"Hey, hey... easy does it! Easy! If you drop that stone table and the magic light vanishes, I am docking all of your salaries for the year!"
Zhao Kuangyin stood with his hands on his hips, watching four of his burliest palace guards grunt and strain as they hauled the impossibly heavy stone table across the threshold of his private chambers. Snow was still dusted on its rough surface, and the men were huffing like overworked oxen.
The Emperor's eyes were locked on the thing that really mattered: the floating screen of light hovering above the table, glowing soft and steady like a lantern that forgot how to burn out. It had appeared three days ago in the western courtyard, and Zhao Kuangyin had spent approximately ten minutes staring at it in the freezing cold before declaring, "Absolutely not. Why am I freezing out here? Let us just bring this thing inside."
The guards finally set the table down with a heavy thud that shook the floorboards. The magical screen did not flicker. It did not vanish. It did not even seem slightly annoyed at being relocated.
Zhao Kuangyin let out a long breath of relief. "There we go. See? Even the immortals agree with me. Indoor heating beats freezing your robes off any day."
The weather outside was positively brutal. The wind was howling like a scorned concubine, and snow was coming down so hard you could barely see the next palace building. Zhao Kuangyin was a military man through and through. He had marched through blizzards, slept on frozen ground, and once fought a battle so cold his sword stuck to his hand. He was tough. He was rugged. He was also not an idiot.
He marched straight over to the charcoal brazier in the corner, held his hands out, and sighed in pure bliss. "Now this is how you study divine artifacts. My fingers were starting to feel like frozen turnips out there."
Chancellor Zhao Pu, meanwhile, was having a very different experience.
The veteran politician stood frozen near the stone table, his eyes wide as saucers, his usual composed expression completely shattered. This was a man who had survived coups, outmaneuvered political rivals, and once talked down an angry general who was literally holding a sword to his throat. Very little shocked Zhao Pu.
This shocked Zhao Pu.
"What... what in the name of all the ancestors is that?" he finally managed, pointing a trembling finger at the glowing screen.
Zhao Kuangyin grinned over his shoulder. "That, my old friend, is our ticket to making the Song Dynasty last a thousand years and dodge every disaster coming our way."
Zhao Pu's shock lasted approximately another ten seconds. Then the decades of court survival instincts kicked in. His eyes narrowed. He stepped forward. He raised his hand.
And he started tapping the stone table.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
"Zhao Pu," Zhao Kuangyin said, amused. "What are you doing? You look like a man trying to order wine at an inn."
"I am testing it!" Zhao Pu insisted, tapping harder now. "What if it only responds to certain frequencies? What if it is a communication device? What if..."
"It is not what if. It is you right now looking like an old man poking a rock."
Zhao Pu ignored him and leaned in so close his nose was practically touching the light. His face was lit up with pure, childlike fascination. "Remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. No heat. No smell. No wires. This is truly the work of the immortals."
Zhao Kuangyin shook his head, still smiling. He glanced around the room and spotted his younger brother Zhao Guangyi lingering near the doorway, looking equal parts awestruck and nervous.
"Guangyi! Get over here!" the Emperor called, his voice warm and amiable, the kind of voice that usually preceded someone getting assigned a lot of work.
Zhao Guangyi approached slowly, already sensing danger. "Yes, Your Majesty?"
"This mechanism of the immortals carries consequences of monumental importance for us," Zhao Kuangyin said, suddenly sounding very imperial and commanding. "It would be best if you transcribed everything it reveals. Write down every single word. Nothing escapes the record."
Zhao Guangyi blinked. He looked to his left. There, positioned right next to the magical stone table, was a small, squat wooden desk. It was fully equipped: high-quality writing brush, premium ink block, inkstone, and a tall stack of fine rice paper. Everything was arranged perfectly.
His brother had planned this. His brother had definitely planned this.
He then looked at Zhao Pu. The Chancellor was still happily tapping away at the stone table, humming a little tune under his breath, completely free of any responsibility whatsoever.
Zhao Guangyi felt the injustice bubble up inside him like boiling water.
"Wait a minute," he said, pointing at Zhao Pu. "Why does he get to poke the magic rock while I have to do all the writing? I am your brother!"
"Exactly," Zhao Kuangyin said smoothly. "As your brother, I know you have excellent penmanship. Zhao Pu's handwriting looks like a chicken walked through ink. Besides, he is... conducting important research."
Zhao Pu did not even look up from his tapping. "Important research. Yes. That is exactly what this is."
Zhao Guangyi stared at his brother. His brother stared back, smiling innocently. Zhao Guangyi stared at Zhao Pu. Zhao Pu tapped the stone table again.
"Come on," Zhao Guangyi groaned. "This is not fair. I command armies! I govern cities! I almost drowned crossing the Yangtze once!"
"Think of it as a great honor," Zhao Kuangyin said, already turning his attention back to the screen. "You will be the first man in history to transcribe the words of the future."
"I think I would rather be the man poking the rock."
"Too late. Assigned."
Zhao Guangyi let out a sigh so heavy and dramatic it could have blown out the candles. He dragged his feet over to the desk, slumped onto his knees, and picked up the brush with all the enthusiasm of a man marching to his own execution.
Outside, the wind howled louder and the snow beat against the windows. The fire in the brazier crackled warmly. The magical screen glowed brighter, and words started to form on its surface.
Zhao Guangyi dipped his brush in ink and prepared to write.
Zhao Kuangyin leaned forward in his chair, eyes gleaming. "Well? What does it say? Guangyi, are you getting this?"
Zhao Guangyi's brush hovered over the paper. He squinted at the screen, blinked, and read aloud:
"It says... 'Hey, hey, hey! Hello, my dear audience! It is your weekly illiterate host, Wen Mang...'"
The Emperor blinked.
Zhao Pu finally stopped staring at the screen and looked up.
They both turned to stare at Zhao Guangyi.
"Wait," Zhao Kuangyin said, frowning. "Did you hit your head on the way here? Why are you reading it wrong?"
"I am not reading it wrong!" Zhao Guangyi protested, holding up the brush defensively. "That is literally what it says! 'Your weekly illiterate host'! Look for yourself if you do not believe me!"
Zhao Guangyi just sighed and dipped his brush back in the ink. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was already mentally drafting a complaint. Note to self: next lifetime, be the Chancellor who gets to poke rocks, not the Emperor's brother who gets stuck transcribing jokes from the future.
---
The question from Li Shimin on the light screen made Liu Bei's expression freeze for a moment, followed by a sense of grievance.
"From the fourteenth year of Jian'an to the current eighteenth year, a mere four years have passed. Does Li Shimin think we are all divine beings?"
Liu Bei refolded the piece of paper he had already written on and placed it back on the table.
The fourteenth year of Jian'an was when they first saw the light screen. At that time, he was in Gong'an. Although he claimed to possess the four southern commanderies of Jingzhou, he knew his own situation best. Aside from an empty title, he had no surplus of soldiers, grain, or wealth.
Now, four years later, he was sitting in Chang'an to report good news. Liu Bei felt a mix of emotions.
Forget it, maybe the standards of this Tang Emperor are too high.
No, that is not right. It should be said that this Tang Emperor assumes everyone is as successful as he is, right?
That is not right either. It should be said that this Tang Emperor seems to believe Kongming should possess godlike abilities.
Liu Bei fell into a strange state of entanglement.
Zhuge Liang, sitting nearby, did not care about this at all.
He only noticed the descendant's joking remark about that thing on the light screen. Zhuge Liang felt suspicious. Why did they refuse to speak clearly?
In his heart, Zhuge Liang also faintly realized that the once prosperous Han Chang'an probably had a side he did not know about.
The prosperous old Chang'an was relatively unfamiliar to everyone in the hall. After all, before the chaotic era arrived, none of them had achieved success. Who would come to Chang'an for no reason?
Fa Zheng, who was geographically closest, came from a family that had long since declined.
---
In Ganlu Hall, Li Shimin lost his previous excitement.
The four words Wu Zhou replaces Tang dealt a heavy blow to Li Shimin, and the four words Dirty Tang, Stinky Han left him dumbfounded.
Empress Wu replacing Tang with Zhou was a meaning that could be easily interpreted, leaving little room for ambiguity.
Although Li Shimin felt his endurance had improved a lot, he was so depressed at this moment that he wanted to vomit blood.
She was his concubine, his son's empress, and the ruler of Zhou who replaced Tang. So messed up.
The complex relationship among them made Li Shimin not know how to curse, and he could only stare blankly at the four words Dirty Tang, Stinky Han.
Thinking about the extraordinary actions of the Tang princesses he had seen before, Li Shimin actually felt a slight sense of agreement with these four words in his heart.
However, he always heard the descendants lamenting the oppression of women by the dynasties after Tang. Could it be that they were taking Tang as a warning?
Losing his previous interest, Li Shimin sat back on the couch, staring at the light screen in a daze, feeling that this kind of thing seemed to happen not for the first time.
He did not want to listen to this topic. He wanted to hear how Wu Zhou replaced Tang, and how Tang was finally restored.
However, the descendants of later generations would not do as he wished, and continued to narrate at their own pace.
[Lightscreen]
[Nowadays, we all understand a basic truth about history. Whenever an ancient era descends into bloody chaos, it rarely features just one single catastrophic problem. History loves to multitask.
Natural disasters and man-made slaughter always march hand in hand. They operate synchronously. The Three Kingdoms era is widely considered one of the most important periods of chaos in our history, and naturally, it could not escape this brutal iron law.
Let us look at the year 217 AD. Boss Cao, having happily secured his shiny new title as the King of Wei, launched a southern military campaign against Sun Quan. Sun Quan, naturally playing his role, happily delivered a formal letter of surrender.
Boss Cao accepted this submission. Feeling smug and satisfied with himself, he turned his army around and headed back north.
Upon returning, Cao Cao went straight to Emperor Xian to report his own merits. This political flexing resulted in some incredible loot drops.
Boss Cao successfully unlocked legendary golden equipment: a crown with twelve strings of jade beads, a golden chariot pulled by six horses, and a designated fleet of backup carriages for all five seasons. At this point in time, both in formal ceremony and reality, Cao Cao had practically completed his usurpation of state power.
But during his triumphant return journey, a seemingly minor event occurred. Wang Can, a respected scholar and one of the famous Seven Scholars of Jian'an, fell severely ill and died.
At Wang Can's funeral, Cao Pi stepped up. He announced to the grieving crowd that Wang Can's favorite sound in the world was the braying of a donkey. Therefore, Cao Pi suggested that instead of standard mourning, everyone should honor his memory by making that exact sound. Cao Pi then personally took the lead. He stood at the grave and began loudly braying like a farm animal.
This absurd event became one of the most famous historical anecdotes showcasing Cao Pi's true personality.
We have briefly discussed the life of this literary Emperor before. If we wanted to perfectly summarize his core philosophy, we could use the most classic line from the legendary Tang Dynasty poet, Li Bai:
'When life brings joy, you must indulge to the fullest. Never let a golden goblet sit empty under the moonlight.'
Cao Pi possessed a profound seize the day mentality. He believed in immediate gratification. This exact mindset influenced the surrounding aristocracy, causing them to develop extravagant, degenerate habits.
These toxic lifestyle choices eventually trickled down through the decades, infecting the Jin Dynasty, and ultimately pushing the powerful aristocratic families straight into the abyss of destruction.
However, if we actually connect his behavior to the specific realities of his era, Cao Pi's wildly uninhibited actions might actually have a perfectly logical explanation.
You see, in the exact same year that Cao Pi was braying like a donkey at a funeral, Wang Can was not the only casualty. Chen Lin, Xu Gan, Ying Yang, and Liu Zhen all died in that exact same year. These four men, alongside Wang Can, made up five of the Seven Scholars of Jian'an.
As for the remaining two members of that elite literary club? Kong Rong had been executed by Cao Cao years earlier, just before the Battle of Red Cliffs. Ruan Yu had already died a premature death.
Therefore, in the year 217 AD, the Seven Scholars of Jian'an were officially and permanently wiped off the map.
And the singular, terrifying force that caused them to all die at the exact same time was a plague. Furthermore, this was not the first time this epidemic had exploded.
According to verifiable historical records, during the violent transitional period spanning from Emperor Ling's ascension to the Cao family's final usurpation of the Han, this specific plague erupted on a large scale multiple times.
It struck in 171, 173, 179, 182, 185, and finally in 217 AD. The official historical texts refer to these outbreaks with two terrifying words: The Great Plague.
And according to those exact same records, the outbreak in 217 AD, the one that annihilated the Jian'an scholars, was by far the most cruel and devastating of them all.
Many years later, the brilliant poet Cao Zhi would look back on this specific year, and a deep, lingering terror would grip his heart.
He picked up his brush and wrote a haunting piece titled Shuo Yi Qi, Speaking of the Pestilence Qi, to record the horrors he had witnessed with his own eyes.
He wrote: Every single household suffers the agonizing pain of stiffened corpses. Every single room echoes with the sorrow of wailing and weeping. In some places, entire families lock their doors and die together inside. In other places, entire ancestral clans are overturned and lost.
When we look back at the grand scope of history, epidemics frequently possess the terrifying power to alter the course of human events from multiple different angles.
The year 217 AD was no exception to this rule.
The origin point for this specific wave of the plague was the active battlefield at the mouth of the Ruxu River. When Sun Quan handed over his letter of surrender, Cao Cao ordered his troops to pack up and head home. That victorious, retreating army instantly became the perfect biological vector for spreading the disease.
The catastrophic result was that the plague zone rapidly expanded, cutting a path of death straight across the north and south. The disease exploded on a horrific scale inside the political center of Yecheng. This localized outbreak is precisely what infected and killed all the remaining Jian'an scholars.
Even Sima Yi's own older brother, Sima Lang, caught the disease and died specifically because he was bravely visiting the military camps to distribute medicine to the infected soldiers.
Meanwhile, over on Sun Quan's side of the map, the death toll was equally suspicious.
The brilliant diplomat Lu Su died suddenly at the age of forty-five. The fierce general Ling Tong died abruptly at the young age of twenty-eight. Both of these losses occurred in this exact same year.
Looking at the timeline, it is difficult not to suspect that their sudden deaths were directly tied to the plague.
Following the sudden death of Lu Su, who was in the prime of his life and firmly advocated for an alliance with Liu Bei, the political dynamics in Jiangdong shifted.
Lu Meng, a general who pushed for a backstabbing strategy against their ally, successfully seized supreme military command. Two years later, he orchestrated the infamous Crossing the River in White Clothes operation, allowing Cao Cao to sit back and reap the ultimate benefits of a fisherman catching two fighting birds.
But chaos rarely operates on a single track. Wars and plagues are inseparable dancing partners. Shortly after Lu Meng successfully launched his sneak attack and executed Guan Yu, the territories of Jingzhou that Jiangdong had just seized experienced another outbreak of the plague.
The military leadership of Jiangdong stationed in Jingzhou paid a horrific price. Lu Meng, Jiang Qin, and Sun Jiao all died sudden, unexpected deaths. They were all in the prime years of their lives. Based on the historical timeline and the environmental conditions, there is a remarkably high probability that all three men were killed by the pestilence.
Looking at this brutal chain of events, it is entirely understandable why writers in the later Ming Dynasty would invent the famous fictional storyline where Guan Yu's vengeful ghost physically possesses and kills Lu Meng.
If you strip away the political maneuvering and solely focus on the timeline of the plague, there genuinely appears to be a faint, supernatural thread of karmic retribution weaving through the devastation.]