"Yide!"
At this moment, Guan Yu did not hold back his praise in the slightest.
His hand came down heavily on Zhang Fei's shoulder, patting with such force that Yide bared his teeth in pain.
"Yide, you defeated Zhang He in a single battle, and not just a minor victory, but a crushing defeat that shattered his main force. One of Wei's Five Elite Generals, beaten by your hand!"
Wei Yan stared, stunned.' Wait... did I wake up in the wrong bed this morning? Is this truly the same General Guan who is known for his sternness and hidden emotions?'
Zhang Fei did not respond immediately.
His gaze remained fixed upon the Lightscreen, where the image labeled "Bameng Mountain Inscription" was displayed.
He studied every single character carefully, as if engraving them directly into his heart.
After a long breath, the tension in his expression dissolved, and his usual easy grin returned.
"Second Brother, I did not even take Zhang He's head. How can this count as a great victory? Compared to your might shaking all under Heaven, it is far from enough."
For a moment, the entire hall burst into laughter, and the atmosphere grew lively once more.
"Yide has saved me," Liu Bei said with a soft laugh. "From this, it seems that what this Liao Li said is not without reason. When Yizhou had just been secured, I should have either temporarily abandoned Hanzhong to stabilize the four commanderies of Jingzhou, or ceded three commanderies of Jingzhou in exchange for striking at Hanzhong."
"In the end, the three commanderies were given away, yet Hanzhong was not taken. A situation where both ends came up empty, wasting soldiers in vain."
"My lord, why blame yourself so harshly?" Pang Tong immediately objected, clearly dissatisfied.
"Liao Li's words are like criticizing the driver after the cart has already crashed. How unfair is that?"
Liu Bei smiled and gently soothed him, then turned to Zhang Fei and said,
"Yide's bravery is evident to all."
"Even with this inscription alone, your name will pass down to later generations. But you should also follow the example of Wei Qing and Huo Qubing, cherishing soldiers and rewarding and punishing with clarity."
Zhang Fei looked serious. "This inscription... the prose is not great, and the location is not ideal. Looking at it now, defeating a rebel like Cao is not much to brag about."
Jiang Wan laughed. "Does Yide wish to emulate Marquis Guanjun, Huo Qubing then?"
Before Zhang Fei could answer, the Lightscreen happened to shift to that very topic.
[Lightscreen]
[Inscribing one's achievements on stone was one of the grandest ways an ancient Chinese general could make sure nobody forgot what he had done.
And the Han had a few legendary examples.
Marquis Guanjun, Huo Qubing had sealed the Wolf Juxu, performed the great ritual at Mount Guyan, and driven his army all the way to the distant northern reaches where they were said to have watered their horses at the Hanhai.
Decades later, another Han general would create an even more famous monument.
Dou Xian defeated the Northern Xiongnu and carved his victory into stone at Mount Yanran.
The phrase Carving the Stone at Yanran would eventually become almost synonymous with achieving a spectacular military victory.
So when Zhang Fei carved his own victory into the mountain after defeating Zhang He, he was not inventing some random new tradition.
He was tapping into an old Han tradition:
Win a great battle.
Find a mountain.
Put it in stone.
Make sure the grandchildren of your grandchildren know who won.]
Zhang Fei pointed at the screen and recited with gusto,
"Brave riders surged forth, advancing in six great drives, returning west to the great river, subduing the Qilian regions. Marquis Guanjun, Huo Qubing's achievements are worthy of praise. Truly a great man!"
"Well said, Yide." Guan Yu nodded in satisfaction.
"It seems later generations place great importance on expanding territory and annihilating foreign tribes," Liu Bei observed.
"That may not be entirely a good thing..." Zhuge Liang remained clear-minded. "Marquis Guanjun, Huo Qubing, was a man beyond mortal measure. Later generations praise such feats perhaps because none could surpass them."
Liu Bei fell silent.
He suddenly recalled the repeated mentions by the Lightscreen of the chaos of the Five Barbarians, and that dynasty where both army and people perished together, the Song.
Zhao Yun, meanwhile, remembered the later tale of his own Horse-Washing Pool.
'If the barbarians reached Chengdu, does that mean the North was completely lost?'
"Dou Xian wielded power arrogantly, yet he also destroyed the Xiongnu. It seems later generations judge merit and fault quite clearly," Pang Tong concluded.
Yet in his heart, there was a faint ache.
He looked at Zhuge Liang's calm expression, as if such matters were nothing unusual. He looked at his lord's composed demeanor, as though he had long accepted such truths.
Before joining Liu Bei, Pang Tong had relied upon his strategy for taking Yizhou as his bargaining chip. Yet he had not expected that his lord's ambition already stretched across all under Heaven.
'Pang Tong, Pang Tong. You must not fall behind others.'
Tonight, he resolved, he would stay up and thoroughly copy and study every word from the Lightscreen.
[Lightscreen]
[The Great Tang Dynasty, however, had a rather different attitude.
What is so impressive about that?
The Tang did not just ride out there, plant a monument, and go home.
At its height, Tang power pushed deep into Central Asia and far across the northern steppe, reaching as far north as the region around Lake Baikal.
They established protectorates, military commands, and subordinate territories across lands that earlier Chinese dynasties had barely been able to reach.
Their frontier stretched so far into the north that, on a modern map, you are already looking at southern Siberia.
The Han carved their victories into mountains.
The Tang started putting the mountains themselves under administration.]
The entire hall was instantly shaken as if struck by thunder.
"Lake Baikal?" Wei Yan scratched his head. "Where is that? Is it even further than the Hanhai?"
"The Tang actually incorporated such distant lands into their territory?" Guan Yu frowned, trying to picture it.
"Marquis Guanjun, Huo Qubing, marched three thousand li beyond the frontier to reach the Hanhai," Pang Tong calculated without hesitation. "But this Lake Baikal... it must be even further north. From Chang'an to such a place would be over five thousand li. Would this Tang not have a northern frontier spanning ten thousand li?"
For a time, no one could even find words.
Zhao Yun spoke softly, "With such vast territory, would that not mean the northern tribes were entirely wiped out?"
"More likely they were merely controlled through loose governance," Zhuge Liang said. "If they had been completely eradicated, what troubles would later generations face?"
[Lightscreen]
[By the time of the Song, all of this was lost.
They could only listen to Fan Zhongyan's poem:
A cup of turbid wine, ten thousand li from home; Yanran remains uninscribed, and there is no way to return.
The reference to Yanran was a deliberate callback to Dou Xian's famous victory over the Northern Xiongnu and the stone inscription he left at Mount Yanran. For Fan Zhongyan, Yanran had become more than just a mountain. It represented the kind of glorious frontier victory that every ambitious general wanted to achieve, but that the Song increasingly struggled to reproduce.
Xin Qiji twisted the knife a little further:
In the Yuanjia era, rashly sealing Wolf Juxu, only to gain a panicked glance north.
He was invoking Marquis Guanjun, Huo Qubing's legendary achievement at Mount Langju Xu, but the comparison was deliberately ironic. One generation had gone north, defeated its enemies, and carved its triumph into history. Another tried to imitate that glory and ended up running for its life while looking nervously back toward the north.
Throughout the Song dynasty, passionate patriots held the highest expectations for military achievement, yet what they received was always disappointment.]
"Wait a moment," Ma Liang said, pen still in hand from copying, his memory sharp for unfamiliar names.
"Did not that Song have a General Yue who was determined to carry out the Northern Campaign?"
"Perhaps... he was held back by that Ninth Sister Wanyan Gou?" someone offered, and it was actually a rather reasonable guess.
The earlier remark at the Wuhou Shrine about sending heads for nothing had left a deep impression on them.
Liu Bei, however, recalled it clearly.
"No. The Lightscreen said that General Yue fought the Northern Campaign against the Jin, but in the end the Song was destroyed by the Mongols."
"Not a single foreign enemy, but multiple great foes."
"In such a predicament?" The group immediately felt a trace of sympathy.
Was that not even worse than their current situation? At least Sun Wu, unreliable as they might be, still counted as an ally in name.
But that Song had faced enemies on multiple fronts. It must have been destroyed by combined assaults of foreign tribes.
[Lightscreen]
[And then, nearly two thousand years later, the mountain gave up its secret.
In 2017, a joint team of Chinese and Mongolian scholars finally confirmed that a weathered cliff inscription in central Mongolia was the long-lost Yanran Inscription, the monument composed by the historian Ban Gu after Dou Xian's great victory over the Northern Xiongnu in 89 CE.
The funny thing is that the local people had already found the rock carving back in the 1990s. The problem was that almost two thousand years of wind, rain, and weather had done a pretty good job of turning the characters into ancient Chinese handwriting written in nightmare mode.
The researchers had to make careful rubbings, examine the stone from different angles, and compare the surviving characters with the text preserved in the Book of the Later Han. Out of more than 260 characters, they were able to identify around 220, enough to confirm that this really was Ban Gu's famous Yanran Inscription.
And suddenly, a piece of Han history that had existed for centuries only as a written account had become a physical object again.
The inscription was created to commemorate Dou Xian's campaign against the Northern Xiongnu, a campaign that had carried the Han army deep into the northern steppe. Ban Gu's text celebrated the victory in the grandest possible language, describing the destruction of the enemy's power and the expansion of Han prestige far beyond the frontier.
That was the whole point of carving it into a mountain.
A victory written on paper can be lost.
A victory carved into a cliff has a slightly more stubborn personality.
For an ancient general, there were few better ways to tell future generations: Your grandpa was here. And he came this far.]
The news made everyone's eyes widen.
Mongolia!
"The Mongols not only built a country but it lasted until the future?"
"And the Yanran inscription lies within its borders. Could it be that these Mongols are descendants of the Xiongnu?" Ma Liang voiced a perfectly logical guess.
"Though Tang's territory was vast, it could not completely eliminate those who would not submit," Liu Bei muttered.
Perhaps it was because their situations seemed somewhat similar, or perhaps because that Song also had a General Yue.
Liu Bei felt a certain affinity for the Song. If Tang had truly eradicated all foreign tribes and seized their lands, how could such disasters have occurred later?
"Even the inscription of Ban Gu has become the possession of another land..." Zhao Yun shook his head, feeling deeply unsettled.
"Then we shall inscribe Yanran once more," Guan Yu said slowly, his eyes shining with brilliance.
"If the Tang of later generations could become a realm of ten thousand frontiers..."
"We have the auspicious Lightscreen, brothers united in heart, and two great strategists. Why should we not achieve a realm of ten thousand frontiers?"
It made perfect sense.
At once, everyone felt the burden on their shoulders grow heavier by a measure.
Yet this weight did not feel oppressive. Instead, it carried a sense of purpose.
If they truly achieved such greatness, how would later generations praise them?
The mere thought made their blood stir with anticipation.
[Lightscreen]
[Ahem... we have wandered off again. Let us return to Yiling.]
Ah?
This time, everyone felt a trace of dissatisfaction.
"What is there to say about Yiling?" Zhang Fei, fully energized again, immediately started talking.
"Everyone already knows it is the defeat at Yiling. What is there to discuss? Might as well talk more about this Mongolia and those vast frontiers."
Liu Bei looked at his third brother with gentle affection.
In his mind, however, he was already considering whether he should write him a piece of calligraphy.
Perhaps something along the lines of impetuous yet lacking restraint.
[Lightscreen]
[After Zhang Fei's prestige shook Baxi Commandery, the first issue for launching the Yiling campaign was resolved: internal and external stability.
The territorial problem was settled, but Yizhou at the time faced another bitter fruit created by Liu Bei's own hand: They were extremely short of money.]
---
Note:
The "Inscription of Mount Yanran" was a real-life archaeological discovery in 2017 in Mongolia, marking the victory of the Han General Dou Xian over the Xiongnu in 89 AD.