Inside Ganlu Hall, Li Shimin's face was still. He looked like a man who had moved past anger into dark amusement. It was the kind of deadpan that said, Go away. I am tracking a disaster so profound that if I don't laugh now, I will start executing people.
Off to the side, Hou Junji was staring at the tactical breakdown on the light screen, his fingers twitching against his belt as if running mental war games.
"Another two... no, wait," he muttered, adjusting his calculations.
"If we're counting Yan Zhenqing up north and this Zhang Xun down in Yongqiu, that makes four. Damn. Four top-tier hard carries. I'm borrowing that term from our streamer."
He let out a low whistle. "Our Great Tang really is a ridiculous all-star roster."
Wei Zheng, however, wasn't in the mood to appreciate the Tang's deep bench. The tactical waste was causing his blood pressure to spike.
"The encirclement was airtight," Wei Zheng hissed, his voice trembling with fury and grief. "The rebels were completely stalled. Their momentum was broken, their morale was collapsing, and they were on the verge of surrendering. "
"Under such perfect conditions, how could Tongguan Pass possibly fall? Did they lose their brains in some jungle before marching to war? Damn it, this is absurd! How did anyone allow it to break?!"
As a man who had seen warfare before becoming the Tang's chief critic, Wei Zheng wasn't just a scholar. He understood defensive geography.
Chang'an had no natural barriers once the primary pass was breached. The rebels were a pack of wolves; after being starved and humiliated for half a year at the gates, the violence they would unleash upon a peaceful capital was something Wei Zheng couldn't bring himself to visualize.
Seeing the older minister turning pale from stress, Fang Xuanling stepped forward, catching Wei Zheng by the sleeve and pulling him back, murmuring soothing words to keep the old man from having a medical emergency in front of the throne.
Meanwhile, Li Shimin remained upright, his hands clasped behind his back. He didn't say a word, but the cold aura radiating from his silhouette dropped the temperature in the room by ten degrees.
While the court panicked, Li Jing's eyes remained on the southern theater of the map, tracking this newly introduced wild card: Zhang Xun.
His gaze scanned the topography, tracing supply lines, river networks, and terrain markers before pausing at a specific node.
"This Zhang Xun is holding Yongqiu," Li Jing analyzed, his tone devoid of emotion. "But look at the placement. The city is dangerously close to the rebel main hub, and the surrounding terrain is too open. It's a nightmare to defend against cavalry.
"If his objective is to build a wall against the rebel push south, he should have pulled back to Songzhou. That city sits in a perfect bottleneck, two mountain ranges squeezing a single urban center. It deletes the enemy's cavalry and numerical advantages."
As he spoke, Li Jing's voice trailed off. He froze, staring at a small footnote on the side of the map. His mind raced back through decades of administrative logs, recalling a decree issued during the early years of the current reign.
Songzhou's administrative seat, Songcheng County, hadn't always been named Songcheng. Before the Emperor had issued a rebranding decree to clean up provincial naming conventions, that strategic bottleneck had been called something else.
It had been called Suiyang.
"Zhang Xun..." Li Jing's breath hitched as the pieces clicked together. "Is he the Zhang of Suiyang from the poem? The one with the shattered teeth?"
Li Shimin didn't look up, but a long exhale escaped his lips. "The frontier garrisons and standing armies are all deployed along the northern and western borders," the Emperor said, his voice cutting through the hall.
"The southeast has enjoyed peace for nearly a century. This Zhang Xun isn't commanding veterans. He's running a scrappy build of local volunteer militias and town guards."
The Emperor leaned closer to the map. "Local town guards cannot go face-to-face with hardened border rebels in an open field. That is why he had no choice but to execute a fighting retreat from the exposed plains of Yongqiu back to the bottleneck of Suiyang."
It was a cold piece of analysis, but Li Shimin's tactical engine was already calculating the domino effect. He had a strong suspicion that Zhang Xun's retreat to Suiyang wasn't an isolated failure. It was the direct fallout of whatever disaster was about to happen at Tongguan.
[Lightscreen]
[For An Lushan, the reality on the frontlines was something he understood better than Yan Zhenqing or anyone else in the Tang command.
Just from a data perspective, the rebel faction was trapped in a systemic chokehold.
On the Northern Front, the Tang Dynasty hard-carry of Guo Ziyi and Li Guangbi were playing out of their minds. They had dismantled Shi Siming's forces so thoroughly that the rebel general had been reduced to a one-man army, barely escaping with his life through a gap in the mountains.
To make matters worse, most of An Lushan's common soldiers had their families and lands back in Hebei. With half of Hebei suddenly flying the Tang banner again thanks to the Yan brothers, the rebel rank-and-file troops were experiencing morale failure. They were looking at An Lushan less like a savior and more like a warlord who had dragged them into a failing raid. They were ready to mutiny and claim the bounty on his head.
On the Southeastern Front, the rebel advance was throwing. Rebel commander Zhang Tongwu had been cut down in open combat by a local magistrate at Shanfu County, while another rebel vanguard, Yang Chaozong, found himself completely blocked by the Prefect of Dongping.
When An Lushan sent a reinforcement wave of over ten thousand troops under Li Huaixian and Linghu Chao to clear the path, they ran straight into a magistrate named Zhang Xun. Stationed at the small outpost of Yongqiu, Zhang Xun played defense so aggressively that the rebel army found itself locked in place, unable to advance an inch.
On the Southern Front, Nanyang Prefect Lu Jiong and Yingchuan Prefect Xue Yuan were commanding a combined force of fifty thousand levies, locking horns with rebel general Wu Lingxun in a war of attrition across the Jingxiang region.
And just when the rebels thought they might squeeze through, the Tang deployed another defensive unit: Lai Tian, a man so stubborn that history dubbed him 'The Iron-Chewer.'
Fun fact: the nickname wasn't given by his own troops or some poetic court historian. It was the rebels who came up with it, because this guy was just that hard to kill.
Every time Lai Tian took the field, he went on a rampage and sent rebel troops straight to meet their ancestors. After throwing everything they had at his lines, cavalry charges, siege engines, probably a few strongly worded letters, and getting absolutely nowhere, they collectively decided that fighting Lai Tian felt exactly like trying to bite through a chunk of solid iron. The name stuck. You know you've made it when your enemies accidentally give you a cooler title than your own emperor ever did.
And with Lai Tian reinforcing the southern lines, the rebel advance was neutralized.
Then there was the Western Front: Tongguan Pass. The ultimate bottleneck.
An Lushan's main force had been parked outside this brick wall for six straight months, making zero progress while draining resources. The rebel leader had lost his nerve, suffering from strategic panic.
And it was at this moment, when An Lushan was looking for a face-saving way to surrender or retreat, that the gates of Tongguan slowly, inexplicably opened from the inside.
At that exact moment, every competent military mind across the Tang Dynasty, whether Yan Zhenqing in his fortress, Guo Ziyi on the northern plains, Zhang Xun in his trench, or Lai Tian on the southern lines, collectively lost their minds. None of them could process the absurdity.
The Tang had guaranteed, unloseable macro-win conditions active on every lane. Why was someone in the central administration match-throwing and feeding kills to the enemy? Were they insane? Were they just sick in the head?
The irony was that Geshu Han didn't want to open that gate either. The decision to march out wasn't a military one; it was forced down his throat by a directive from Li Longji and Chancellor Yang Guozhong.
Translation: Bro, trust me, I really don't want to throw this match. But you know how it is. What choice do I even have.
Originally, Yang Guozhong had been Geshu Han's political backer. Before the rebellion, the two of them belonged to the same anti-An Lushan alliance. But the moment Geshu Han took command of the empire's final elite army and leveraged his military clout to force Li Longji into executing An Sishun, Yang Guozhong's paranoia went into overdrive.
Yang Guozhong realized a terrifying reality: If Geshu Han could use his army to delete a Military Governor like An Sishun with a single report, what was stopping him from doing the exact same thing to a civilian Chancellor? This man was a threat.
And the trigger pulled itself quickly.
Yang Guozhong intercepted a classified report containing a piece of gossip: Certain factions within the military had petitioned Geshu Han to lead his border legions back to Chang'an, execute Yang Guozhong on the spot, and present his head to the public.
The logic was clean.
If the Yang Guozhong was dead, An Lushan would lose his primary propaganda slogan of 'cleansing the court of corrupt officials,' delegitimizing the entire rebellion.
Geshu Han hadn't openly agreed to the plot, but he hadn't said no either. He left the letter sitting on his desk.
That non-answer terrified Yang Guozhong. Desperate to secure his life, the Chancellor begged Li Longji for permission to raise a private force of thirteen thousand mercenaries, stationing them at Bashang under his trusted lackey, Du Ganyun, to act as a buffer against his own empire's general.
This private army made Geshu Han uncomfortable. The general responded with a classic power move: he submitted a petition requesting that this private force be absorbed into the Tongguan command structure for 'efficiency.'
Then, without waiting for a reply, he arrested Du Ganyun and decapitated him. He didn't bother to invent a crime or a trial; he just cleaned him off the board.
With his top military lackey dead, Yang Guozhong's paranoia broke containment. Realizing that the moment Geshu Han won the war, his own life was forfeit, the Chancellor leveraged every ounce of his political capital, screaming into Li Longji's ear that Geshu Han was stalling and refusing to fight.
He gave the Emperor two options. Option one: force Geshu Han out to fight and hope for a quick win. Option two: do nothing and let Geshu Han come to you... except he'd be coming for the throne, not for a friendly chat. Spoiler: neither option ended well.
Faced with the pressure of a paranoid sovereign and a desperate minister, the imperial edict was issued. This was the trigger behind the account of Geshu Han 'weeping as he marched out of the pass.' And honestly, can you blame the guy? He knew exactly what was waiting for him out there
Looking back at the anatomy of the An Lushan Rebellion, the catalyst that turned a localized mutiny into an empire-ending wildfire wasn't the martial skill of the rebels. It was the collapse of trust within the imperial hierarchy.
Because An Lushan had broken his vows, Li Longji lost his ability to trust anyone, leading him to panic-delete top-tier talents like Gao Xianzhi and Feng Changqing without a second thought.
The executions of Gao Xianzhi and Feng Changqing taught Geshu Han one thing: military results meant nothing to a paranoid court. So he started grabbing power and deleting rivals, purely to keep himself from getting killed by the next absurd imperial edict.
And Geshu Han's power grabs made Yang Guozhong realize his civilian position was unsafe, driving him to use his final bureaucratic play to force the army out of its fortress and into a slaughterhouse.
A feedback loop of mutual distrust.
A crisis that could have been suppressed within six months became an inferno that incinerated the Golden Age of the Great Tang.]
"Only in the bitterest cold does the pine show its strength..." Li Shimin murmured, repeating the line from the poem as he stared at the text scrolling across the light screen.
A moment later, a sharp, mocking chuckle escaped his throat. "I see it now. I understand the mechanics of this disaster. The core issue is that our capital of Chang'an was simply too comfortable."
The Emperor turned back toward his ministers, his eyes flashing. "If the central court had been located in an open, defenseless zone like Luoyang, these parasites wouldn't have had the luxury of playing political chess with their own defense forces. They would have been too busy screaming for their lives."
Zhangsun Wuji cleared his throat, stepping forward with a careful bow. "Your Majesty... at its root, this is the result of an unprincipled mind holding the highest office.
"Yang Guozhong's entire psychological build was defective. If the Chancellor at the time had been someone of institutional gravity, like Zhang Jiuling, or someone with the moral spine of Yan Zhenqing, they wouldn't have spent their energy optimizing their personal political safety. If a real statesman had been managing the bureaucracy, this rebellion would have been suppressed before it even began."
The ministers nodded along, but everyone understood the deeper reality: if the court had been caught flat-footed in an exposed zone like Luoyang, the Imperial Guards would have routed the same way.
The only difference is that instead of a leisurely retreat to Shu, this Li Longji would have just had to run faster to escape being trapped in his own capital.
The entire structure was rotten from the top down, and that rot started at the throne. The Chancellor was an issue, but the only reason a clown like Yang Guozhong was allowed to run the country's macro-strategy was because the Emperor had invited him into the lobby.
Li Shimin, possessing a resilient psychological constitution, didn't sink into depression.
Instead, he unmuted his mic, delivering a blunt critique of his descendant:
"An Lushan Rebellion? What an absurd misnomer. History should simply call it Longji's Legacy of Disaster."
The Emperor let out a sigh. As he looked at the display, his mind drifted back to the holographic statues he had seen earlier, the monuments of the 'City that Never Sleeps' dedicated to the peak of the Kaiyuan era.
It was a paradox. Every piece of data confirmed that when Li Longji first climbed into the imperial driver's seat, he wasn't some lazy fool. He had executed a political coup as a young prince, cleared the court of rival factions, and spent decades of intensive management building the most prosperous civilization the world had ever seen.
And then, with those same hands, he had dismantled it piece by piece.
A thought popped into Li Shimin's brain: Is it possible that this descendant of mine didn't suffer from age-related decline? Could he have been possessed mid-reign by some incompetent transmigrator?
"Hey, hear me out," Zhang Fei whispered loudly in the Chengdu headquarters, leaning toward Zhao Yun with a conspiratorial smirk. "Is there any chance this Li Longji boy was possessed by An Lushan's biological father? Because you've got to admit, the level of strategic assists he's giving the rebel faction is professional."
The absurdity of the theory forced a round of dry chuckles from the Shu Han officials. But once the humor faded, the silence grew heavy.
"To think that such an unloseable macro-position could be thrown away..." Liu Bei stared at the map.
He found the sequence harder to swallow than Li Shimin did. "Because a handful of men prioritized their personal safety, millions of citizens are about to be tossed into the meat grinder of war."
For a man who had spent his life scraping together scraps of land, fighting to secure a single province to protect his people, watching an emperor casually default on a superpower was painful.
The Tang's military reach was unmatched. They were projecting power deep into Central Asia, operating across thousands of miles of frontier terrain.
If this internal sabotage hadn't corrupted the system, the Tang had the capacity to push their borders even further west, perhaps going toe-to-toe with that western superpower the screen had mentioned: the Abbasid Caliphate, known to the Tang as the Black-Robed Dashi.
Instead, the sovereign and his ministers had spent their processing power calculating how to backstab their own generals, transforming a minor security issue into a dynastic collapse.
Liu Bei turned his head slowly, looking toward his Chancellor. Zhuge Liang met his gaze, his face expressionless, though his fan had stopped moving.
Looking around the room at his inner circle, his sworn brothers, Zhao Yun, Fa Zheng, Liu Bei felt a question rise within his chest: Is treating your people with sincerity and simply appointing capable men to do their jobs truly that difficult for some rulers?
Zhuge Liang, meanwhile, was already moving past the emotional weight, his mind transitioning into practical implementation.
He turned toward Zhao Yun, pointing his fan toward the northern sectors of their map. "Based on these future tactical records, we need to accelerate our timeline for securing the Liangzhou and Longyou regions. We need to lock down those zones as early as possible."
Zhao Yun let out a rare chuckle, adjusting his posture. "Kongming, I didn't expect you to become this impatient. What happened to our steady approach?"
Zhuge Liang looked at the screen, a look of logistical envy flashing across his eyes. "If we can secure a pipeline for breeding heavy iron cavalry... even a tenfold numerical disadvantage can be neutralized on an open field."
Real iron cavalry. Not the makeshift infantry-riding-ponies or light scouts they were forced to run due to regional limitations. It was a reminder of Shu Han's hard-capped constraint:
Chengdu was a money-printing machine, but no matter how many coins they minted, the terrain simply didn't spawn horses.
Lightscreen]
[Born into the prestigious Boling Cui clan, the rebel general Cui Qianyou might be one of the most controversial figures in the Tang military logs.
At Luoyang, Cui Qianyou had dismantled the Tang general Feng Changqing.
Immediately following that, he leveraged his momentum to force the defensive specialist Gao Xianzhi into a disorganized retreat without forcing an open engagement.
And finally, at Lingbao, he shattered Geshu Han's elite border legions, achieving a level of prestige that briefly made him look like the undisputed god of the current meta.
Though, if you audit the combat logs and strip away the hype, the amount of tactical skill involved in his victories is debatable.
Lingbao, which pushed the An Lushan Rebellion into its endgame, was a slaughter for the Tang forces.
Tongguan Pass wasn't being held by fresh recruits; Geshu Han was commanding eighty thousand battle-hardened frontier veterans recalled from the Longyou and Hexi border sectors. From a stat-line perspective, there was no gap between the two armies. The Tang soldiers were elite professionals.
Because of this, Geshu Han could not blame his troops for the loss. The tactical failure belonged entirely to the command level.
The tragedy is that long before he ordered the gates opened, Geshu Han had read the map. In his strategy briefings sent to Li Longji, the general had pre-calculated that Cui Qianyou was setting up an ambush along the narrow ridges outside the pass.
Under normal circumstances, since the commander had scouted the enemy's trap, the correct play was simple: maintain defensive positioning, ignore the bait, and execute a slow, methodical advance.
But Geshu Han didn't have the political capital to play a slow game. His feud with Chancellor Yang Guozhong had broken containment and entered the public lobby.
The administrative latency was killing him.
If Geshu Han wanted to submit a tactical update to the throne, his messenger had to ride from the front lines to Tongguan Pass, verify the documents, and then sprint to Chang'an.
By the time the message arrived, Yang Guozhong was standing next to the Emperor's chair, filling Li Longji's ears with toxic mic-spam.
For Geshu Han, the math was brutal.
The longer he remained parked inside Tongguan Pass playing defense, the higher the probability that Yang Guozhong would convince the Emperor to send a silk cord, resulting in his head hanging from the corner tower next to Gao Xianzhi and Feng Changqing.
Driven by a need for a quick victory to secure his political survival, Geshu Han took a desperate gamble. He ordered a sprint out of the pass, and stepped with both feet directly into Cui Qianyou's prepared slaughterhouse.
The frontline broke. Following the rout at Lingbao, a shattered Geshu Han escaped the pocket with a handful of bodyguards, retreating to the outer defenses of Tongguan Pass to gather scattered units for a secondary line.
He never got the chance. His own subordinate, a general named Huoba Guiren, realized the match was over.
Without a word, he ambushed Geshu Han in his command tent, bound him with ropes, tossed him onto a horse, and rode straight into the rebel camp to hand him over to An Lushan as a peace offering.
With Geshu Han captured and the elite border legions wiped from the server, Tongguan Pass fell in hours.
When the news reached the central court, Li Longji held an emergency audience.
Standing before his ministers, the sovereign maintained a firm posture, proclaiming: 'This Emperor shall personally lead the vanguard on a punitive expedition to crush the rebel scum! Every minister, every officer, every citizen of Chang'an must steel their hearts and fulfill their duty to the state!'
It was a moving speech.
And then, at midnight that same evening, Li Longji packed his bags, rounded up Yang Guifei, grabbed his favorite sons, slipped out through a side gate under cover of darkness, and sprinted away from Chang'an.
The next morning, the officials arrived for the morning briefing to find an empty throne and an abandoned palace. The realization hit the capital like a shockwave.
Chang'an descended into chaos as nobles, merchants, and citizens trampled each other in a scramble to escape.
With the leadership gone and the administrative system AFK, the garrison soldiers looked at each other, threw down their weapons, and scattered into the countryside.
The grandest metropolis on the planet was left wide open, waiting for An Lushan's vanguard to claim the territory.
In June of 756, the rebel army marched into the deserted streets of Chang'an.
According to later historical records compiled by imperial revisionists, during the escape, Chancellor Yang Guozhong had suggested burning the treasuries to deny resources to the enemy. Li Longji reportedly refused, stating: 'If we burn the wealth, the rebels will vent their fury by looting the citizens.'
The records also claim Yang Guozhong suggested demolishing the bridges west of Chang'an to slow the pursuit, but Li Longji shut it down, claiming he wanted to leave an escape route for the refugees.
Let's be real: this is almost certainly historical whitewashing manufactured by later court historians to save the Emperor's legacy.
When you are executing a ninja escape in the dead of night, terrified that your own ministers will discover your absence and lock you inside the city, the last thing you are doing is holding debates about infrastructure fires and bridge demolitions.]
"Li Longji was just copy-pasting his own descendant's homework!" Li Shimin's teeth ground together, the sound echoing through the hall.
As a sovereign who had spent his youth commanding armies from the front, breaking enemy lines on horseback, and staring down foreign invasions at the Wei River, he could respect an emperor who fought and died in a ditch.
What his warrior soul could not process or forgive was a ruler who defaulted on his contract, leaving his subjects behind while he ran for his life.
"Do these descendants of mine possess no memory of how this empire was forged?" Li Shimin's voice cracked with fury. "Did they forget how I stood at the riverbank, stared down a nomad horde with a handful of riders, and then spent years refining our blades until we wiped them from the earth?!"
The Emperor slammed his hand onto the armrest. "You hold the title of Son of Heaven and yet you've got the vision of a panicked peasant. Fleeing faster than your own citizens. What the hell is wrong with you?!" He clenched his fist. "Damn, I really just want to kick him in the head right now."
Off to the side, Hou Junji was no longer looking at the map.
His eyes were fixed on the breakdown of Geshu Han's final moments, empathy shadowing his face. "If he took it slow and played defense, his own sovereign would have executed him for treason,"
Hou Junji murmured, his voice heavy. "If he rushed out and fought, the enemy would slaughter his army on the field."
The general lowered his head, letting out a sigh. "The road of two deaths, with no third option on the board. For a general on the frontline... there is no way to play out of that position."