[Lightscreen]
[When an empire starts collapsing, human lives become cheaper than grass. Don't imagine you can walk leisurely down the road, or visit friends and family for a gathering, or take a vacation somewhere peaceful. Even sending a simple message across a province turns into a nightmare.
During the chaos in Hebei, Yan Zhenqing ended up trapped in Pingyuan County. He had no idea what was happening to his family over in Changshan. No reliable scouts. No letters. No communication. No WiFi. No internet. Nothing. Just pure, unfiltered anxiety and the occasional rumor that was probably wrong anyway.
By the time he finally managed to scrape together a volunteer militia and march to the rescue, he arrived at a literal graveyard.
The first thing waiting for him was the mutilated corpse of his young nephew, Yan Jiming.
Then came the second blow: his cousin, Yan Gaoqing, along with the entire surviving household, had already been chained up like cattle and dragged off to Luoyang by the rebels.
And honestly, we need to talk about Yan Jiming for a moment.
Let's talk about that kid, Yan Jiming, for a second.
The rebels captured him specifically to use as psychological leverage to break his dad.
They dragged the boy out in front of the city walls, put a blade to his throat, and screamed at Yan Gaoqing to surrender the city or watch his son die.
Yan Gaoqing didn't even flinch. He refused to back down for traitors. So, the rebels butchered the boy right then and there, right in front of his father's eyes.
That is the kind of brutality this rebellion had descended into.
But here is the cruel reality of ancient warfare. Yan Zhenqing did not have time to collapse emotionally.
There was no room for grief.
He hastily gathered his nephew's remains, shoved his grief deep down into his chest, and ordered his militia to hit the road immediately. His target was Wei County.
If he could seize it, he could cut off the rebels' northern retreat line, pin them down, squeeze the life out of the insurrection, and single-handedly drag the Tang Empire back from the edge of the abyss.
And for a brief moment... it actually looked possible.
At Wei County, Yan Zhenqing's momentum was real. The rebel position was deteriorating. He genuinely believed the rebellion could be crushed before summer ended.
Then reality hit him in the face like a siege hammer.
Good news? Nowhere to be found. Bad news? Started arriving one after another like they'd been waiting in line.
First came a messenger arrived with his brother's gruesome death certificate.
Then came the news that Chang'an, the capital of the civilized world, had fallen to An Lushan's forces.
Then Li Heng bypassed his own father, took the throne out in the middle of nowhere, and ordered General Guo Ziyi to abandon the entire Hebei theater just to march to Lingwu to secure the new court.
And just like that, every strategic advantage Yan Zhenqing had built vanished overnight.
The quick suppression campaign he envisioned was gone. What remained was a long, endless war of attrition.
If there is any silver lining here, it is an extremely bitter one.
During this chaos, Yan Zhenqing finally uncovered evidence proving that a corrupt official named Wang Chengye had been stealing military credit from Yan Gaoqing for years.
The parasitic bureaucrat running the cover-up, Zhang Tongyou, was finally dragged into the courtyard and beaten to death with heavy wooden staffs.
Which was probably one of the few satisfying moments in this entire disaster.
When the imperial army finally reclaimed the eastern capital of Luoyang, Yan Gaoqing's eldest surviving son, Yan Quanming, combed through the ruins of the city until he found his father's scattered bones.
He packed them into a funerary casket, escorted them back to Chang'an, and buried them properly in Fengqi Plains.
And Yan Zhenqing returned to the capital for one reason only: To mourn his brother.
But once again, time was a luxury he didn't possess.
Chang'an had only just been retaken. Smoke still hung over the streets. The rebuilt court was drowning in bureaucracy, political infighting, and bruised egos. Yan Zhenqing had no choice but to throw himself back into administrative work while everyone waited for peace negotiations that never arrived.
Instead of peace, what arrived the following year was his demotion order.
And honestly, we need to pause for a second and appreciate how absurd this man's career record actually was.
Yan Zhenqing was a man with a spine made of solid tungsten and zero political flexibility.
The man simply could not flatter people. He could not play nice. In a political ecosystem built entirely on ass-kissing, smiling lies, and strategic bootlicking, Yan Zhenqing stood out like a lit torch in a paper house.
Over the course of fifty-one years in government service, his official position changed forty-nine times.
Read that again.
Forty-nine transfers, He was either promoted, demoted, transferred, or exiled almost once every single year.
The man was a walking human resources nightmare for corrupt politicians.
The year 758 was especially ridiculous.
One morning, Yan Zhenqing irritated the Chancellor during court discussions. By the afternoon, he had already been stripped of his position as Grand Imperial Censor and reassigned as Governor of Fengyi.
Before he even had time to settle into Fengyi, another order arrived sending him to Puzhou.
Then a few months later, political rivals fabricated accusations against him, and he got shoved even farther away to Raozhou.
The court was basically playing bureaucratic shuttlecock with this man.
In October of that same year, Yan Zhenqing passed through the devastated ruins of Luoyang during his transfer route.
He stopped to visit the ancestral shrine of his uncle, Yan Yuansun, the the patriarch of the Yan clan.
Looking at the empty chairs and the dust settling on the altars, he picked up a brush and wrote the Ji Bofu Wen, the Elegy for My Uncle, carving the words deep into stone so the world would never forget how his family bled for an ungrateful throne.
Then, he went to a private room, pulled out a rough sheet of hemp paper, and wrote a personal note to the nephew he had buried with his own hands: the Ji Zhi Wengao, Draft of a Requiem to My Nephew
The nephew in question was Yan Jiming.
The same child whose mutilated remains he personally recovered from Hebei.
Even while writing, Yan Zhenqing knew the boy's torso was still lost somewhere in the northern wilderness, unable to rest beside his ancestors.
But the Yan family's tragedy wasn't done. Fate apparently decided that Yan Zhenqing had to be the one to sign the final death warrant of his lineage.
Fast forward to the reign of Emperor Li Kuo.
At court appeared a Chancellor named Lu Qi.
And when I say this man sounds like a villain from a political drama, I am not exaggerating.
Lu Qi embezzled money, manipulated appointments, sabotaged rivals, and generally behaved like corruption had gained human form.
Unfortunately for him, Yan Zhenqing was still very much alive.
And Yan Zhenqing had never learned the valuable political skill known as "keeping your mouth shut."
So every time Lu Qi appeared in court, Yan Zhenqing would openly point at him in front of the entire assembly and call him a fraud to his face.
Naturally, Lu Qi took this personally.
The opportunity finally came when the warlord Li Xilie went completely running wild in Huaixi, successfully stormed the city of Ruzhou.
Chancellor Lu Qi immediately walked into court with the kind of smile that should make everyone nervous.
He proposed a solution to the Emperor.
"Your Majesty," he said, "this rebellion requires an envoy. Someone with immense prestige, an elder statesman whose very presence would shame the rebels into surrender."
"And who fits that bill better than our old friend, Yan Zhenqing?"
The other Chancellor, Li Mian, instantly realized this was basically a murder plot disguised as diplomacy.
He stood up on the spot and objected furiously.
"You cannot send a national treasure into a rebel camp!" he shouted. "That is not diplomacy. That is sacrificing him! It's an insult to the entire imperial court!"
But Emperor Dezong, Li Kuo, possessing the collective tactical intellect of a boiled potato, nodded his head and approved the mission.
The entire capital exploded into outrage.
Officials, scholars, and ministers crowded around Yan Zhenqing's carriage, desperately begging him not to go. Some urged him to claim illness. Others outright told him to refuse the order.
Yan Zhenqing simply shook his head.
"An imperial command is an imperial command."
Then he calmly returned home, arranged his family affairs, wrote his will, and prepared for death.
But before leaving the capital, Yan Zhenqing suddenly stopped his carriage.
He turned around and looked directly at Lu Qi, who was standing in the distance watching everything unfold.
And then he said something that froze the entire courtyard.
"When the rebels killed your father and sent his severed head to Pingyuan County," Yan Zhenqing said quietly, "his face was covered in dried blood."
"I could not bear to leave him like that."
"I cleaned his face with my own tongue before I buried him."
Then his voice turned cold.
"And now, you cannot even allow an old man to die peacefully in his own home?"
The courtyard fell completely silent.
The man Yan Zhenqing referred to was Lu Yi, Lu Qi's father.
During the early stages of the rebellion, Lu Yi had died defending the imperial censorate. The rebels severed his head and paraded it across Hebei as a warning.
It was Yan Zhenqing who later hunted down the executioners, recovered the head, and personally ensured Lu Yi received a proper burial.
No one standing there could have imagined that nearly thirty years later, the hero's own son would repay that debt by sending Yan Zhenqing to his death.
And so, the old man departed.
Yan Zhenqing walked directly into Li Xilie's military camp.
The rebel warlord imprisoned him in a dark cell.
For over a year, they starved him. They denied him water. They tried every method possible to force the legendary calligrapher to write a proclamation legitimizing the rebellion.
Yan Zhenqing never touched the brush.
In August of 784, the guards finally entered his prison carrying a silk cord.
Yan Zhenqing was strangled to death at the age of seventy-six.]
"One single family," Li Shimin murmured, his knuckles whitening against the carved armrest of his dragon throne as the light screen flickered above. "Two generations. Three martyrs of loyalty."
He closed his eyes, his breathing heavy in the silence of the grand hall. "This... this is the true backbone of my Tang."
As for Li Kuo, Li Shimin didn't even want to look at his face on the light screen. The sheer incompetence made his stomach turn.
He wasn't even going to judge the boy's domestic policies; he was just baffled by how every single one of his descendants seemed to have a magical radar for finding the most toxic, treacherous prime ministers available on the market.
The moment an honest man gave them a piece of solid, good advice, their immediate response was always to ignore it.
They keep calling it the 'Li family trait' in the future comments, Li Shimin thought bitterly. If you fools are going to inherit my bloodline, why aren't you copying my habit of using Wei Zheng as a literal mirror to check your own flaws?
Lost in his thoughts, Li Shimin accidentally glanced toward the corner of the hall, where Wei Zheng was already staring right back at him with an expression that clearly said, 'Are you taking notes, Your Majesty?'
Wei Zheng stepped forward, adjusting his wide sleeves, and bowed deeply. "Your Majesty, have you ever studied the Yan Family Regulations?"
Li Shimin blinked, caught off guard. "The what?"
"I have a theory, Your Majesty," Wei Zheng explained, his voice echoing off the high beams of the palace.
"This Yan Zhenqing must belong to the distinguished lineage Yan clan of Linyi, Langya. Their ancestor was the great scholar Yan Zhitui, who famously penned a massive volume of household doctrines. It contains exhaustive chapters on everything: how to raise children, how to govern a household, personal integrity, respecting the wise, and staying out of petty political drama."
Child education. That particular phrase hit Li Shimin like a physical blow, given how his own sons were currently acting. But as Wei Zheng spoke, a memory clicked in the Emperor's mind.
"Yan Zhou... Yan Shigu," Li Shimin said aloud, tapping his finger rhythmically on his knee.
"I recently promoted him to Deputy Minister of the Secretariat and granted him the title of Marquis of Langya. Then he immediately resigned, claiming he had to observe ritual mourning for a family death. If I calculate the timeline correctly, his mourning period should be coming to an end right about now."
Li Shimin remembered that incident vividly because the timing had left a sour taste in his mouth. He had assumed the scholar was just using family drama as an excuse to avoid court politics and escape his sight. Now, looking at the light screen from the future, he realized he had misjudged the bloodline.
"Note that down," Li Shimin commanded his scribe. "The moment his mourning ends, summon him to the palace. I need to ask him exactly how his family raises men who don't fear death. Even if our current princes don't learn a single thing from it, doing something is better than sitting here watching our future house burn down."
Across the aisle, Du Ruhui didn't care about family trees. His face was pure rage. "This Lu Qi is an animal in human skin. A monster."
Fang Xuanling was sitting next to him, staring at the light screen with his jaw slightly slack. "How does a man who functions like a rabid dog manage to climb all the way to the rank of Chancellor? The system shouldn't even allow...." He stopped himself mid-sentence.
He suddenly remembered Fang Guan from the previous broadcast, the guy who went from a comfortable desk job to Commander-in-Chief of the entire imperial military in less than six months just because he knew how to talk big.
Compared to that, a corrupt chancellor sneaking into office wasn't even surprising anymore.
Fang Xuanling let out a long, exhausted sigh. "Traitors run the court, while the loyal are thrown into the dirt. It had only been twenty years since the An Lushan Rebellion ended, and the court had already completely forgotten the taste of their own blood."
Down in the Three Kingdoms era, inside the provincial office of Chengdu, Zhang Fei was pacing around the map table, his heavy boots shaking the floorboards.
He couldn't wrap his head around the timeline.
"I don't get it," Zhang Fei barked, throwing his thick hands up in the air. "This Tang Dynasty... Li Longji became brain-dead in his old age. His son Li Heng looks like a paranoid coward. Then comes Li Yu, who acts like a total fools. And now this Li Kuo clown is actively letting an obvious traitor run his cabinet."
He stopped pacing and slammed his fist on the table, rattling the wooden markers. "Every single generation features a new flavor of idiot on the throne! How the hell did this dynasty survive for another hundred years? Why didn't it just collapse?"
Fa Zheng, who was sitting in the corner quietly peeling an orange, let out a dry, knowing chuckle. "You're looking at it backward, Yide. It's the leftover momentum of a golden age."
He tossed a slice of fruit into his mouth. "Look at Yan Zhenqing. He's an old man still bleeding for a broken court under Li Kuo's reign, but his spirit was forged during the high peace of the early Tang. Because he tasted what a great empire felt like, he isn't afraid of a warlord's blade. He speaks the truth because he remembers the light, even when he's standing in the dark."
Zhang Fei opened his mouth to argue, but the words wouldn't come. He just stared at the light screen, overwhelmed by the weight of a legacy that could keep a dying empire alive on pure spite and old loyalty.
He couldn't even begin to imagine what that golden age looked like at its peak.
Sitting at the head of the table, Liu Bei remained silent. In fact, he was doing everything in his power to keep his lips pressed together because he was terrified that if he opened his mouth, he would burst into a hysterical laugh.
For the past few months, he had been privately losing sleep over his son, Adou, constantly worrying that the boy was too soft, too simple, too easily managed by others.
But after watching the last few historical broadcasts from the Tang Dynasty, Liu Bei realized he owed his kid a formal apology. Adou was an absolute saint compared to these royal disasters.
At the same time, Liu Bei finally understood why that future history book contained that famous quote from Cao Cao: 'If you are going to have a son, he should be like Sun Quan.'
Forget about grand strategies for a second. If you took any of these late Tang emperors and replaced them with Sun Quan.... hell, even Sun Quan's less talented relatives, the rebellion would have been crushed in three weeks.
And what about Adou? Liu Bei thought, a massive smirk threatening to break through his serious expression. The future light screen kept praising that chancellor Li Bi as the 'True Zhuge Liang.' I wonder, when Li Bi was dealing with Li Heng screaming 'The Emperor refuses to listen' every five minutes, did he secretly wish he was working for my boy Adou instead? At least Adou knows how to sit still, nod his head, and let the smart people handle the country.
Liu Bei forced his face back into a stern, heroic mask. He lifted his head to look back at the light screen, expecting another block of text about military logistics or political executions.
Instead, the light screen shifted.
The historical analysis vanished, replaced by a massive, high-definition image of an ancient manuscript. It was a piece of calligraphy, but it didn't look like the pristine, perfect inscriptions found on imperial monuments.
This paper was covered in frantic brushstrokes, heavy ink blots, and layers upon layers of messy, desperate scribbles where the writer had crossed out entire lines in a hurry.
Liu Bei leaned forward, his eyes narrowing as he tried to read the jagged characters. "What... what is this?"