Chapter 45: Loyalty And Valor For The Nation
“Copper coins strung, scattered and rolling, with a black hole in the middle, no heart no lungs…”
Countryside children sang this nursery rhyme, hopping along. Xuan Chong had just held a meeting with several subordinates in his uncle’s main camp responsible for merchant affairs, and now he lifted his head to look at these laughing children, lost in thought. As a gentleman from the internet in later generations, how could Xuan Chong not know that these children were spreading a meme.
This matter is also recorded in the Later Han book. Nursery rhymes like “A thousand li grass, what green green, ten days divined, especially not growing” spread throughout Luoyang. And the naughty children singing such nursery rhymes beside Dong Zhuo’s horse cart were the earliest “meme kids” recorded in history. Dong Zhuo was an elder and didn’t understand the culture of the younger generation, so he happily entered the palace.
Of course, the problem doesn’t lie with these children singing nursery rhymes, but with some scholars in this place who comment on current affairs according to their own preferences, and those phrases that flow smoothly are then spread by the children who don’t understand their meaning as practice for their mouths.
Sure enough, Xuan Chong stared at these kids, and these kids also looked at Wu Fei sitting on the horse.
In the stare-down of big eyes versus small eyes, Xuan Chong pulled out a coin and suddenly spoke to these little ghosts: “Come sing a line with me, and I’ll give you a big coin to buy candy.”
The little ghosts crowded around. Xuan Chong: “Love you walking alone in dark alleys.” After getting a coin, the childish voices followed and sang together.
Xuan Chong continued, “Love your unyielding posture.” The children were now interested in the tune they were singing along with, so Wu Fei pressed on, starting the third line’s tonal shift: “Love you confronting despair, refusing to shed a tear.”
A few minutes later, Wu Fei watched the children walking away, now singing: “Love your tattered clothes, yet daring to block destiny’s gun, love how you’re so like me, with the same gaps…”
The ballad was sung with increasing vigor because the nearby adults stopped to watch them, giving this group of meme kids the motivation to keep spreading it.
As a transmigrator, Xuan Chong watched the little ghosts skip away with the song, then nodded. The childish code from the streets of his previous life echoed in this otherworld—just right. He wondered if there might be other transmigrators responding to the code with him.
Xuan Chong smiled. In a way, he was now a little ghost himself.
…But the system popup began…
System: “Please analyze, in the current historical period, the impact of folk song information dissemination on economy, politics, and culture. And combining with your own era, analyze the role of media discourse power in international politics.”
“Hiss—” Xuan Chong took a deep breath of dissatisfaction and muttered softly: “I just hate it when, right when I’m relaxing, it suddenly assigns me homework.” It was like having to submit a reflection after every spring outing—nauseating.
However, Xuan Chong quickly entered “problem-solver” mode and began a serious analysis, namely that the Wu Family Army, as an external force wielding violence, had intensifying contradictions with the local powerful clans!
Xuan Chong thought for a moment and brought in a modern example from a dozen years before his birth in his previous life: in a free port in the South, local gangs encountered people from the North who had come over via connections, leading to serious conflict. Since the local group controlled movies and various industries, when clashing with the group making a living from the North, they couldn’t win by force, so they collectively regionally blacked Northern culture groups. Yes, this was one port’s public opinion regionally blacking an entire country—extremely absurd, with the lingering poison spreading decades later.
Xuan Chong paused while doing the problem. Because following this line of thinking, the situation the Wu Family Army faced now was indeed a hidden danger, as in the mouths of these scholars, the Wu Family Army was currently Lingnan people.
Although the Wu Family ancestors had migrated from the North of Da Yao, regional factional hatred ignores logic and follows emotions only.
The system saw Xuan Chong’s analysis and then said: “Please discuss how to handle such conflicting contradictions.”
Xuan Chong: “The other side can’t use knives, so they can only use public opinion, while the Wu Family is weak in public opinion now but has knives! That means the ultimate contradiction is to purge the entire top layer. Or create a new top-layer class.”
The system said nothing.
Xuan Chong paused: “My answer is wrong.”
System: “This is an open question with no right or wrong; the correctness of the answer lies in practice.”
Xuan Chong squatted down looking at ants on the ground; the ants followed routes on the ground, and even if he cut off a route with a knife, they would still follow instructions from deep in the ant nest. Xuan Chong spurred his horse to leap twenty zhang high, gazing at the walled fortress dozens of li away—the nursery rhymes like such instructions came from there.
In this era, the source of nursery rhyme spread was obvious: those people reciting poetry and couplets; the phrases they chanted were heard by servants, the servants chanted them, and the children spread them out. Like the ant nest center mastering pheromones, they controlled the information input rights to the populace.
The powerful clans mastered the classics’ essentials. As information hubs, like the swarm center issuing instructions to the swarm, they unilaterally instilled their preferred concepts into the common people, while the people’s freezing, hunger, illness, and fundamental interests could not spread.
Xuan Chong reflected: Pure slaughter cannot overturn this structure. For example, in late Tang, Huang Chao nearly slaughtered all noble families and clans, but Zizhi Tongjian stood on the side of the new noble family class interests and completely vilified his actions.
And after Huang Chao, another figure like him used the meme song “Eat his grain, drink his mother, Raider King is here, no grain tax” to directly overthrow Great Ming.
The people, due to natural disasters, flowed and rose up; because they had heard the same ballads, they were no longer weeds. But a tide of blood!
Wait, Xuan Chong muttered: “I seem to have found a thread. From Huang Chao to Li Zicheng, the source of ‘rumors’ changed from noble families to poor families; the social dissemination medium also changed, from ignorant children’s unconscious behavior to farmers and citizens selectively amplifying according to their own interest tendencies.”
This was the thread from the eve of ideological shackles to the modern era.
Xuan Chong wrote “La Marseillaise” on the system’s reserved bookmark page number, namely how the army through military songs seized the dominant right of information dissemination from kingdom nobles and the church. The army’s mobility made dissemination efficiency suddenly surpass the old forces.
From the perspective of a historical observer, this was one of the “characteristics” of traditional serf uprisings suddenly becoming modernized.
Of course, Xuan Chong thought, now he still needed to rein in his ambitions a bit.
Europe’s medieval feudal lords lacked historical experience; in the modern era, letting armies sing songs, as they sang they resonated with themselves, and then the resonating ones sent the king to the guillotine. But in the East? They had ample experience.
…The system had already hidden…
In the East, if military generals tried to start mastering public opinion power, that would be indulging the spread of “absurd words”.
The Eastern governance system was quite vigilant about this. Such behaviors were uniformly classified as “transgression”.
In the pre-Qin period, “Great Chu rises, Chen Sheng king” made all later dynasties explicitly prohibit disorderly singing in the ranks. Even the most correct singing would arouse rulers’ suspicions; Yue Fei’s “Man Jiang Hong” was loyal enough, yet it touched the ancestral wariness of the old Zhao family toward military generals, ultimately meeting his end at Fengbo Pavilion.
After Song, Chinese military generals absolutely could not produce literary works expressing ambitions outside the “emperor’s highest directive spirit”.
Wu Fei was certain that if he dared release something advanced like “military songs,” the lords at the Da Yao imperial court would immediately consider “his heart harbors disloyalty”.
For Wu Fei, he had finally found a “sharp tool” in the historical toolbox, but couldn’t use it, and couldn’t help scratching his head in frustration.
What if merchant caravans sang it? Wu Fei shook his head again—not to mention the consequences of merchants mastering public opinion power in the future, right now merchants were extremely resistant to “singing” activities. Actors who sang for a living were lower nine streams, worse than beggars.
If a child from a good family said they wanted to sing opera, their parents and elders would break their legs.
Wu Fei looked up at the sky; the Eastern Dynasty he faced had a complete and stable control system. Breaking this system required long historical gradual evolution, not something one or two smart people could puncture.
The cultural inertia of large nations was too intricate; unless changing dynasties, seizing the chaos gap, could some things be done.
Wu Fei left the Wu Family Army’s main camp. Inside the camp, Xian Daoren watched Wu Fei’s figure, sniffed: “I smell the breath of wonderful change, but it seems stifled again. Of course, it will eventually emerge, because you can’t cut off the doubts in your heart.”
…The perspective shifts to the North…
On the Da Yao imperial court, fifteen palace attendants unfolded a dozens-of-zhang-long silk cloth map.
The top of the map reads “Map of Mountains and Rivers” in ancient script, displaying the entire area covered by Da Yao’s Imperial Aura. This Map of Mountains and Rivers has been passed down from the previous dynasty, and this map can actually be made larger or smaller.
When the map holder’s national power is at its peak, this map can unfold to a hundred zhang, showing the Northern Rong to the north, the ten thousand great mountains to the south, the myriad islands of the Eastern Sea to the east, and the mountain ranges and deserts to the west. But when the Imperial Aura weakens, it unfolds to only nine zhang square.
It is said that before Da Yao, in the final years of the Cheng Dynasty, four people could unfold the Map of Mountains and Rivers, which displayed only one prefecture.
Emperor Shu, wearing cloud-ascent boots, looked at his own vast mountains and rivers. At this time, the northeast corner of the Map of Mountains and Rivers was already missing, with the patterns of mountain ranges, rivers, and cities all extremely dim—this had already been seized by the Evil Dragon clan. In addition, the islands in the Eastern Sea were now also hidden in the clouds and mist on the map.
Whether the Under Heaven is within the Imperial Aura’s range can all be seen from the Map of State Altars. —Whether the Imperial Aura covers it depends on whether the local people silently acknowledge the Son of Heaven as the master of the Under Heaven. To a certain extent, Wu Fei at this time also acknowledges Da Yao as legitimate, hence he is also part of the current manifestation of the Imperial Way.
In the Under Heaven that Emperor Shu’s gaze saw, at Yunmeng Marsh, although there was a very glaring ship covered in dragon scales, the mountains and rivers of this prefecture were still clearly visible on the map. The Imperial Court army (Wu Family Army) stationed across the river from Changcheng was like blazing fire, continuously melting away the rebellion.
In the Yunmeng Marsh area, the Wu Family Army advanced steadily, pulling out one Water Tribe stronghold after another on the five hundred li of water marsh in Yunmeng Marsh, already forcing the local Dragon Clan unable to come ashore. Trap them for another year and the water marsh can be secured.
Emperor Shu: “The Ting Marquis leads the army capably.”
The eunuch beside him said: “The Ting Marquis’s family has enjoyed the nation’s grace for generations, so naturally they will not let the rebels act recklessly.”
Hearing this, Emperor Shu seemed provoked by something unpleasant: “Hmph, enjoying the nation’s grace for generations does not mean they will loyally serve the country in times of national calamity!”
Emperor Shu glanced at Changcheng and said: “Now the Ting Marquis is short on military supplies and expenses, so he cannot quickly pacify the evil thieves.”
The eunuch beside him fell silent, because this involved the struggle between imperial power and noble family rights. —It should be said that Emperor Shu’s impression of the Wu Family Army’s current “difficulties” came from the accusations of the local noble families.
Changcheng’s noble families now had more energy than other local powerful clans to shout about their own interests being harmed! And many villages in northern Da Yao suddenly disappeared during grain levies, yet the local noble families paid no attention to worldly affairs. For powerful clans, those villages not under their protection were often “troublesome villages” that harbored their escaped slaves! These “troublesome villages” now meeting misfortune was their natural bad luck.
For the emperor sitting in the court, the voices of noble families were to a large extent the “public opinion” of the local people. But what they loudly shouted about differed from the Yao Calculation results of the rivers and mountains that the Son of Heaven saw.
In peaceful times, the monarch still cared very much about the reputation of a “prosperous era,” but now it was a chaotic time of warfare.
The fierce shouting of Donghua Commandery’s noble families and powerful clans at this time was not “the crying child gets milk,” but rather made the monarch feel they were complaining about his own imperial decree.
The Wu Family Army was deployed to Donghua Commandery by Emperor Shu’s imperial decree, and now it was about to succeed in suppression. Southern grain would soon travel north along the river from Ji Prefecture. (The reason grain is stuck in Ji Prefecture now is not just warfare.)
In the end, Emperor Shu still wrote “sarcasm” in the imperial decree, demanding that the people of Donghua Commandery encourage each other in this time of national calamity.
……
In the 2nd month of the 28th year of the Shu Tian Calendar. Wu Hanluan’s main camp received another imperial decree. This time the military banners in the camp were fully unfurled and swaying in the wind, but the command axe and halberd did not twist as they had a few months ago. However, it was unclear if it was an illusion, but the command axe and halberd seemed to sway along with the main camp.
Following a great plague a month ago on the southern bank of the Donghua River, two southern armies collapsed and fled due to skyrocketing maintenance difficulties, suddenly leaving the Wu Family Army as Da Yao’s only military reliance in Donghua Commandery.
Thus, Wu Hanluan and his son, as well as his nephew who “should” now be in the Southern Region, came into the emperor’s favor.
Upon hearing the meaning of Emperor Shu’s decree, Wu Hanluan immediately replied that he would offer twenty fire oxen from the Southern Border as tribute.
These fire oxen had sturdy scales on their ribs and a pair of three-chi-long sharp horns on their heads—these features were said to be manifestations of fire qilin bloodline.
After being tamed with spirit talismans, these fire oxen charged in formation in the camp with majestic vigor, their huge oxen eyes like the crimson charcoal fire in a furnace chamber.
These monstrous mounts were escorted here by Wu Fei, intended to supplement Wu Hengyu’s ground monstrous cavalry team with sufficient impact force. Yet Wu Hanluan decided on his own to offer them directly as tribute, and the imperial envoy smiled and accepted them.
Wu Fei was very puzzled, Wu Hengyu was very angry.
The emotional Wu Hengyu was temporarily unpersuadable, so Wu Hanluan pointed at Wu Fei: “Emperor Shu already knows you came to me. He knows you worked hard in the Southern Border, but you hid it from him, and he is very unhappy!”
(Offering these divine oxen as enshrined masters is a form of defense as a minister: although Wu Fei came without greeting, it was to deliver tribute, and Emperor Shu actually did not care about these twenty fire oxen, but by accepting them, it meant forgiveness.)
Wu Fei suddenly understood. Thus, he proactively asked Wu Hanluan for leave.
Wu Fei: “The things that needed doing have all been handled in these dozen days, and the camp’s grain is now basically secured.”
Wu Fei personally reviewed the situations of those merchant soldiers in the army, straightening out the trade route order to the Donghua Commandery side. Rare goods from the Southern Border would be transported over, and people from Donghua Commandery who lost land due to warfare would also migrate there.
Wu Hanluan nodded, telling Wu Fei to return quickly—not alone, but with five hundred soldiers returning home, to reassure the locals that this expedition went smoothly.
……
After Wu Fei left the camp, he suddenly heard the camp’s war drums. Wu Fei turned his head to look: the camp was filled with killing intent, and this killing intent was pressing toward the Southern Region.
Wu Fei understood: “Uncle is acting on the decree to send out troops.”
Behind Wu Fei, the two Guiche at this time, like chickens startled by firecrackers, suddenly raised their heads and emitted shrill cries, but after Wu Fei’s accompanying beast tamer shook the bell, the Guiche settled down in the cage.
