Chapter 43
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…….
…….
Liu Bei stopped the hand that had been hoeing the garden bed.
He casually brushed the dirt from his hands.
‘……So the day has come.’
He swallowed his tension down inside.
It was only recently that he had put his name on that petition.
Could this be nothing more than a simple banquet?
No. There was no way.
Cao Cao was not that simple a man.
Every move he made had a purpose.
What was that purpose?
Liu Bei looked up at the sky.
.
.
.
He had assumed this would be some grand place worthy of being called a banquet.
Liu Bei kept his thoughts hidden and took in the sight of Cao Cao, sitting alone in the middle of the pavilion.
The eyes of the two heroes met.
Cao Cao's eyes clearly held a friendly smile, but within them there was a sharp, blade-like edge.
Liu Bei lowered himself as much as possible and bowed politely.
“Prime Minister, you called for me?”
“General of the Left, you’re here? The plums have just ripened splendidly.”
Just as he said.
As Liu Bei sat down, politely raising his cup, the fresh fragrance of plum wine that Cao Cao had personally poured soon filled the cup.
Under the dark sky, as though rain might pour down at any moment.
The two of them shared a drink.
Keeping his expression as calm as possible, Liu Bei’s mind was working furiously.
From the atmosphere so far.
His scheme surely had not been exposed.
Then why had he suddenly been summoned?
As he swallowed those thoughts.
“General of the Left—no, Xuande. Do you know about the dragon’s transformations?”
Cao Cao was the one who brought up the topic first.
“I do not know the details, but...”
While refilling Liu Bei’s empty cup with plum wine, Cao Cao went on.
“A dragon can grow large and then shrink small, changing its form freely. It can hide as tiny as a needle, or spread itself to cover the whole world. And when spring is in full bloom like it is now, it finally rides the clouds and leaps into the sky. Just like the heroes of the realm, if you ask me.”
Right after pouring some into his own cup as well.
Cao Cao lifted his cup and said.
“In Xuande’s eyes, who in this realm could be called a hero?”
Liu Bei’s heart dropped for an instant.
The weight of the thorns hidden in those words seemed to prick him again and again, and without realizing it a bead of cold sweat trickled down his spine.
He knew the answer.
But he could not say it.
For now, testing the other side’s intentions came first.
“How about Yuan Shu? Isn’t he in Huainan, preparing to claim the imperial title while holding the imperial seal?”
Cao Cao snorted.
“An illusion of a man. Before long he’ll wither away and die, and you won’t even be able to find his bones.”
“Then... his elder brother, Yuan Shao of Ji Province, would surely deserve to be called a hero. A lineage of three generations of Three Excellencies, and vast lands under his control, after all.”
“Ha! That braggart, greedy coward? I’ll wager he’ll strangle himself with his own indecision before long.”
“I’ve also heard that Sun Ce of the Jiangdong region possesses martial skill and command ability comparable to a tiger.”
“Nothing but a snot-nosed brat riding on his father’s fame. He’ll soon lose to his own temper, that’s for certain.”
More names came out of Liu Bei’s mouth after that.
Liu Biao, Liu Zhang, Zhang Xiu, Han Sui......
Along with the rain that had begun to pour down in sheets, each name Liu Bei muttered was refuted by Cao Cao one by one.
A silence followed for a moment, as if the air in the pavilion had frozen cold.
The one to break that suffocating silence was Cao Cao.
He pointed a finger at himself.
Then slowly turned that finger toward Liu Bei.
A strange smile, impossible to read, glimmered at the corners of his mouth.
“Right now, under heaven, the only ones worthy of being called heroes are you, Liu Xuande, and I, Cao Cao.”
The instant he heard those words.
Liu Bei felt as if his innermost thoughts had been torn to pieces and put on display.
All the thoughts he had hidden until now.
His ambition, as a descendant of the imperial house, to set the realm right.
The man before his eyes saw straight through all of it.
The chopsticks in his hand fell hopelessly to the floor, entirely against Liu Bei's will.
Clang──!
The sharp crash brutally shattered the silence at the same time.
Rumble, boom……!
With a deafening roar as though the sky itself were being ripped apart, lightning flashed.
In that instant.
“Hwaaaah! O heavens!”
Liu Bei hunched his shoulders and made a show of crawling under the table.
Then he trembled all over.
Truly, like a coward who had been shocked senseless by nothing more than the sound of thunder.
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The sight of Liu Bei, who seemed to have seen through Cao Cao’s pressure and was desperately trying to wriggle away from it by playing the scaredy-cat, moved many hearts.
“There’s no way a High Elf would be scared of something as trifling as lightning! ...Hyaak! What do you think you’re doing?!”
Even Chloe, who had just been pushing the theory that elves were supreme beings, had raised a question mark at Liu Bei’s elf-like antics, but she too was ultimately brought down by Kim Yul’s sudden jump scare and let out a truly pathetic scream.
“Eh? Could I, by any chance, shrink down to the size of a needle?”
There was also a dragon who polymorphed into a needle and learned firsthand that needles do not have vocal organs.
Of course, draconic magic could be cast without having to chant out loud, so after about ten minutes of struggle she was able to return to her original form.
Aside from those idiots.
“So, Cao Cao figured out that Liu Bei took part in the treason...?”
“Well. If he had noticed, wouldn’t he have just killed him outright instead of probing like this?”
“But looking at Cao Cao’s conduct so far, it feels like he really wants to make Liu Bei work for him as neatly and thoroughly as possible. So maybe this was an indirect warning?”
“Hmm... That’s not without reason.”
People savored the novel’s content and the lingering afterglow of the scene.
“Surely the lightning strike wasn’t a coincidence? If he’s a High Elf, he’d surely be proficient in magic too. He must have deliberately called down the lightning to turn the mood around!”
“Still, I think crawling under the table and trembling like a scaredy-cat is kind of pathetic......”
“You bastard, you’re a dwarf spy, aren’t you?”
“If it were a dwarf, he’d have downed the plum wine on the spot...... Why are you pouring the drink into the cup little by little......?”
The all-purpose High-Elf theory had evolved even further, and the Liu Bei conspiracy theory had climbed from Swordmaster to Great Mage status.
“Cao Cao is... too scary. If he were my superior......”
“Deliberately calling him Xuande to draw him into a personal relationship, then tightening the noose and confirming the kill one step at a time—it feels like watching suspense fiction.”
“A descendant of the imperial family losing his dignity means death, after all......!”
“Rather than explaining with words a hundred times that it isn’t so, showing it through action like that is far more effective. Liu Bei really does know politics.”
People savoring ‘The Two Heroes’ as a political drama.
“This is... definitely hinting at black magic! Yuan Shu is a rotting zombie... Yuan Shao is a hollow skeleton... Sun Ce will be ashes in no time... Cao Cao wants to become a lich!”
“Drag that bastard out.”
“Kraaaagh!”
The idiot who had unknowingly outed his dark side.
“No matter how you look at it, the dragon... seems like it’s describing that thing, doesn’t it?”
“Small at one moment... big at the next...”
“Rising up while riding the clouds must mean that phenomenon, right?”
“Liu Bei going under the table may have been to get a look at Cao Cao’s impressive... package...?”
Even the outright lunatics.
And only after reaching this scene.
Only then were people finally able to understand the novel’s title in full.
Two heroes.
It really was a story centered on two actual heroes.
The royal bloodline is hidden.
If it isn’t hidden, Cao Cao would already have cut off his head.
The villain hides his ambition.
If he didn’t, rebellions would keep happening just like they are now.
Through the Hero Banquet scene, the novel’s themes and title finally came together perfectly and made complete sense!
Of course, writer Kim Yul, who heard that interpretation,
“What on earth is that supposed to mean?”
He scratched his ear once.
After all, even a four-point question asking for the test-maker’s intent can differ from the test-maker’s actual thoughts.
* * *
Back when I decided I wanted to write Romance of the Three Kingdoms as a novel.
I divided the flow of the story into three major parts.
Part 1. From the Yellow Turban Rebellion to the rise of the warlords—right up to this Hero Banquet.
At the very least, you could call it the early part where Cao Cao and Liu Bei had as many points of contact as possible.
Part 2. From the Battle of Guandu to the Battle of Red Cliffs.
Leaving aside the Cao Cao part, which had more than enough to write about.
The Liu Bei part was the problem.
- How far have you read in Three Kingdoms?
- I got as far as Liu Bei running away!
- Ha, shit. Which part is that?
It was around the time when one of the major highlights of the endless legend of the King of Reverse Charge, Marine-elf Liu Bei, would come out.
No matter how I thought about it, it felt like it would draw a ton of complaints about being too frustrating.
Of course, episodes full of hype, like Changban Slope, did pop up here and there.
But the hero of Changban Slope is not Liu Bei.
It’s Zhao Yun and Zhang Fei.
What did Liu Bei do there?
Because he tossed his son aside like he didn’t need him, Liu Shan’s stats—left with shock and PTSD etched into his body—didn’t plummet straight down, did they?
All just so he could go and headpat Zhao Yun right away, he practically threw away the nation’s future.
So...
“It’s about time I prepared to swap out the protagonist.”
“Will people accept that?”
“You’ve got to lay the groundwork early. And the people here are pretty tolerant when it comes to that sort of thing.”
Maybe because they have a fantasy brain built in by default, readers like big, grand scales.
I looked at the current number-one work serialized in the Empire Daily, ‘Train Even If You Die and Wake Up,’ and sure enough, number one was number one for a reason.
With its incredibly meticulous and vast structure, and the system where the training points accumulated by the father are passed down and added onto the son, I could glimpse a fragment of genius.
One critic even left the praise, “It feels like humanity was born to read this novel.”
So I can change generations without any burden.
The timing would be right after the Battle of Guandu.
At the same time as the card pack release, I change the protagonist.
Title.
A once-in-a-lifetime genius who doesn’t hide his loyalty.
It already felt like a gentle southeast wind was blowing.