Chapter 2: Magic-Nullifying Pig Innards
After they don't kill Dong Zhuo and instead walk away peacefully, Liu Bei and co. team up with more government officials to fight even more Yellow Turbans. This time, they're stymied by the sorcery of one of the Turban mystics, who conjures a phantom army in the sky to chase everybody away.
Except they're not that stymied, because the general of the local forces says "nah, look, the way to dissolve the illusion—and hear me out on this—is we gotta mix together, like, all the entrails and excrement and disgusting bits of a couple animals and throw them at the apparition."
And this works; the sorcery is undone, Zhang Fei scores another kill during a duel, and victory is had.
...Now that I think about it though, like, geeze, why would you ever become a sorcerer? You spend your life learning and mastering rituals and incantations, and when you finally get to have your moment, somebody else is goes "have some pig guts lol" and ruins all your effort. And this is back in the days when people didn't even feel bad about killing pigs; I mean at least nowadays your enemies would have PETA up on them being like "yeah, look, if you want to go slaughter that army of people that's fine, but you're not hurting this pig to do it."
After a lot more of this, the leaders of the rebellion are eventually put down. Despite this, the Red Hat Yellow Turban movement continues to grow, continuing to be a nationwide problem for a while yet. Around this point, though, the book begins to grow about as tired of them as I am. But we need to do one more to introduce our third protagonist.
The Han army Liu Bei has now joined up with goes to reclaim yet another city that's been captured by the rebels. Here, they're aided by a man named Sun Jian.
You may have noticed that I have now named three protagonists, and the book is called "Romance of the Three Kingdoms". Just something to consider.
Sun Jian has the ferocity of a tiger, and claims to be descended from Sun Tzu, the guy who wrote "The Art of War". Instead of popping in and out of the story for two seconds like Cao Cao did, we actually see Sun Jian in action here. His army is the first to breach a city gate, and he charges headfirst into battle, drops a few mooks, and spears a general.
Liu Bei gets an officer kill in this battle, too, but he takes the guy out with an arrow, so it's less cool. Sun Jian is cool.
Because he already has government connections, Sun Jian's valor in this battle earns him a government position, while the commoner Liu Bei still gets nothing, despite all his contributions thus far. Some time after a lot of the action dies down, he gets chatting with a courtier in the capital who realizes, whoa, hang on, this guy should be in charge of something.
So the courtier raises a stink with the emperor, and calls out the Ten Eunuchs for not promoting good people. The eunuchs respond by saying "uuhhh look the paperwork probably just got lost, we'll go through and give seats to people who helped fight against the rebellion. Cool?"
Naturally, they only do this to take the heat off of them, and once it's died down they totally plan to pull these people back out of office and put in their own guys. You know, the ones who are going to bribe them.
In the meantime, Liu Bei gets to be a county deputy for a little bit. Before too long, though, an imperial inspector comes along who has about the same attitude as the matchmaker in Mulan. It's obvious to everybody that the inspector is expecting to receive a bribe in exchange for a good review, but Liu Bei sadly turns out his pockets and says, but I don't have any bribe money because I haven't been extorting the peasants like everybody else.
And we're surprised that there's a populist uprising going on right now?
So there's no doubt in anyone's mind that Liu Bei is going to be ousted from this job. It's at this point that we see the first act of Zhang Fei doing something that I like to call "pulling a Zhang Fei"; i.e., making everything much more goddamn worse than it already was for no good reason. In this instance, Zhang Fei arrests the inspector, ties him to a post, and publicly flogs him.
OBVIOUSLY this is a bad move for your burgeoning politcal career, and the three brothers become wanted men and go lay low for a bit. Eventually though, more Yellow Turbans rise up in rebellion and the brothers help put them down, and for their efforts they're forgiven and given another posting somewhere else.
There's a quick aside over to Sun Jian as he clears out some rebels, after which he's put in charge of a province in the southeast. Keep that in mind.
Anyway, we're going to leave all of them for a little bit because it's time for PALACE INTRIGUE.
Because uh, the emperor dies right around this time. He has two young sons who aren't old enough to be emperor yet, but who would make suitable heirs when they come of age: Bian and Xie. The problem is, each of the kids are from different concubines (which always seems like a good idea until a succession crisis breaks out. But I guess if you're the one being succeeded then it's not really your problem, is it).
The emperor's favorite son is Xie, who also has the backing of his grandmother, the Queen Mother Dong. Bian, however, is the son of Empress He, who obviously wants her own kid on the throne. On top of that, the Regent in charge following the emperor's death is He Jin—the empress's brother. Since he's the pseudo-emperor until whichever heir comes of age, he kind of has the power to put who he wants on the throne. This is bad for the Ten Eunuchs, who favor Xie since he doesn't have any family members who would be a threat to their control over the throne. So they figure, uh, things would probably be better for us if we got rid of He Jin.
He Jin catches word of this, and he begins to consider the possibility of killing the Ten Eunuchs. Our mysterious pal Cao Cao is here, and he is on board—he flat-out tells He Jin that killing the eunuchs is really his only choice here, and it's going to break bad for him if he doesn't.
But despite being in charge of everything (at least on paper), He Jin isn't a thousand percent sure he can get away with an execution, so he doesn't really do anything. Fortunately for him, on his behalf, another imperial governor marches five thousand troops into the capital and forcefully installs Bian on the throne as emperor. This guy is Yuan Shao; He'll be a regular for a little bit yet. He's friends with Cao Cao, and the noble Yuan family is kind of a big deal. Almost as big a deal as the Lius.
At this point, Yuan Shao figures, you know, I have the troops here anyway. Maybe we should go kill those eunuchs for good measure.
Desperate to get out of this, the Ten turn against one of their own, killing the eunuch who He Jin knew for sure had a plot in motion to assassinate him. The remaining eunuchs plead to Empress He, saying that the plot was entirely that guy's fault, and the rest of them knew nothing about it. Empress He convinces her brother to lay off.
This happens a couple more times, where He Jin realizes that the Eunuchs need to be stopped, but they're so good at the game they keep bestowing gifts and titles onto people who turn around and use Empress He to talk He Jin down. But this can only buy them time, and eventually He Jin decides, no, we definitely need to do this. He just doesn't quite know the best way.
Yuan Shao suggests, hey, call in a bunch of provincial leaders to march armies in here and wipe them out. How could the eunuchs possibly stop them?
But Cao Cao says, wait, why the hell bother? You're the regent, you have the authority to just eliminate them yourself, freaking, just do that.
But He Jin decides to go with Yuan Shao's stupid plan so here we are. This is probably the decision that ultimately leads to the destruction of the Han dynasty.