Chapter 86: Fry 'Em Up
First, add Cao Ren to the list of people who is briefly mentioned as having passed away off-screen.
The book then jumps back a bit to Sun Quan receiving the order from Cao Pi to join the 5-armied attack on Shu. We learn that it's Lu Xun's idea to keep the peace as best they can by promising troops, but waiting to see what the other armies do first before actually committing to anything. We already know how that ends up.
Now recall that, at the end of the last chapter, Zhuge Liang was going to send an envoy to Wu to patch up relations. Well, that guy arrives in Wu.
Upon receiving word of the envoy's appearance, Sun Quan thinks, hmm, he's probably here to open up peace talks between Wu and Shu, of which I am in favor, because Wei is super-untrustworthy. So I really want to get in good with Shu right now. This means that, what I really need to do here, is threaten this envoy with a thousand armed soldiers and a vat of boiling oil.
His advisor suggests it based off of a story from the founding of the Han. I don't really get it either. Maybe it's supposed to be a symbolic threat or something, except the oil is very real.
But anyway, the envoy isn't very worried about this. He reasons that Sun Quan is afraid of what he's come to say, and so he's overcompensating, because a thousand soldiers AND a vat of oil is just overkill. Again, none of this makes sense to me; Sun Quan correctly guessed why this guy is here and was incredibly receptive to the idea of an olive branch, so like, why any of this. Whatever.
Sun Quan finally agrees, yes, I really wanted to be friends the whole time, and sends his own envoy back to Shu to do some partying.
At one of these parties, the Wu envoy gets into a nerd battle with one of Shu's scholars. It's not at all important, and neither of these guys are important either. And to sum it up, it's kind of like two modern-day philosophers trying to out-riddle each other, and backing up their rebuttals by quoting the bible. And it's played entirely straight.
I'm beginning to think maybe I just don't understand international relations.
Anyway so long story short (too late), Shu and Wu are friendly again, and the defensive pact against Wei is set. After hearing the news that his two enemies are going to team up to fend off any attack he could possibly launch, Cao Pi immediately decides to attack Wu. This is obviously excellent political and military strategy.
Despite being present a few paragraphs ago, Lu Xun is now nowhere to be found, so Sun Quan taps Xu Sheng to lead the defense. I don't believe Xu Sheng will be relevant beyond this chapter, so you don't have to commit that name to memory.
Xu Sheng immediately proceeds to nearly execute Sun Quan's nephew.
And by that I mean, the nephew thinks it's a terrific idea to attack Cao Pi's army before he crosses the river into Wu. Xu Sheng disagrees, mostly because you're smashing your own inferior numbers right into the enemy vanguard in a place where you can't escape or be reinforced. Just a minor concern, really.
But the nephew won't shut up about it. He basically says, if you don't let me go attack, I'm going to do it anyway. And that shit does NOT fly in the military; disobeying a superior is a thousand percent grounds for execution. In fact, you HAVE to put the guy to the sword regardless of who he is, because if you don't, then everybody else might start thinking they can get away with shit too.
...I'd have to check, but I don't think this is common disciplinary procedure anymore.
Anyway, the nephew is about to be executed when Sun Quan puts a stop to the thing. There's a bit of back-and-forth about it, but the ultimate verdict is, the nephew was actually made an honorary family member by Quan's brother, and isn't truthfully a Sun. And because of that, it's totally cool to pardon him; but if he was a member of the ruling family by blood, he'd have to be executed.
I'm usually better about grasping the logic in this book, but I am just really struggling this chapter.
Now that's he pretty much been granted full immunity, the nephew takes the troops to go do the ill-advised assault anyway, so Xu Sheng can only shake his head and send Ding Feng to back him up. But actually, nothing I've said for last few paragraphs really matters because the attack doesn't happen this way.
Instead, Cao Pi sails down the river and finds exactly zero defenses set up by Wu on their side, probably because they've been so wrapped up trying to decide whether or not to execute the kid that they just forgot. But Cao Pi figures, surely this is a trick, so he doesn't disembark from the ships.
Some fog rolls in overnight, and when it disperses the next day, suddenly there's a fully-manned defensive barricade set up for miles upon miles! Cao Pi gets unnerved because bloody hell, where did all these troops come from all of a sudden, and how is he supposed to invade something this well-defended?
(What actually happened was that Xu Sheng pulled a Blazing Saddles and had a fake wall with fake soldiers put up, but Cao Pi didn't need to know that.)
Then Wei receives the report that Zhao Yun from Shu is making some threatening advances, so Cao Pi decides to pull back to deal with that.
THAT'S when the nephew strikes and leads a devastating attack on their rear. Ding Feng follows up the initial assault by setting some of Wei's boats on fire, and eventually mortally wounds Zhang Liao, who shows up to the battle just in time to get shot in the dick.
Which is an interesting detail to invent because the real Zhang Liao died from illness. But either way, sheesh, at the rate they've been dropping lately we won't have any of the all-time greats left anymore.