Chapter 97: Go Ahead and Cancel the War
After Wu kicks Wei's butt, they write a letter to Shu saying "Hey, we just kicked Wei's butt. Could be a good time for you to attack maybe?" Liu Shan agrees that it's good advice, so he tells Zhuge Liang about it.
Zhuge Liang says, absolutely, I've been preparing for round two this whole time. All I need is your explicit permission to deploy. But Liu Shan then goes, actually, some of my advisors are saying being at war sucks and things are going well for us right now, so like, maybe nevermind?
Fortunately, Zhuge Liang predicted that he might have to sell this cushy emperor on the value of another campaign, so he hands over an impassioned letter he had already written. As best as I can make out, the gist is "Hey, look, you suck at your job and I suck at mine; but if you think about it, Cao Cao sucked at his job, and even the founder of the Han sucked at his job, too, but they got to where they were because they kept trying. So of course attacking Wei is a dumb wasteful idea, and we're probably going to lose, but it's either that or we sit here and wait for them to attack us, and that seems worse."
Liu Shan apparently loves this and authorizes the expedition. Not joining the conflict this time is Zhao Yun, who finally passes away off-screen. The book implies this is due to old age, but more likely he suffered the wrath of the soldiers he stiffed last chapter.
Shu doesn't get very far very quickly. They besiege a small but critical town, outnumbering the Wei forces there a hundred to one; but embarrassingly, they can't breach the walls. Every single siege engine Zhuge Liang brings in gets thwarted, and he gets increasingly agitated until a beefy Wei general comes in as reinforcements and smacks the Shu soldiers around. It's definitely not one of his finer moments.
Eventually, Shu gets distracted from their objective and decides to play a trick on the main Wei army. Jiang Wei has an idea, and sneaks a spy into the enemy camp to deliver the following message: "Hey, I'm still loyal to Wei, you can tell because I didn't change my name to Jiang Shu. Anyway, the suckers actually gave me a lot of power here, and we can totally defeat Zhuge Liang if we attack him from both sides."
(I mean, the book doesn't set it up to be a trick and wants us to think Jiang Wei is going to betray Shu. Except for the fact that beforehand he tells Zhuge Liang "I'm going to do this thing I'm not going to explain right now and then we'll win".)
Anyway, when Wei attacks, Jiang Wei says "psych!" and traps them instead, dealing a blow and allowing Shu to advance onward.
No, they never actually ended up taking that town. We'll get to that next chapter.