Chapter 102: Cowmobiles
It's three years before Zhuge Liang wants to take another crack at conquering Wei. This time Liu Shan goes, ugh, c'mon, really? Why can't we all just be three kingdoms at peace? Wouldn't that be okay? Meanwhile, the court astrologer does a reading and reports, actually, the stars ain't looking good on this one, might want to stay home.
Zhuge Liang... kind of just does it anyway though, even though we know he puts stock in what the stars are saying. And like, there's nothing about him defying anybody in order to launch the campaign, but Liu Shan never explicitly gives his blessing. Oh well, whatever. Also Guan Xing dies of illness.
Anyway you know the drill. Shu marches north through the hills again, Wei pulls in Sima Yi to block them.
Sima Yi camps by the river, and this time he's one step ahead of Zhuge Liang. He sees the Shu forces aiming at a nearby pass, and he realizes, nah, that's a distraction, they're actually gonna come down the river and try to burn us out. And he's exactly right. So he scores a rare win against Zhuge Liang, and Shu is dealt a heavy blow from the outset.
This prompts Zhuge Liang to write to Sun Quan, saying, hey, you want to march against Wei now maybe, since we're kind of supposed to be working together? Sun Quan does agree to this, but we won't see the outcome until the next chapter.
But also, Sun Quan randomly asks, hey, who's leading the Shu vanguard? When he's informed that Wei Yan is, he just shakes his head, because even HE knows that Wei Yan is going to cause trouble someday. There's no narrative purpose for this, just, you know, we have to remind the audience that Wei Yan is bad because you'd never know it from how he's Shu's finest and most loyal officer at this point.
Then we launch into full-on caper mode in the Shu camp, which I am going to try to make as not-confusing as possible while also avoiding adding more inconsequential names to the list of those you have to remember.
A minor Wei officer shows up at Zhuge Liang's tent, saying he's switching sides because Sima Yi promoted his friend into leading the vanguard but didn't reward him even though they both did equally well kicking Shu's butt last time. Then the friend shows up, looking for the first guy. For the record, this friend pretty much just knocks on the door of Shu's camp saying he wants to duel the first guy for being a turncoat, as though Shu would just shrug and be like, that's fine, we'll put together a nice basket to send back with you while you do that.
Zhuge Liang tells the first guy, all right, you slay your friend for me and I'll believe you. Guy's like, great, I'll go do that; and he kills the friend in a single blow and brings back the head.
Then Zhuge Liang turns around and has the guy arrested, saying actually, I used to know your friend, and that is not his head.
This is actually a bluff. Truth is, he never knew the dead guy, but the fact that he died so quickly told Zhuge Liang that the so-called "friend" sure as shit was never promoted to vanguard leader, so this "surrender" was all a ruse.
Not really sure how they convinced the guy pretending to be the friend to go knock on the enemy's front door, but here we are. Anyway, Zhuge Liang has the fake turncoat pretend that he did, in fact, infiltrate the camp, and is able to lure Sima Yi into a nasty ambush.
Sima Yi then decides to just sit tight on defense again and wait for Shu to run out of grain, because that plan has worked incredibly well, like, four times now. Honestly it should really be Wei's go-to play at this point.
Except that's not the case this time. THIS time Zhuge Liang has invented these "wooden oxen" things, which are made out to be all cool and mechanical and shit, but were probably just specialized wheelbarrows. They don't exactly say how a fancier wheelbarrow solves the problem of reliable grain transportation, but that's not the point here. Basically, Sima Yi realizes he can't just starve Shu out this time.
But the wooden ox is apparently such a good idea that Sima Yi decides to steal a couple of these things, intending to reverse-engineer them to supply his army. He sends out a force to nab them.
Zhuge Liang says, hey, that's great, I wanted him to do that actually. He sends his army in to chase Wei from the wagons they just stole. When Wei counterattacks, the Shu troops hit a hidden button on the oxen to put on the parking brakes, so Wei can't budge the things when they try to push them away.
Then the Shu troops go all Trick-or-Treat again, putting on costumes to dress as folk gods. When they return to the wagons, they just push them away like it's nothing, making it look all mysterious and shit.
Also Wei gets a trouncing for good measure, because why not.