Chapter 106: Accruing Sick Leave
The newly-designated Kingdom of Yan has spent the entirety of the story thus far happily occupying the strip of land between China and Korea, being so unthreatening that they haven't even been mentioned until now. Since the title of the book isn't Romance of the Four Kingdoms, you can probably predict how well their sudden war declaration against Wei is about to go for them.
It's going so well, for example, that Gongsun Yuan doesn't actually mobilize any troops to invade Wei or anything. I mean, the book implies that they invade, but when Cao Rui sends Sima Yi to go deal with them, he just marches his army straight to the Yan capital. So who can say. I'm certainly not going to scour Wikipedia to clarify this one detail.
Gongsun Yuan's top generals figure, okay, the Wei army has come a long way, so they're going to be tired and short on grain. We should dig in outside our city; we can hold them at bay long enough that they starve and go home.
However, when Sima Yi shows up, he decides he doesn't much care for the idea of starving and going home. Instead, he sneaks the Wei army around the encampment and attacks the city anyway. The guys in the encampment go, well, crud, and try to get back to the city to help with the defense; but Sima Yi ambushes them, so they never make it.
Funnily enough, Sima Yi besieges the city for so long that now Gongsun Yuan is the one with the grain problem. As the people of the city begin to starve, he realizes that public opinion is turning against him. Wisely, he sends messengers out to Sima Yi to negotiate a surrender.
...But not so wisely, I guess, because Sima Yi executes the messengers, saying that if Gongsun Yuan was really going to surrender, he should have come out himself rather than continuing to hide behind his gates.
In response, Gongsun Yuan nominates Wei Yan to deliver another offer of surrender. No, of course it's not the same Wei Yan from Shu who died last chapter; it just happens to be a guy with the exact same name, and it's apparently really, really important that the audience knows who this character who exists for a single paragraph is.
(also, imagine being the messenger who gets deployed immediately after the previous messengers were executed by the enemy. I'd probably just go home and hide)
This messenger tells Sima Yi, yeah, Gongsun Yuan is totally going to surrender, and as a show of good faith, he's willing to give you his heir as a hostage until he does so. Sima Yi (along with Skep) is getting pretty fed up with this; he figures, look, why the hell do I need a stupid hostage prior to you surrendering? You either come out here and surrender, or you sit in there and die, those are literally your two options as this point.
Well, Gongsun Yuan tries to take a third option and flees the city. Unfortunately for him, the heavens decided we weren't going to waste the limited amount of time we have left in the book chasing Gongsun Yuan around, and a few days prior had used a meteor to indicate to Sima Yi which escape route he was going to take. Naturally, the Wei army is lying in wait, and Gongsun Yuan is captured and executed, and Yan is no more. I apologize I built up that "fourth kingdom" hype for something that was resolved in half a chapter. Anyway, moving along...
I mentioned offhandedly in the previous chapter that Cao Rui was shuffling some wives around, but I kind of glossed over the details. I shouldn't have done this, because now he starts feeling kind of guilty about the wife he executed during that time. Which he'd had done after she committed the crime of...
*checks notes*
...being jealous. All right then.
Anyway, I guess he regrets it because he decides to fall terminally ill at age thirty-six. As all dying rulers do, he calls in his eight-year-old heir alongside his top advisor Sima Yi. Cao Rui tells them, right, so you remember when Liu Bei died and he bade Liu Shan to look upon Zhuge Liang as his own father? I thought that was really stinking cute, so I'm doing that with you two.
Then he dies. Of course, since his son Cao Feng is so young, a regent needs to be appointed to oversee the kingdom's affairs. As designated by Cao Rui, there will actually be two co-regents: Sima Yi, and a family member named Cao Shuang.
Things are pretty chill at first, but eventually Cao Shuang pulls his posse into the capital and they kinda start just Dong Zhuo-ing it up, being corrupt and abusing power and all that good stuff. But he knows he can't go too crazy, because Sima Yi is still part of the equation, and that guy is scary good.
Eventually, Cao Shuang gets the bright idea to promote Sima Yi to Grand Tutor. It's a huge promotion, very prestigious. It also has the "unfortunate" side effect of stripping Sima Yi of all military command, meaning nothing can really oppose Cao Shuang anymore. In an act of defiance, Sima Yi says "screw it" and calls in sick for the next ten years.
Even after all this time, Cao Shuang is still wary of the threat that Sima Yi could potentially pose. To feel out the situation, he promotes one of Sima's employees, and uses the exit interview to see if the man actually sick. Most employers require a doctor's note after three days, but these were simpler times I guess. Anyway, the employee reports back, oh yeah, Sima Yi is senile as hell. And with that, Cao Shuang doesn't have anything to worry about.
...Or so he thinks.
In actuality, Sima Yi's years of senility were a complete act; and as Cao Shuang and his cronies escort Cao Feng into the family tomb to perform the annual rites for the late Cao Rui, Sima Yi starts calling up some old army buddies...