Chapter 111: The Most Loyal General of All
We are now 2,000 pages into this mess. Almost there. Why did I do a book this long.
Recall that at the end of the last chapter, Jiang Wei took the Shu troops home because Deng Ai was hiding the woods making ambush sounds. Well, now Jiang Wei turns around and goes, look, I know I just led you away from the front lines, but we should actually be back out there fighting right now! In fact, I can give you five good reasons why we should be attacking!
He then enumerates how the Shu troops currently have higher morale (even though they just ran home in fear), how his soldiers are better-rested because they can take boats while Wei has to walk (don't ask why Wei Yan burning the plank roads to prevent the Shu army's retreat was supposed to be a huge deal though), how Shu's soldiers are more experienced than Wei's new recruits (seems like Wei has had this western army going for a while but okay), how Shu will have easy access to grain this time of year (even though running out of grain while on campaign has been a huge unsolvable issue for dozens of chapters now), and how Wei has to split up their army to defend multiple potential attack vectors (despite this never having been a factor in any previous battle).
Over in Wei, Deng Ai is also smart enough to identify all of these unjustifiable advantages that Shu apparently has, and he takes action to rectify them. And by that, I mean that he moves his camps around a bit, so that when Jiang Wei shows up with the Shu army he goes "Aw, dang, they moved their camps around a bit." This causes him to rethink his entire plan of attack and forfeit his biggest advantage, which was that he didn't need to split up his army.
Unfortunately, Deng Ai sees that the actions taking place in the "main camp"—the decoy Jiang Wei leaves behind while he attempts to sneak around the rear—don't make any sense for an army conceivably about to launch an attack. In response, he does the same kind of crap Zhuge Liang used to pull, where he identifies precisely what Jiang Wei is actually up to and maps out a six-point response plan that goes off without a hitch. The fighting goes so poorly for Jiang Wei that he high-tails it back home. Then, because so many people are upset with Jiang Wei for getting their relatives killed in a battle he convinced them to go to, he also dips into the Zhuge Liang playbook and "demotes" himself for being bad at his job while still keeping said job.
Over in Wei, Sima Zhao has somehow gone from "I'm in a really precarious position right now thanks to the antics my father pulled to get me here" to "actually I probably have enough support to usurp the Wei empire" in just a single chapter. To his credit, though, he's not super sure he can pull it off, so he asks his friend/advisor Jia Chong to suss out some influential people and see how they're feeling.
Jia Chong embarks to hit up Zhuge Dan—who's a pretty major general on the eastern front—and goes, wow, man, a lot of people back home are saying the current leadership isn't very good. Kinda makes you want to put Sima Zhao in charge, doesn't it?
Zhuge Dan replies, absolutely not, I am loyal to Wei, and I will give my life to preserve this empire if I have to! And this is in the he-really-means-it way, not in the he-has-to-object-because-this-might-be-a-test-and-he-gets-executed-if-he-fails way.
Jia Chong goes back and reports the outcome to Sima Zhao. Now, you might be thinking that Zhuge Dan's rejection is a clear sign that Sima Zhao doesn't have the support he's looking for, and maybe he needs to rethink his approach. Instead, Sima Zhao goes "well, putting Zhuge Dan to death seems like a logical solution to my problem and would be very easy to do," so he sends a message to Zhuge Dan telling him to go see the nearby governor for a "promotion".
However, Zhuge Dan has actually been reading along with the book so far and understands that if somebody starts hinting at a regime change, and then you get promoted shortly thereafter for no reason whatsoever, your goose is pretty much cooked. He finds out from the messenger that the governor he needs to report to is in on the scheme, so he goes over with some troops and burns the whole city to the ground.
Then after destroying the city, he decides to do what any good Wei loyalist would do in this situation, which is to ally with Wu to attack Wei. I guess this kind of 3D chess thinking just runs in the Zhuge family. Anyway, he sends Wu his son as a political hostage, and in return Wu sends a bunch of troops.
The irate Sima Zhao wants to personally lead the army to go put down Zhuge Dan's rebellion; but Jia Chong is now telling him that, actually, despite being super-confident that he could be emperor he still doesn't have enough friends to be able to leave the capital without risking his job being given to somebody else. So INSTEAD, why not just bring the capital with him? The emperor could use some exercise, it'd be good for him to accompany the troops.
And so Sima Zhao packs up emperor Cao Mao and marches off to go face Zhuge Dan.