[Lightscreen]
["I raised you to the position of Prefect. How have I ever wronged you that you would dare to rebel against me?"
That was the first thing Yan Gaoqing heard when he was dragged in chains to Luoyang.
In An Lushan's mind, the logic was perfectly sound. Yan Gaoqing had started as a lowly census clerk. Every promotion after that, Judge, Guanglu aide, Taichang aide, had gone through An Lushan's personal recommendation. In the rebel leader's distorted worldview, he was the patron, and Yan Gaoqing was his protégé. Why would his own man bite the hand that fed him?
Yan Gaoqing's answer came without a moment's hesitation.
"You are nothing but a sheep-herding nomad from Yingzhou. What has the Son of Heaven ever done to wrong you, that you dare call this a rebellion?"
He didn't stop there. He spat a mouthful of blood and kept cursing. "My family has served the Great Tang for generations. We know loyalty. We know righteousness. My only regret is that I could not chop your head and present it to the Emperor. And you accuse me of rebellion? Laughable. Utterly laughable, you trash."
An Lushan understood there was nothing left to discuss. Psychological intimidation was useless. He resorted to pure butchery. Yan Gaoqing was strung up on a bridge, and right in front of the old man's eyes, the rebels systematically dismembered his son Yan Jiming, his nephew Yan Dan, his grandson Yan Xu, and over thirty other family members, slicing them apart piece by piece.
Through the unimaginable torture, Yan Gaoqing never stopped cursing. Enraged, An Lushan ordered his men to tear out the old man's tongue with iron hooks. Even then, amid garbled, bloody shouts of defiance, Yan Gaoqing kept going until his body gave out. He was sixty-five years old.]
The narrator's voice faded. The background music shifted. A chorus of young voices rose slowly in its place, swelling until it filled the entire space.
Kongming had barely processed the image of Yan Gaoqing's entire family dying together for the dynasty before the opening lines caught him completely off guard. He set down his brush without thinking.
The melody was plain. No ornamentation, no dramatic flourish. But there was something underneath it, something that did not announce itself so much as pull at you, like a current you only noticed once you were already moving with it.
Every person in the room went quiet and leaned in without realizing they had.
[Heaven and Earth possess righteous qi,
Scattered yet embodied in all forms…
In men it is called vast integrity,
Mighty enough to fill the heavens…]
A warmth settled in Liu Bei's chest, deep and certain. These were his descendants. His people. Han people.
They carried the unbroken lineage of Chinese history, documenting this unyielding, righteous spirit through every age.
Liu Bei tapped his knee softly with one hand, the rhythm quiet and unconscious, and said nothing. He did not need to.
[Only in the bitterest cold does the pine show its strength. Only in desperate times does integrity reveal itself. One by one, their names are etched into the annals of history.
In Qi, it was the bamboo slips of the Grand Historian. In Jin, it was the unflinching brush of Dong Hu.]
Liu Bei's tapping stopped.
What makes a true historian? When Cui Zhu murdered his sovereign, the historian wrote it down and accepted death. When Zhao Dun's negligence led to regicide, Dong Hu wrote it down.
'Holding the brush to record our history, a vast righteousness fills the void!'
He nodded slowly to himself. That was the spirit the poem was speaking of. Not just warriors and martyrs, but the men who wrote the truth knowing it would cost them everything.
[In Qin, it was Zhang Liang's iron mace. In Han, it was Su Wu's staff of authority. It was the unbowed head of General Yan...]
The scattered, displaced men of the late Han Dynasty gathered in Chengdu exchanged a glance across the room and smiled, the same thought moving between them without a word spoken.
Later generations still remembered Su Wu. That was enough. A man who endured years of captivity in the frozen north, who refused every offer and every threat, who chose to come home as himself rather than survive as something else. Unbroken by power. Uncorrupted by comfort. Willing to die before he would kneel. That was what it meant to be Han.
Zhang Fei, meanwhile, was running through every name 'General Yan' he could think of and coming up empty.
Wait, don't tell me it's Yan Yan? The stubborn old guy currently patrolling the borders of Hanzhong?
Zhang Fei immediately rejected the idea.
Hahaha, no way. Absolutely impossible.
[It is the blood of Attendant Ji Shao, the teeth of Zhang of Suiyang, the tongue of Yan of Changshan.]
Li Shimin stood with his hands clasped behind his back, listening.
Yan Gaoqing. Prefect of Changshan. Yan of Changshan.
The noise that had been crowding his thoughts, the ugliness of An Lushan, the panic of Li Longji, the squabbling of every minister jockeying for position in the chaos, all of it receded. What remained was simpler. A feeling that was closer to grief than anger.
A line came back to him, something he had read before and quietly loved. He said it aloud, just under his breath.
"Your bodies and your names will both be gone. But the river flows on, ten thousand ages without end."
He wondered about Zhang of Suiyang, though. Given where that name appeared in the sequence, this was almost certainly another Tang man.
Back in the Chengdu government hall, Kongming was listening and writing at the same time, brush moving steadily down the page.
He had just finished copying the passage about the reclusive scholar Guan Ning, the man who spent decades in poverty teaching because that was what integrity looked like in quiet times, when the next line appeared.
His hand completed it before his mind had fully caught up.
[...Or it may be the Memorial on Dispatching the Troops, so stirring that even ghosts and gods weep at its valor.]
"Oh! Ghosts and gods weep!" Zhang Fei, never one to pass up a moment of theatrical hype, enthusiastically shouted the line at the top of his lungs.
Feeling the combined, burning stares of every official in the room zeroing in on him, Zhuge Liang maintained an absolutely flawless, deadpan expression.
Whatever.., Kongming thought. Next time I draft a military memorial, I'll make sure to write all your names into it so you can get a feature too. Except for Yide.... He gets cut.
He kept copying. The more he read, the more he found himself wondering: was this history told as literature, or literature that had become history? The line was dissolving the further he went.
[This spirit floods through sun and moon alike, austere and burning, alive across ten thousand ages.
When it blazes through the heavens, what is there left to say of life and death?
The earth stands upright because of it. The pillars of the sky draw their dignity from it.
The three bonds of human order depend on it for their very existence.
Righteousness and the way are rooted in it.]
"Beautiful."
In the quiet of Ganlu Hall, Wei Zheng said it softly, like a man exhaling something he had been holding for a while.
The poem was doing something unusual. It was not lecturing. It was walking you somewhere, holding the examples up one by one, letting each one add weight to the one before it, until the idea of righteous force was no longer abstract. It was a person. It was a dozen people. It was something you recognized.
"How many writers like this has the world produced," Du Ruhui murmured, shaking his head slowly.
Li Shimin's expression shifted as the next lines came. The image of the torture chamber, torment embraced as sweetly as candy, the dark room thick with ghost-fire. He felt something move behind his eyes.
"Truly, it is only in desperate times that a man's integrity shows itself. Later generations also have their Wenzhong."
He glanced around. "And what dynasty produced a talent like this?"
No one knew. But men like Hou Junji had already edged in behind Fang Xuanling and Du Ruhui, necks craned, reading over their shoulders. Nobody dared push forward, because the Emperor had been standing there first.
Fang Xuanling read the closing line aloud as he finished.
["At a breezy desk I open the book and read. The ancient path illuminates the face."]
Li Shimin crossed the room and took his own copy before the ink was dry.
He made the decision immediately. "This text goes to the Imperial Academy. Circulate it across the realm."
In Chengdu, Zhang Song made the same suggestion a breath later. "This text goes to the school. Let the Han children read it."
But both Liu Bei in Chengdu and Wei Zheng in Ganlu Hall landed on the same problem at nearly the same moment.
"Some of the allusions in this piece, I do not fully understand them. How can we circulate something we cannot explain?"
The two halls, separated by centuries, came to the same resolution independently.
Check the historical records. Adapt what needs adapting. Later generations could write a poem like this, but between two halls full of people like us, surely we can annotate it.
As for the name of the poem, the light screen would certainly tell them...
[Lightscreen]
[Wen Tianxiang's "Song of Righteous Spirit" moves me to tears every time I read it.
At the fall of the Southern Song, he looked back at these twelve figures from history, men and women who had chosen integrity over survival, and wrote this poem to sustain himself. He was executed with composure not long after.
The allusions to Yan of Changshan's tongue and Zhang of Suiyang's teeth both come from the An Lushan Rebellion. They are separated by less than a year.]
[Server Chat Log]
[ScrollLoading: Lord Wen Tianxiang is an absolute legend. The Song of Righteousness is elegantly simple, yet it perfectly encapsulates the titanium spine of our civilization.
Though, if you look closely, it's a pretty brutal self-own regarding why the Song Dynasty collapsed. Twelve historical examples of ultimate loyalty, and zero of them are from the Song Dynasty itself.
The Mighty Han had unyielding integrity. The Great Tang had iron blood. But the number of scholar-officials in the Northern and Southern Song who possessed both could literally be counted on two hands
Zhao Kuangyin: Wait, hold on. A Song is a Song. Why are you splitting it into 'Northern' and 'Southern'? Who exactly did Jingkang surrender to?! And why did this Southern Song collapse?!]
Watching the comments scroll by, Li Shimin muttered, "So it's called the Song of Righteousness..."
Then, his eyes locked onto the panicked barrage of questions from Zhao Kuangyin, the founder of the Song. Seeing that Kongming was too busy writing to reply, Li Shimin felt a sudden, irresistible urge to engage in some historical cyber-bullying. He grabbed a brush, marched up to the screen, and started rapid-firing his own comment:
[Li Shimin: Let me tell you about your Northern Song. You had Emperor Zhenzong, who practically begged for a treaty at his own city gates. He signed a pact to become 'bros' with the Khitan Liao, paid them a massive annual subscription fee in silver and silk, and his court officials actually cheered him for it. Then the guy had the absolute audacity to go to Mount Tai and perform the sacred Fengshan sacrifices as if he actually achieved something. LMAO.]
Perhaps infected by Wen Tianxiang's rhythmic prose, Li Shimin realized his trolling had accidentally come out in rhyming couplets.
Still, visualizing the psychic damage this was going to inflict on the Song Emperor actually improved his mood significantly.
Though, his mind kept drifting back to Zhang Suiyang's shattered teeth. Li Shimin had a sinking feeling this was going to be yet another Tang minister weeping blood for the state.
Nearby, Fang Xuanling was still processing the macro-historical stats. "The Han had integrity, the Tang had blood... but the Song had advanced technology. If only an empire could combine all three..."
Du Ruhui, however, wasn't having it. He crossed his arms confidently. "If the Song couldn't combine them, then our Great Tang will just have to do it for them."
---
[Lightscreen]
[Yan Gaoqing's life ended under An Lushan's butcher knife, but his brother, Yan Zhenqing, was still furiously fighting for the people of Hebei.
The historical records state: "Seventeen commanderies returned to the state on the same day, electing Zhenqing as their supreme commander. With an army of two hundred thousand, they cut off the rebel domains of Yan and Zhao."
In a single night, half of the Hebei map was suddenly painted back in Tang colors. Now, the "two hundred thousand troops" was obviously inflated XP farming numbers meant to scare the enemy, but the strategic map control was very real.
The Tang central government actually played good support for once. To ensure Yan Zhenqing's legitimacy, they officially buffed his stats, appointing him Vice Minister of Revenue and the Supreme Military Commissioner of Hebei.
Commander Yan didn't waste time. He immediately marched his local militias straight at Wei Commandery. Despite being heavily outnumbered, his vanguard shattered the rebel defenders and recaptured the city. The combat logs went public, and the Tang's global morale skyrocketed.
Now, why was Weizhou the absolute VIP zone on the map?
Because geographically, it was the ultimate logistical bottleneck. It had impassable mountains to the west and the massive Yellow River to the east. When An Lushan pushed south, Weizhou was his primary river crossing and his main supply chain hub.
An Lushan wasn't entirely stupid; he left a heavy garrison of twenty thousand troops there specifically to protect his supply lines and prevent anyone from griefing his spawn point. Unfortunately for him, his trusted general, Yuan Zhitai, got absolutely dismantled by Commander Yan's impromptu army.
At this point, Yan Zhenqing's chief tactician was the Prefect of Qinghe, a man named Li E. Li E had intercepted some high-level intel: The fierce Tang General Cheng Qianli was allegedly marching a hundred thousand troops toward Hebei, but they were currently bottlenecked in the Taihang Mountains.
The strategy was textbook. If Commander Yan could hold Weizhou, he would secure the exit node. Cheng Qianli's army could pour out of the mountains, merge with the Hebei militias, and completely sever the rebel supply chain. They could then loop around, wipe out An Lushan's base, and launch a massive pincer attack on the main rebel army. Total system collapse.
Except, there was a massive plot twist waiting for Yan Zhenqing. When the Tang reinforcements finally broke through the Taihang Mountains, it wasn't Cheng Qianli.
It was the ultimate SSR-tier carry duo of the Tang Dynasty: Guo Ziyi and Li Guangbi.
Yan Zhenqing didn't know all the details yet, but sitting in Weizhou, he analyzed the macro-strategy and realized the game was essentially over.
An Lushan's main army in Luoyang only had three viable movement options.
Option 1: Retreat north back to Hebei. But Yan Zhenqing was blocking the door at Weizhou, and Guo and Li were deploying advanced, highly disciplined military formations. Marching into them was tactical suicide.
Option 2: Push south to farm resources and loot money. But the southern terrain was a chaotic mess of hills and rivers, an absolute nightmare for rebel cavalry logistics. Plus, there was this guy named Zhang Xun currently holding a fortress called Yongqiu, effectively acting as an unbreakable brick wall preventing southern expansion.
Option 3: Push west and break Tongguan to reach Chang'an. But Tongguan was a literal geographical cheat code of a fortress, currently defended by the seasoned veteran Geshu Han and a massive imperial army. Assaulting it was mathematically impossible.
Therefore, Yan Zhenqing's strategic conclusion was simple: The rebels were turtles trapped in a jar. It was just a matter of waiting for the Tang to decide whether to fry, roast, or boil them.
Back in Luoyang, An Lushan was having a full-blown meltdown. He was screaming at his advisors.
"You idiots spent years hyping me up to rebel! You promised me it was a guaranteed win! And now? We've been bashing our heads against Tongguan for months. Our northern supply chain is dead. The Tang armies are closing in from four different servers! Where is your guaranteed win?!"
His generals stood around in awkward silence, completely out of ideas.
But do not fear. Sitting thousands of miles away in Chang'an, Emperor Xuanzong seemingly sensed the enemy's despair. And so, the Emperor whispered into the void.
"Do not panic, my boy Lu'er. Let your godfather carry you to victory!"]
Zhangsun Wuji glanced back at the Emperor.
Li Shimin's face was completely calm. Hands behind his back. His expression read four words exactly.
Exactly as expected.