Zhao Wei

The trouble had finally passed.

The inn could not reopen for the time being, either.

After leaving three strings of cash as wages, Shen Fa vanished without a trace.

With nothing else to do, Yang Ge poured all his energy into the tedious work of renovating his shabby little courtyard home.

First, he gutted the place, leaving almost nothing but a few beams and pillars.

Then he hired a few masons to help raise the low-roofed house from just over eight feet to fifteen-nearly five meters tall.

He added two more windows on each of the north and south sides. At last, sunlight could reach inside.

After that, the work was his alone.

Building walls, plastering, making furniture, paving the little courtyard with blue stone slabs, digging a pond, planting greenery...

He was no skilled craftsman, and mistakes were commonplace.

Even when he made no mistakes, he needed several times as long just to scrape up to an acceptable standard.

But that was all right. Time was what he had most of...

For an entire summer, aside from visiting the old fisherman, he spent every moment in the courtyard, sweating like rain.

Under the scorching sun, day after day, the shabby little courtyard gradually took the shape Yang Ge wanted.

And after the sun peeled several layers of skin off him, Yang Ge turned as black as a lump of charcoal.

But little by little, a light began to shine in his eyes.

Shopkeeper Liu visited twice. Seeing Yang Ge, who had worked himself into a lump of black charcoal, and the courtyard, which he had transformed beyond recognition, filled the old man's face with indescribable relief. He promised Yang Ge that as long as Yang Ge did not say he wanted to leave, the Liu family would never take the house back!

Wang Dali, on the other hand, came often.

Every time, he claimed he had come to lend a hand, only to spend the whole visit spraying spittle as he delivered blow-by-blow accounts of the martial competition's highlights. Even sweeping the floor took him forever, and afterward he still wheedled two coarse-grain buns out of Yang Ge!

The fellow was a local, with relatives and friends throughout the lower and middle ranks of every trade in Luting County.

And as the gateway to the Upper Capital, Luting County saw merchants traveling either into or out of the capital. Their casual chatter could well be major news from the Upper Capital.

Thus, the fellow's channels for gossip and rumors could hardly have been better informed!

Those little schemes winding through Wang Dali's mind...

Yang Ge, of course, understood them perfectly.

But he had not even told Shopkeeper Liu that the Wild Wind Leg manual was still in his possession. How could he possibly tell a loudmouth like Wang Dali?

Did he not have enough trouble already?

Just look at Shopkeeper Liu. He could clearly guess that Yang Ge still had the manual, yet he had never so much as mentioned it again.

Only Wang Dali had no fucking sense of his place. Every few days, he brought it up again, dropping roundabout hints such as, "People from families like ours can only get ahead by practicing martial arts," "If you could practice martial arts, lad, maybe you could go to the Upper Capital and win yourself a future," and "The two of us can't wait tables for the rest of our lives, can we?"

Naturally, Yang Ge ignored him, treating his words as so much farting.

Still, after listening to enough of Wang Dali's farts, he did pick up a few things despite himself.

First, of course, came the course of the Grace Martial Examination.

After entering the capital, Jiang Kui took first place in the Martial Examination's field tests with his fearsomely formidable Northern Wind Saber Technique. For a time, no one could rival his fame!

Unfortunately, in the strategic essays of the subsequent written tests, Jiang Kui fell far short of the scions of military families. In the end, he placed only fifth, earning a place among those whose names were proclaimed at court.

Yang Ge did ask where Jiang Kui had gone afterward, but unfortunately, that was beyond Wang Dali's ability to find out.

Then there were the top three in this Grace Martial Examination. Apart from the third-place laureate, an outstanding disciple of the Mount Hua Sect, the other two were both rumored to be sons of Meritorious Nobles who had concealed their identities.

In the days after the Grace Martial Examination drew to a close, Yang Ge saw large groups of martial wanderers, men and women carrying sabers and swords, silently leaving Luting County to the east.

Gone were the cheerful voices and laughter with which they had called out to friends and companions on arrival, brimming with confidence...

During those days, even Wang Dali stopped talking about "winning a future."

Besides the ups and downs of the Grace Martial Examination, Yang Ge learned a great deal about Great Wei's current circumstances from Wang Dali's farting.

For instance, Great Wei had passed through three former emperors-Taizu, Taizong, and Zhongzong-before reaching the current Emperor Xiping, making four reigns in all.

For instance, over the past twenty years, the steppe Tartars had grown stronger by the day, frequently sending armies south to provoke the border, plunder property, and slaughter civilians. Five years earlier, the reigning emperor had taken advantage of a change in the steppe's khanship to dispatch three armies, totaling two hundred and fifty thousand elite troops and capable commanders, against the Northern Desert Grasslands.

In the end, however, they lost men and commanders and returned without achieving anything.

And for instance, grain prices had more than doubled in five years...

At last, Yang Ge developed a flicker of interest in the world around him.

Just then, the Start of Autumn brought days of rain, making further work on the courtyard impossible. Yang Ge went to a bookshop and, on the shopkeeper's recommendation, rented several volumes of unofficial histories and anecdotes. Their details were wildly fabricated, but their broad outlines still followed the actual course of history.

Over the next few days, accompanied by the soft patter of rain on the roof tiles, he read all the books, comparing their accounts against one another.

In the end, he confirmed his earlier suspicion: this really was a world whose history had taken a different course from the world he had originally lived in!

The two worlds' histories had diverged toward the end of the Three Kingdoms period.

Before the Three Kingdoms, their histories had followed roughly the same course: Xia, Shang, and Zhou, the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, and the transition from Qin to Han.

Even the Hundred Schools of Thought, the great powers of the Warring States, and all the famous scenes and historical anecdotes differed little.

But toward the end of the Three Kingdoms, Ji Han, which should have gradually faded from the stage, shone ever more brilliantly. Marquis Zhuge marched out from Mount Qi three times, destroyed Cao Cao, and reclaimed the north. Tianshui Jiang Wei carried on his last wishes, destroyed Sun Quan of Eastern Wu, and reclaimed the lands east of the Yangtze. Ji Han successfully united the Three Kingdoms, extending the great Han dynasty's reign by more than two hundred years...

Eventually, the realm split apart again, returning to history's cycle: long divided, it must unite; long united, it must divide.

After that came Xiao Qi, Li Liang, Zhou Tang... all the way down to the present Zhao Wei.

Yang Ge became engrossed in his research and made several more trips to the bookshop, renting a large number of books containing historical records to study at home.

And in the end, he actually found the answer: the Sima Family was gone!

To be precise, it was not that the Sima Family was gone, but that Sima Yi had been snuffed out early!

Yang Ge never found out exactly where he had been snuffed out. In any case, every book about the Three Kingdoms offered only a single sentence on Sima Yi: "Sima Yi, courtesy name Zhongda, was recruited as a literary official in Cao Cao's chancellery; wild and arrogant by nature, he was disliked by Cao Cao."

Judging by Boss Cao's habit of killing people in his sleep, Sima Yi might not really have been wild and arrogant, but Boss Cao certainly had disliked him!

Without Sima Yi, that late-game powerhouse known as the Tomb Tiger, Cao Wei naturally had no one who could stop Marquis Zhuge once Boss Cao died.

And with Cao Wei gone, how long could Eastern Wu last, tucked away in one corner with no worthy successors?

Emperor Xiaohuai Liu Shan's greatest strengths were his willingness to listen to advice and his tolerance of others. With his temperament paired with Ji Han's later civil and military leadership under Jiang Wei, was it any wonder they could give the great Han dynasty another two hundred years of life?

With things turning out that way, wouldn't the entire course of history be thrown into chaos?

If the ancestors were gone, where could their descendants possibly come from?