Deng Ai's memorial was quite different from everyone else's.
Other people's memorials asked Cao Mao whether they could do something.
Deng Ai's memorials, however, told Cao Mao that he had decided to do it.
Cao Mao had already made up his mind: once the Shu Kingdom was pacified, he would send Deng Ai off to farm and never let him touch an army again.
He had originally thought Zhong Hui wanted to kill Deng Ai because Deng Ai was ugly, and because his destruction of the Shu Kingdom had left Zhong Hui with no further honors to receive.
But Deng Ai's recent behavior had finally made Cao Mao understand why both Sima Zhao and Zhong Hui wanted to kill the man.
How should he put it? Cao Mao had never seen anyone so clever and yet so stupid.
Call him clever, and he had deliberately driven the Qiang and Hu into rebellion, wanted to build a mound of their severed heads, and then sparked a major war between Wei and Shu. Now he had even bypassed Zhuge Dan and the others to submit a memorial directly to Cao Mao, saying he intended to go around Jiange and attack Chengdu.
You could not even call these things deliberate attempts to sully his own reputation. Who sullied himself like this?
He was driving himself straight down a road to death.
But call him stupid, and he had successfully wiped out the Qiang and Hu who had entrenched themselves in Yongliang for years, beaten Jiang Wei into a sorry state, and driven him back defeat after defeat, all the way from Gansong and Tazhong to Jiange.
Now he had even proposed going around Jiange to strike directly at Chengdu.
In fact, unlike what the Romance of the Three Kingdoms said, there were quite