“Turmoil”: Battle for the Han Empire sample (Act I) -- T. P. M. Thorne

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1

“…My, how much has changed in recent times.”
It was a reflective, sombre and somewhat haunted Cao Cao - Governor of Yan Province in eastern-central Han China - that had uttered those words as he stared out of his horse-drawn carriage and took in the sights of Yè, the walled capital city of Ji Province. Cao Cao then stroked his short, prematurely-grey beard and turned to look at his only company in the carriage: a gaunt, weary adviser in pale blue robes. After a pause, Cao Cao smiled strangely and said, “Your expression betrays the desire to ask me a question, Wenruo.”
“You… are wondering if you should have come here, my lord,” the adviser Xun Yu - whose courtesy name was Wenruo - replied cautiously.
“That was more of an inference statement than a question, but it is correct nonetheless,” Cao Cao said with a sigh. “Ji Province… the seat of my old friend Benchu… or is that ‘Lord Yuan Shao’ now…? Are we friends now, or are we lord and vassal…? …I prefer the former, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that he prefers the latter.”
Xun Wenruo hummed thoughtfully and said, “Before we left, you summoned us all and made similar statements, and it was my belief that you had resolved your concerns about this invitation.”
“But every one of those concerns has been replaced by a worse one still!” Cao Cao replied desperately. “Yes, I have decided that he does not intend a similar fate for me as the one he inflicted upon his predecessor; he cannot, for all of his arrogance, govern Ji, Bing, Qing and Yan Provinces simultaneously, and he knows that I would never betray him, and am hence best left in my seat of authority in Yan, despite my ‘obvious difficulty in keeping it’.”
The last words were said with evident bitterness; Xun Wenruo smiled sadly.

“…I say again, Wenruo, that a lot - too much - has changed,” Cao Cao continued. “I had to determine who invited me here… who Yuan Shao now is. I had to wonder if he is Benchu, the friend that I have known since we were boys at school, the noble gentleman that I collaborated with to curb the vicious ambitions of the ‘Ten Attendants’, protect the so-called ‘Partisans’, and fight the tyrant Dong Zhuo… or whether he is… something else now, something closer to his wretched brother-cousin Shu. Some things still point to that friend I had, while others… like the state of things in the land as a whole, in particular the current state of things in Xu Province and Chang’an… say that ‘Benchu’, like ‘Mengde’, is… is fading away, Wenruo, leaving something much less… human.”
Xun Wenruo hummed purposefully rather than respond with words. Cao Cao’s final words were self-referential: his old friend Yuan Shao, the governor of Ji Province, had indeed been a lifelong friend that he had known only by his courtesy name ‘Benchu’ in past times, while Cao himself had enjoyed being referred to by his own courtesy name, ‘Mengde’. ‘Courtesy’ - or ‘style’ - names not only implied closeness or respect between friends or acquaintances: they were names that men chose with care, names that they would use to give themselves a sense of identity and personification in a world where all men gave their family name before their given name and status was everything. Cao Cao was a troubled man, and he often wondered whether his sense of self was as established as it had been in more peaceful times: his hands were steeped in blood, and he had made decisions that he could not live with comfortably.

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