Setting aside the terrifying reality of the aristocratic strongmen, Kongming's mind had already latched onto something else. A term the screen had just dropped for the second time.
"The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms," he murmured, waving his feather fan slowly. "If I had to guess, it refers to a period of extreme fragmentation, a chaotic gap between the fall of the Tang and the founding of the Song."
Pang Tong nodded without hesitation. "The screen already told us the Boling Cui reached their peak in the Late Tang, then got absolutely wrecked during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. That lines up perfectly with a violent dynastic transition."
He stroked his chin, thinking fast. "The phrase 'Ten Kingdoms' is easy enough to decode. Numerous regional powers declaring independence.
As for the 'Five Dynasties', it most likely mirrors the rapid succession we know from history, like the Jin replacing the Wei. Five imperial courts rapidly slaughtering and replacing one another in the central plains."
Kongming closed his eyes, visualizing the grand map of the empire breaking apart. "Remember the earlier spoiler?
The screen mentioned that far-off Jiaozhou would eventually declare itself the Military Commissioner of the Great Tang and launch a crusade against the Song dynasty. Put the pieces together and the picture becomes very clear."
He opened his eyes. "Once the Tang officially collapsed, the Central Plains turned into a bloody meat grinder where five successive dynasties violently rotated power.
Meanwhile, in isolated territories like Liaodong, Lingnan, Jiaozhou, perhaps even our own Shu region, local warlords simply hoarded troops, locked the borders, and crowned themselves kings while still flying the banners of the dead Tang."
Pang Tong tapped his fingers on the table. "We have limited data, but that is the most logical deduction, but consider this.
The screen explicitly stated that Ma Chao and Lu Bu would have perfectly adapted to the meta of that specific era.
Does that mean the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms was a server patch where hyper-violent martial culture was the absolute norm?"
He grimaced at the thought. "Can you imagine a world completely ruled by the sword?
A chaotic realm where dozens of warlords with the exact same brain-dead, violent mindset as Lu Bu are just endlessly slaughtering each other?"
"Good heavens!" Zhang Fei bellowed, slapping his massive thigh.
His booming voice echoed off the rafters. "If that is true, how many adoptive fathers had to get murdered in that era?"
Pang Tong stared at him. His left eye twitched. "I am trying to have a serious strategic discussion, and this man is doing arithmetic on dead adoptive fathers."
Inside the Ganlu Hall, the atmosphere was equally contemplative.
"Military merit warlords?" Li Shimin chewed on the phrase, rolling it around his tongue as his mind spun through a dozen different military scenarios.
Unable to hold back his curiosity, he voiced his deepest fear. "Is it possible that my Great Tang was destroyed because a foreign military force simply possessed overwhelming, unstoppable strength?"
He paused. Then he shook his head, hard.
"No. That is completely wrong."
His memory of the earlier spoilers was flawless. He clearly remembered the tragic tale of the Guiyi Army.
During the twilight years of the Late Tang, the central government was so pathetically weak that they could not even reclaim the Hexi Corridor from foreign invaders.
A loyal hero named Zhang Yichao had to bleed for years, practically begging the imperial court to grant him the title of Jiedushi of Hexi.
And how did his worthless descendants respond? They treated Zhang Yichao with intense paranoia and suspicion.
No matter how Li Shimin analyzed it, a dynasty that acted so cowardly toward its own loyalists was not conquered by a superior foe. It died the highly conventional death of rotting from the inside out until it was too weak to stand.
Zhangsun Wuji, sensing the Emperor's dark mood, stepped forward with a carefully constructed, highly flattering hypothesis.
"Perhaps the warlords who established those fragmented nations all inherited the military systems of the Tang,"
he suggested gently. "Just as the Han inherited the institutions of the Qin, our Tang referenced the foundational systems of the Sui. It is only natural that warlords carving out their own kingdoms in a chaotic future would deeply idolize Your Majesty's unmatched military genius."
Li Shimin slowly nodded. The logic was sound. His military campaigns were legendary, praised even by future generations.
It made perfect sense that a bunch of rebel armies two hundred years from now would fanboy over his tactical manuals and adopt his administrative systems.
Still. Visualizing a horde of lawless, bloodthirsty rebels causing absolute chaos while waving his personalized merchandise left Li Shimin with a very complicated, deeply sour expression.
He really did not know whether to feel proud or deeply, personally offended.
[Lightscreen]
[The Eastern Han meta of Strongman to 'Famous Scholar to Officialdom' relied on one massive, exploitable feature.
The Recommendation System, known as Chaju.
Let me break that down. Chaju, literally means "to examine and recommend." The central government told the provinces: you go find the talented people, and we will hire them. No exams. No tests. No interviews. Just... trust.
Sounds noble, right? What could possibly go wrong?
The title "Filial and Incorrupt," or Xiaolian, which everyone today knows so well, was only one category within this enormous framework.
Xiaolian was supposed to find young men who were devoted to their parents and never took bribes, admirable goals.
But here is the thing. How do you prove someone is filial? You ask around.
How do you prove someone is incorrupt? You ask around.
There is no test for that. It is just reputation, and reputation, as we have already established, could be bought.
Back in the Western Han, the court created all sorts of recommendation labels.
Filial.
Outstanding Talent.
Upright.
Four Virtues of the Imperial Household.
Virtuous and Square.
Every tag sounded noble, every tag was supposed to find a specific kind of good man for the government.
But here is what actually happened.
A local strongman wants his son in office, he pays a scholar to praise the boy's name. The scholar writes a glowing report. The local official, who owes the strongman several favors, nods and stamps the paper.
Congratulations !!!
The boy is now officially Filial. Or Upright. Or Virtuous, or. whatever tag was trending that year, the strongmen could buy it.
By the Eastern Han, the court adapted to scholarly trends and added categories like Understanding the Classics and Understanding the Law.
Let us be real.
They had given up pretending these tags meant anything, every new tag was just another door the strongmen could pry open for their sons.
The category of Outstanding Talent was later renamed Flourishing Talent. Why? Because the original name shared a character with Emperor Liu Xiu's personal name, and you could not have a government program accidentally using the Emperor's name, right ? That was taboo. So they changed it.
And by the Eastern Han, this category had evolved into a yearly quota system.
Every commandery had to send a certain number of recommended talents to the capital every single year. Whether they were actually talented or not.
But the Recommendation System had a fatal weakness from the very beginning.
It was fundamentally a bottom-up pipeline.
In simple terms, the central court voluntarily handed its hiring authority over to the local provinces. The Emperor sat in Luoyang and waited for names to arrive. He did not choose, he did not test, he just... trusted the provinces to send good people.
When you hand over hiring power without oversight, the result is predictable. The Emperor became a rubber stamp.
The provinces sent names.
The court approved them.
No questions asked.
The man sitting on the Dragon Throne had no idea whether the "Filial" scholar recommended by some distant commandery was actually a genius or just the son of a rich local family with good connections.
Spoiler: it was usually the son of a rich local family.
And to be fair, the system was not designed to be corrupt. Emperor Wu of Han created Chaju with a genuinely noble goal. He wanted to find talented men from every corner of the empire, not just the sons of rich families in the capital.
Before Chaju, government posts were basically inherited or bought, chaju was supposed to be the fair alternative. A way for a brilliant farmer's son to rise. A path that did not depend on who your father was.
And for a while, it worked.
Take Gongsun Hong. He was a pig herder. A literal pig herder. He spent his youth raising swine and did not even start studying the classics until he was past forty. At sixty years old, he was recommended through Chaju. At seventy, he became Chancellor of the Han Empire. A pig herder. Running the government.
Zhu Maichen sold firewood on the side of the road just to feed himself. His own wife abandoned him because he was too poor. He walked everywhere carrying a bundle of sticks and a book, reciting the classics while people laughed at him. Chaju found him. He ended his career as a provincial governor.
Kuang Heng was so poor he could not afford candles. He literally chiseled a hole through his neighbor's wall just to borrow enough light to read at night. That level of desperation. Chaju lifted him out of poverty and onto the Chancellor's seat.
These men were not the sons of aristocrats. They had no money. No connections. No powerful families backing them. And Chaju still found them.
The system worked. Until it did not.
The flaw was baked into the design, when you hand over hiring power without oversight, there is no mechanism to stop the abuse. Sooner or later, someone will figure out how to game it.
The aristocratic clans figured it out, they cracked the code on how this game worked, they exploited the academic climate of the Eastern Han to the fullest. That exploitation gave rise to the 'Famous Scholar class'.
What exactly was a Famous Scholar? Essentially, they are public opinion influencers, think of them as ancient influencers.
Their entire purpose is to wage war against the central court for control of the media narrative.
Once you control the public narrative, you control who gets recommended. And once you control the recommendations, you hold the ultimate monopoly on government hiring and personnel placement.
Because these influencers held the keys to the kingdom, the intellectuals of the Eastern Han developed a desperate, toxic addiction to 'reputation farming' or 'clout-chasing'.
To put it bluntly, it was one giant marketing scheme.
A group of men would gather together and promote one another. I go out in public and loudly declare that you are a 'genius capable of governing the realm'. You immediately go out and declare that 'I am a minister fit to assist a king'.
We aggressively cross-promote each other, once our names are famous enough and the local officials start recommending us for office, the privileges, the tax exemptions, and the massive land grants follow naturally. No skills required. Just good marketing
The Eastern Han was absolutely infested with these reputation-farming circles. Every corner of the empire had scholars hyping each other up, trading praise, and manufacturing fame.
It was a national obsession.
And the players in this game? They had levels.
At the very top, you had the elite tier. These were the household names. The A-list influencers of their day.
The most famous independent player, thanks to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, was Xu Shao.
He ran a literal tier-list column called the 'Monthly Evaluations'. Every thirty days, he would drop a new set of reviews, declaring this man a hero and that man a prodigy. If Xu Shao said you were a genius, your career was made. If he ignored you, you were nobody. He was the ultimate gatekeeper of reputation.
And he did not hold back.
When a young Cao Cao nervously asked Xu Shao to evaluate him, Xu Shao looked at the future warlord and delivered one of the most famous backhanded compliments in Chinese history: "You would be a capable minister in times of peace, and a treacherous hero in times of chaos." Capable minister. Treacherous hero. In one sentence, he captured the two sides of Cao Cao that historians would debate for the next two thousand years.
Cao Cao reportedly laughed and walked away delighted. Being called a "treacherous hero" was still better than being ignored.
Another top-tier influencer who rivaled Xu Shao was Guo Tai. This man was a marketing genius. He did not just praise individuals. He created an entire brand. He called his personal recruits the Outstanding Elites, a label so exclusive and prestigious that merely being associated with it guaranteed you a government post. Guo Tai understood something modern advertisers would appreciate: people do not just want fame. They want a premium label.
And when Guo Tai evaluated someone, the whole empire listened. He once met a young scholar named Wang Yun, spent a single afternoon talking with him, and then declared publicly: "This man is a pillar of the state. He will one day carry the realm on his shoulders." Decades later, Wang Yun orchestrated the assassination of Dong Zhuo and briefly restored the Han court. Guo Tai had called it. One evaluation. One prediction. One man's career launched into the stratosphere
If you did not want to play solo, you formed a supergroup. Dou Wu, Liu Shu, and Chen Fan teamed up to create the Three Lords. Each of them was branded as a Master of the Era. Three men. One label. Total domination of the academic conversation. When one of them spoke, the whole empire listened.
Those men were playing in the diamond lobby. The highest tier imaginable.
But what about everyone else? The mid-tier players who wanted fame but lacked the raw talent to reach Xu Shao or Guo Tai levels? Simple. They banded together in larger groups and invented catchy team names.
The Eight Paragons. A circle of eight celebrated talents. The most famous member of this squad was Liu Biao, who later rode solo into Jing Province and established himself as a major warlord. His reputation was built long before he ever picked up a sword.
The Eight Guides. Marketed as moral beacons destined to guide society toward righteousness. They were supposed to be paragons of virtue. Whether they actually were is another question entirely.
The Eight Exemplars. Branded as perfect teachers. The kind of men who could supposedly educate an entire generation just by existing.
The Eight Kitchens. Rich men who gave money to charity and turned their generosity into a brand. You think modern billionaire philanthropy is a PR strategy? The Han Dynasty invented it.
Honestly, the sheer number of reputation labels was so absurd that modern Hollywood award shows should probably be sending them royalty checks. Best Actor. Best Director. Best Supporting Role. The Han Dynasty was running the exact same playbook two thousand years ago.
Cao Pi, who later became Emperor of Wei, looked back at this era and wrote a scathing review. He said these scholars gained their high ranks through private, backroom deals. Their prestigious reputations were not earned. They were manufactured. Cooked up in alleyway gossip and sold to the public like cheap wine in an expensive bottle.
And the consequences were devastating.
The Imperial Court lost control of local administration first. Then they lost control of the media narrative. And once they lost the narrative, they effectively lost their entire HR department. The Emperor was just interviewing candidates that the strongmen had already selected, vetted, and stamped with approval.
At that point, you can safely say the Eastern Han completely deserved to collapse. It was not a government anymore. It was a hiring agency for the aristocracy.
But the aristocratic clans still had one final concern. Even with their iron grip on reputation, the Recommendation System technically still left a crack in the door. A genuinely talented commoner could, in theory, still rise through the ranks. After all, the system was supposed to value filial conduct and ability. If a poor boy truly was brilliant, if he truly served his parents with devotion, the rules said he deserved a chance.
The great clans looked at this crack and decided it was unacceptable.
Why? Because they owned thousands of servants. They did not need their own sons to personally grind through decades of genuine filial devotion or actual scholarship. A strongman's son could fake it. He could have servants prepare his meals, manage his estate, and ghostwrite his essays while he practiced the art of looking virtuous. But a commoner? A commoner had to do it all himself. And every once in a while, some farmer's son would be so genuinely talented and so genuinely filial that he could not be ignored.
That was a threat. A small one. But the strongmen did not tolerate threats.
So to seal the door forever, the aristocratic families unveiled their ultimate weapon.
The Nine-Rank Zhongzheng System.
This system was not originally meant to replace the Recommendation System. It was pitched as an additional grading mechanism, a secondary filter that would help the court evaluate candidates more efficiently.
But the grading was based almost entirely on family background. In effect, it became an iron filter layered over the old recommendation process.
At first, the central government promoted it as a way to seize authority back from the Famous Scholars.
That was exactly why Cao Pi approved it.
He believed he was centralizing power. He thought he was building a tool to control the aristocracy.
He was wrong. So very, very wrong.
The aristocratic clans absolutely adored the Nine-Rank System. Why? Because it removed the middlemen entirely.
Under the old system, you still needed a scholar to praise your son, you still needed a local official to write the recommendation. There were steps. There was paperwork. There was at least the theater of merit.
The Nine-Rank System stripped all of that away, during the initial local evaluations, aristocratic judges simply looked at a candidate's family name.
A noble lineage? Top rank.
No lineage? Bottom three ranks, it was that simple.
Commoners were shut out of high office almost completely. The door to upward mobility was not just closed. It was welded shut. Zero chance. Forever.
And that is why the historical records of the Jin Dynasty are filled with increasingly bizarre, almost unhinged stories of exaggerated filial piety.
A man who cut his own flesh to feed his sick mother.
A son who lay naked on a frozen river to thaw the ice and catch fish for his hungry parents.
A scholar who lived in a hut next to his father's grave for three years, refusing to speak to anyone.
These were not just heartwarming tales of devotion, they were the desperate stunts of brilliant commoners who had been locked out of the system and driven nearly mad by the injustice.
Their only hope was to perform some act of devotion so extreme, so outrageous, that the story would spread across the empire and somehow pry open the iron gates of the Nine-Rank System.
It never worked. The gates stayed shut.
The degeneration of the Recommendation System reveals a brutal, unchanging truth. Any ruling class, in any era, will use every method available to make its monopoly on power hereditary.
To preserve their privileged status, they will happily corrupt the very institutions meant to govern society. Even if it drags civilization into stagnation or decline, they do not care. As long as their position remains secure, the rest of the world can burn.
And that is exactly why the rotten Recommendation System was eventually thrown into the trash can of history. It had failed. Completely. Irreversibly, the common people had watched it rot for centuries, and they were done.
From its ruins emerged something entirely new. A system where a farmer's son and a nobleman's heir sat in the same room, took the same test, and were graded on the same answers. A system where merit, not bloodline, determined your future.
The Civil Service Examination System.
That system would illuminate Chinese civilization for more than a thousand years.]
Zhang Fei shook his massive head, letting out a heavy sigh. "The hearts of these highly educated scholars are pitch-black!"
He was completely oblivious to the complicated, awkward glances being thrown his way by the room full of highly educated scholars.
"If I had been born in this blasted Jin Dynasty," Zhang Fei grumbled, crossing his thick arms, "my family would be stuck slaughtering pigs for ten generations straight."
Pang Tong's lips curled into a dry, teasing smile. "I highly doubt that, Yide. With that explosive temper of yours, you would not last two days selling pork in that era before some noble family dragged you off in chains to be a private gladiator or a disposable thug."
Zhang Fei did not even get angry. He just chuckled darkly.
"Well then. Once we flatten the Central Plains and win this war, I am going to personally dig a massive, highly luxurious grave for these aristocratic families. When they arrive at the gates of the Underworld, they better not complain to the Lord of Mount Tai that Grandpa Zhang did not treat them with proper hospitality."
Pang Tong flashed a thumbs-up at the giant warrior. Then his expression sobered, turning deeply melancholic.
"Before this, when I read those bizarre, exaggerated accounts of extreme filial piety from the Jin dynasty records, I thought they were just absurd fairy tales. But knowing the suffocating context behind them... looking back, it fills me with a profound sense of tragedy."
Kongming let out a long, slow sigh, his feather fan resting motionless in his lap.
"Who would not feel that way? Imagine possessing the intellect to weave the very fabric of heaven and earth. Imagine holding the perfect strategies to bring peace and prosperity to an entire nation inside your mind. But simply because your father was a commoner, you are permanently branded into the bottom three ranks. You are denied even a single inch of ground to display your talents. Meanwhile, the useless sons of the great noble houses can sit around eating premium grain, doing absolutely nothing all day, and simply wake up as high-ranking ministers."
Zhang Song chimed in, his tone bitter and heavy. "We always envied the ancient minister Gongsun Hong, who rose from a completely common background to the rank of Chancellor in a mere ten years. When the trapped scholars of the Jin dynasty read his biography, their hearts must have bled with absolute despair."
The entire room nodded in heavy, silent agreement. The crushing weight of such an unfair system was terrifying to contemplate.
Kongming whispered, his eyes locked on the fading text of the glowing screen. "This summary... it is deeply profound. It forces a man to examine his soul. This is not just a critique of the Han's recommendation system. Whether in the imperial court or a rural village, in the Central Plains or the remote borders... wherever there is a strict hierarchy of noble and baseborn, does this exact same corruption not take root?"
He paused, his gaze drifting toward the distant horizon. "I fear even the distant Roman Empire suffers this same disease."
Then his eyes lit up with a sudden, intense fire.
If the examination system is the cure, he thought, could it be applied everywhere? Civil exams? Military exams? Agricultural exams?
A torrent of institutional blueprints flooded his brilliant mind, culminating in a single, awe-struck realization.
"This Examination System..." he murmured. "This is the true, undisputed definition of a pure meritocracy."
Now that the idea was firmly planted in his head, Kongming was practically vibrating with the urge to draft the legislation and test it immediately.
Liu Bei, watching his chief strategist's face light up like a lantern, did not even wait for Kongming to formally bow and request permission. He simply laughed, a warm and deeply trusting sound.
"My dear Military Advisor, if you have a vision, just let go and do it! You are the Wolong, who in this entire world would dare question your intellect?"
Laughter filled the hall. It was true. A man destined to be etched into the annals of eternity needed no second-guessing.
But Zhang Fei suddenly blinked, a strange thought crossing his mind. He leaned forward, squinting at the two genius strategists.
"Wait a minute, Kongming! You are the Wolong, and Shiyuan is the Fengchu. Are you two just running one of those mutual hype rings the screen was talking about?"
Kongming and Pang Tong exchanged a blank look. Then, they both burst out laughing at the exact same moment.
Pang Tong shook his head, taking the lead to explain. "Yide, if we were farming reputation, it would mean I go around screaming that Kongming is a majestic dragon, and Kongming goes around swearing I am a divine phoenix. It is exactly like those Eight Paragons or Eight Kitchens. Strip away their fancy marketing labels, and who actually remembers what those guys accomplished? Nobody. But Kongming's actual talent..."
He waved a dismissive hand, looking utterly smug.
"Does the title Wolong actually add anything to his real worth? We are simply living up to our natural reality. We are the genuine articles. How is that reputation farming?"
Kongming patted Pang Tong heavily on the shoulder, his eyes crinkling with amusement.
"I was just about to point out that the Fengchu is also living up to his natural reality. But if I compliment you right now, it will look exactly like we are farming reputation and mutually hyping each other up....
So, to maintain my integrity, I will just keep my mouth shut."
Pang Tong's smug expression instantly vanished, replaced by sheer, furious indignation.
"You absolute village bumpkin, Zhuge!"
After the brief, chaotic banter settled down, the Wolong and the Fengchu turned their incredibly sharp minds back to the final, lingering questions left by the screen.
"The screen phrased it very deliberately," Pang Tong noted, his brow furrowing in confusion.
"It implied that the entire society of the Jin Dynasty was either completely stagnant or actively moving backwards. What exactly is the metric for that? How do we measure societal progress versus societal regression?"
Kongming tilted his head back, staring at the ceiling in deep thought. Images flashed through his mind. The waterwheels. The sprawling network of water-powered industrial mills they had seen in the visions of the future. The terrifyingly high crop yields depicted in the Exploitation of the Works of Nature. The constant, relentless refinement of sugar boiling and steel smelting.
He remembered their previous, intense debates about currency and the expansion of goods. Putting all the puzzle pieces together, he offered a highly confident hypothesis.
"The ultimate metric must be the productive forces. The sheer ability to create, harvest, and innovate."
Pang Tong thought about the tragic rise and fall of the Recommendation System, and the horrific lengths those desperate, poor scholars went to in the Jin Dynasty just to fabricate a fake reputation of filial piety.
It was darkly comedic, yet profoundly depressing. He let out a long, tired sigh.
"Productive forces, yes. But there must also be a system of absolute clarity, fairness, and incorruptible evaluation."