Liu Bei did not care one bit about the exact chemical makeup of Cold-Food Powder. That ancient toxic drug meant nothing to him on its own. What dug under his skin, though, was where it led. The final chapter of the Great Han. A heavy sigh sat tight in his chest and refused to budge.
He Jin. Grand General. The legendary butcher who accidentally kicked the empire into faster collapse. That name lived in Liu Bei's memory right next to the Ten Eunuchs, filed under the same label: people who broke the world and shattered the Han Dynasty.
Liu Bei had never guessed that decades later, the worst legacy these national traitors left behind would not be some twisted political idea, but a poison. The fact their descendants had accidentally cooked up a toxic nightmare that would haunt the Central Plains for centuries was a grim, bitter irony.
Zhang Fei had been listening to the Light Screen repeat the word hallucinogenic over and over. He rolled the term around in his mouth like a strange new fruit, then offered his best guess.
"This feeling of being incredibly light, of floating like an immortal..." Zhang Fei mumbled, scratching at his thick beard. "Is it basically just having a really, really good dream while you are still awake?"
Liu Bei paused to consider his sworn brother's random analysis. He found the logic surprisingly solid.
"If eating this powder just lets a man run completely from reality and drown in perfect fantasy," Liu Bei nodded slowly, his face darkening, "then the harm this thing could do to the whole of society has no limit."
Zhang Fei nodded so hard his hair bounced, his eyes wide.
"I had a dream like that once!" Zhang Fei yelled, slapping his thigh loud enough to make cups rattle on the table. "In the dream, Big Brother, you were Emperor! I punched Cao Cao right in the face myself! Split Yuan Shao clean in half with my sword! Sun Quan crawled on his knees to surrender! Even that coward Liu Zhang tied himself up and begged for mercy! The whole world was finally at peace!"
He grinned wide, like he was still living in that dream. "I was so happy in there. I honestly never wanted to wake up. Wanted it to last forever."
"If this Cold-Food Powder can fake that exact feeling of perfect happiness... that is genuinely terrifying."
If even the fearless, battle-hardened Zhang Fei used the word terrifying to describe something, Liu Bei let that sink in for a moment and decided the damage this stuff could do to a dynasty was probably worse than anything he had ever imagined.
But Liu Bei had no time to linger on the philosophy of addiction. He stood up from his seat fast.
On the magical screen floating in the middle of the command office, a highly detailed graph had just popped into view. It tracked 5,000 years of global climate change.
The image had a stark, sharp beauty to it. Clean lines, structured text, rising and falling data points, all completely alien to ancient Chinese aesthetics. Even Liu Bei, who had zero formal training in mathematics, felt he grasped a third of what the chart was trying to say the second he looked at it.
Zhuge Liang lost his mind over it.
He dragged his desk across the floor immediately, scraping it right under the Light Screen. Then he tilted his head back and started copying the chart, every single line, curve, and tiny data point, as carefully as a calligrapher copying a sacred sutra.
He had studied mathematics long enough to know the rule. When numbers are involved, one tiny mistake in copying could snowball into a catastrophic miscalculation later. If his brush slipped even a fraction of an inch while copying this climate graph, the whole predictive value of the chart would be ruined.
In Zhuge Liang's eyes, this graph was the ultimate treasure. Forged by the future with the sharpest tools of science. Two thousand years of dynasties rising and falling, squeezed into one image. For men fighting to survive the chaotic Jian'an era, this chart was worth more than Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian a hundred times over.
Zhuge Liang held the prime spot right under the screen. His wrist stayed steady. His brush moved with the patience of a man who knew he was holding lightning in a bottle. Zhang Fei stomped over to act as his personal shield, using his massive bulk to block the space around the desk and keep anyone from bumping into it.
Pang Tong looked at the chaotic scrum around the desk and decided fighting for a spot was not worth the trouble. Instead, the Fengchu tilted his head back, narrowed his eyes, and burned every single detail of the graph straight into his memory. He started running the data through his mind as fast as he could, desperate to decode the ideas behind it.
Beside him, Fa Zheng was doing the exact same thing.
"Agro-pastoral ecotone? Latitudinal shifts?" Fa Zheng mumbled, his eyes slightly glazed. Even with the host's short introductions, the thick scientific terms were making his brain throb.
Pang Tong hummed low in his throat, then took a guess.
"I bet future generations, living high up in their metal sky-palaces, carved the whole globe into a grid with mathematics," Pang Tong said out loud. "They draw artificial lines to measure the vastness of heaven and earth."
The host had casually dropped the words longitude and latitude in an earlier broadcast. Pang Tong and Zhuge Liang had spent hours debating the concept fiercely, finally concluding it was an advanced futuristic system for mapping the planet.
This idea was not totally alien. The basic concept already existed in ancient Chinese philosophy. The old Rites of Zhou clearly stated the north-to-south path is Jing, longitude, and the east-to-west path is Wei, latitude. The ancient engineering manual Artificer's Record also required a perfectly built capital to have nine longitudinal streets and nine latitudinal streets.
Building on that old foundation, Pang Tong guessed the mechanics of the graph correctly.
"This latitude must be a horizontal measuring line," Pang Tong said confidently. "And this chart tracks how that specific temperature line shifts north or south over thousands of years."
He paused, his brow furrowing as he noticed another set of data. "But what in the world is a Rice Price Index?"
Fa Zheng laughed this time. Actually laughed, bright with sudden understanding.
"That has to be a pure mathematical abstraction," Fa Zheng explained, his eyes shining. "It is likely a combined number calculated from total national tax revenue and overall agricultural yield."
During the still months stationed in Hanzhong, Fa Zheng had taken up solving mathematical equations as a private hobby. He could not fully explain how the number was produced, but he grasped the purpose of the economic index instantly.
Hearing that, Pang Tong clamped his mouth shut entirely. He poured every last bit of his brainpower into analyzing every curve on the chart, running silent simulations in his head.
Yeah, Pang Tong thought to himself. Based on how dense this data is, I am definitely dragging Zhuge Liang into a private talk tonight. We are pulling an all-nighter to pick this thing apart.
---
Inside Ganlu Hall, Li Shimin was also fighting to untangle the thick scientific terms on the graph. But the core idea, the simple brutal lines tracking temperature shifts, was crystal clear to him.
From the climate data and the records of droughts and floods alone, he understood the value of this chart so sharply it made his hands tremble.
This was not prophecy. Not one of those vague mystical riddles fortune tellers sold to scared emperors. This was built by the future with methods no mortal alive could copy, grounded in mathematics so rigorous it made the Nine Chapters book look like a child's counting game.
For an emperor, the worst part of a natural disaster was not the flood or drought itself. The true terror was the total unpredictability, the blindness. The complete inability to see it coming.
Because governments could not predict the weather, they were always caught off guard. No warning meant no preparation. No preparation meant famine. And famine opened the door for every wandering priest and self-proclaimed prophet to march in and declare heaven was furious, claiming the disaster was divine punishment because the emperor lacked virtue. This kind of meddling constantly created massive political instability and endless administrative headaches.
But what if an emperor could predict disasters? Even just a general multi-year trend?
That changes everything, Li Shimin thought, his heart pounding hard. Great Tang could accurately predict exactly when to stockpile grain, exactly when to cut taxes to prepare people for a harsh winter. They could literally plan their way through a crisis.
And thinking as an emperor, Li Shimin's mind went further, into sharper, more paranoid territory.
If this single piece of paper fell into the hands of a wandering Daoist priest, that man could use the accurate weather predictions to build an unstoppable fanatical religion overnight.
If it fell into the hands of an ambitious rogue warlord, he could time a massive rebellion perfectly to line up with a predicted famine, and shatter the empire without breaking a sweat.
In this ancient era, what really defined the Mandate of Heaven?
This graph. This exact graph was the literal, physical Mandate of Heaven.
Li Shimin's brow tightened. He glared straight at veteran general Hou Junji, who was currently slouched in his chair looking thoroughly miserable.
Ever since Hou Junji realized all the truly elite Tang generals were out west conquering the Tuyuhun Kingdom, he had been sulking. He felt completely left out of the military glory, trapped uselessly in the capital.
Feeling the emperor's sharp gaze land on him, Hou Junji dropped his head instantly. His shoulders pulled inward, like he was trying to fold himself into the smallest possible shape.
Seeing his loyal general cower actually made Li Shimin feel a little bad. Hou Junji had followed him since the very beginning. The man had risked everything during the bloody Xuanwu Gate Incident to put Li Shimin on the throne. He was a core loyalist, not a threat.
"Old Hou," Li Shimin commanded, his voice softening a little. "Stay here after the briefing ends. You will dine with me tonight."
Hou Junji's head snapped up so fast it was a wonder he did not hurt his neck. The crushing gloom vanished instantly, replaced by pure, unbridled joy.
Meanwhile, the two Prime Ministers were completely oblivious to the emperor's political moves. They were fighting their own desperate battle against the data.
Du Ruhui was copying the chart onto a silk scroll as fast as his hand could move. He forced Wei Zheng to double-check every single line he drew, terrified of making even the tiniest transcription error.
Fang Xuanling stared at the chart with the intense, glazed focus of a man slipping into a trance. The mathematical thinking he had ground into his brain over years of study was suddenly, gloriously useful. It let him pull apart every piece of information on the chart and sort it into categories that made sense.
"Two thousand years of rise and fall," Fang Xuanling whispered, his voice trembling with awe. "Every brilliant triumph, every catastrophic failure. The whole mechanics of human history are packed into these simple lines."
That was Fang Xuanling's verdict. It was the most profound realization of his entire life.
Looking at the graph, he could see the horrifying truth of their own timeline. The golden age of Great Tang lined up perfectly with a global warming period. And when that warmth inevitably ended, the climate would collapse violently, triggering a horrific era of warlordism that would ultimately destroy the empire he loved.
He saw the Northern Song rise, carrying Tang's cultural legacy forward like a torch. Then a new cold wave arrived and shattered that torch into pieces. The Jingkang Humiliation. The Southern Song clinging to one corner of the map, breathing but not truly living. And finally, the Mongols taking everything.
But looking at the final sections of the chart, Fang Xuanling felt a sudden surge of respect for the much-criticized Ming Dynasty. A dynasty forged in the teeth of a brutal cold wave. Built by people who refused to freeze and die. That level of stubbornness alone was worth admiring.
Fang Xuanling set down his brush. He looked at the chart one last time.
"The absolute, terrifying power of heaven and earth," Fang Xuanling said, his eyes reflecting the lines of data. "Master just a small fraction of its rules, and you can build a glorious empire. Miscalculate by a single inch, and your entire civilization is wiped from the map."
"Truly... how magnificent."