Mengde didn’t stay long in Chaona County either.
After meeting with Huangfu Quan and explaining her plan, she quickly obtained a letter of recommendation from him.
The Huangfu family supported Miss Mengde’s disaster relief proposal because their clan resided on the frontier.
If the Xiongnu or Xianbei tribes were to march south during autumn due to food shortages, the border counties would be the first to suffer.
As soon as those nomads reached Anding Commandery and stayed even for a day, the Huangfu family would be the ones bearing the brunt of the loss.
No one in the Huangfu clan wanted to take the risk of rejecting Mengde’s proposal.
After all, all Huangfu Quan needed to do was write a letter to introduce her to Huangfu Song.
As for where the funding for the relief plan would come from, or how to establish contact with the Xiongnu and Xianbei—that would all be Mengde’s responsibility.
The Huangfu family could simply sit back and reap the benefits.
Refusing under such advantageous circumstances would make them look like fools who didn’t even know how to take a bargain.
After bidding farewell to the Huangfu residence, Mengde and her party continued northward, heading toward Beidi Commandery.
Beidi Commandery lay on the upper left bank of the Yellow River, roughly corresponding to present-day Ningxia and its surrounding areas.
It bordered Anding Commandery.
When Mengde left Anding and began traveling north, the 100 soldiers under Hua Xiong’s command separated from her group and returned to the commandery seat.
They were regional troops, and Han dynasty law strictly prohibited them from leaving the commandery without an imperial order.
Compared to Anding, Beidi was even closer to the frontier and thus more chaotic.
Many refugees from the Central Plains had fled to the northern grasslands, only to discover that life on the steppe was even harsher than back home.
Their original farmland had long been seized by aristocratic clans, making it impossible for them to return.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place, these refugees ended up becoming bandits, surviving by looting and pillaging.
Since merchant caravans conducting trade with the Xiongnu, and grain convoys supplying frontier troops, frequently passed through this area, the local bandits managed to make a living by ambushing them.
Some of the more established groups were even fully armed and armored.
It was illegal for civilians to privately own armor during the Han dynasty.
Of course, prominent families like the Cao clan often kept some hidden for emergencies, but they would never distribute it to their household retainers.
That’s why the fifty elite guards Mengde brought with her to protect the convoy were outfitted only with leather armor.
The bandits took one look at their own iron armor, then at the convoy guards’ leather armor, and immediately thought, ‘We have the advantage.’ Confident, they charged at the convoy.
And then they were almost completely obliterated by Liu Bei, who fought like a human Gundam and nearly wiped them out single-handedly.
When they had practiced martial arts together in the past, it wasn’t so obvious.
But after watching Liu Bei take down wave after wave of enemies on this journey, and recalling how he had once fought Hua Xiong in single combat, Mengde finally realized—
She had transmigrated into a bizarre Three Kingdoms world, one that was a hybrid of historical records, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and… some kind of female destiny system.
***
‘Why… Why did this world need to include a “Fated Maiden” setting?!’
‘And why did it have to be me?!’
Miss Mengde fumed internally, cheeks puffed in frustration.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that this world was somehow targeting her personally.
Of all the famous figures in the Three Kingdoms era, why was she the only one who got gender-swapped?
Unfortunately, no matter how furious Miss Mengde was at the moment, all she could do was sit alone in her tent and rage in helpless silence.
After all, even though the people in this world had slightly higher physical stats on average, they were still bound by the limits of mortal flesh.
There was no way for Miss Mengde to suddenly become a cultivator in her wrath, train for tens of thousands of years, shatter the void, and go punch out the creator god.
‘But wouldn’t that be nice.’
“Miss, what should we do with these bandits?”
“Did they try to kill you?”
“They went for the kill.”
“Then what are you waiting for? Kill them all.”
“Understood.”
Liu Bei nodded, then drew his sword across the bandit leader’s neck.
They had just encountered another bandit group that thought they had the upper hand—only to be crushed by Liu Bei and his forty cavalrymen.
For those who had no bottom line and intended to kill them without mercy, Miss Mengde would show no leniency like she had with Hua Xiong.
She ordered Liu Bei to finish them off completely.
After all, if Mengde showed mercy to these killers, who would show mercy to the countless innocent people they had slaughtered?
This girl was no saint who only knew how to forgive.
As the bandit leader’s throat was slit, hot blood sprayed out from his severed artery. But Liu Bei had made his cut with such precision that the blood only sprayed to the left side of the neck. Not a single drop landed on him.
Elegant!
In the past few days, Liu Bei had already killed nearly a hundred people.
As the saying goes, practice makes perfect. Though Liu Bei still didn’t have a detailed understanding of every part of the human body, when it came to the quickest and most effective way to cut a throat, he had developed some skill.
He pulled out a silk cloth and wiped the blood clean from his sword.
Then Liu Bei suddenly remembered what he had been like the first time he killed someone a few days ago.
Back then, he had been terrified after the act.
He was afraid that the souls of those he had slain would come back to haunt him at night.
That night, he couldn’t sleep at all in his tent. In the end, he stepped outside and stared blankly at the moon.
And Mengde had also stepped out of her tent.
Her reason was simple—she was worried about Liu Bei.
At the time, Liu Bei was only sixteen years old.
He had just killed someone for the first time that day, and Mengde was worried that he might suffer some psychological damage afterward.
Humans instinctively feel disgust and fear toward the corpses of their own kind.
Mengde had once, in her previous life, seen a murdered body.
The experience had left her horrified, every hair on her body standing on end, the nausea almost unbearable.
Sure, there might be people in the world who had stronger mental resilience and didn’t react to corpses at all—but Liu Bei was still a sixteen-year-old boy.
In Mengde’s view, there was no way he could feel completely fine after killing someone.
Worried, she stepped out of her tent—only to find Liu Bei sitting by the river, staring into space.
“As I thought…”
A relieved smile spread across Mengde’s face.
She was glad that she had taken the trouble to step outside to check.
If she hadn’t, who knew how long Liu Bei might have been trapped in this emotional turmoil?
Liu Bei was sitting by the river with his arms wrapped around his knees, his eyes vacant as he gazed up at the sky—just like those teenage boys in Mengde’s past life who were troubled by all kinds of trivial worries.
Until now, Liu Bei had always acted so mature—either calculating everything with a strategist’s mindset or treating others with a gentle, composed demeanor.
No one would ever have guessed he was only sixteen.
But now, he looked like a real boy—a boy who, in Mengde’s past life, would have been sitting in a high school classroom, deep in his rebellious phase.