Mengde ultimately failed to catch up to Liu Bei.
After all, Liu Bei was now at least a top-tier second-rate martial general. Even the original Cao Cao from history would have had a tough time beating him—so for Mengde, a female version of Cao Cao who could barely be considered physically competent, that was out of the question.
She had barely been chasing him for two minutes before she was doubled over, hands on her knees, gasping for breath.
“Huff… Huff… You—You bastard!” Mengde wheezed angrily as she shouted at Liu Bei, who was now ten meters away.
“Stop right there! Haven’t you ever heard that saying: ‘A light cane you endure, a heavy cane you flee’? I’m not even trying to hurt you—can’t you just let me hit you a few times?”
“Miss, that saying doesn’t apply here at all!”
Liu Bei turned around and refuted her calmly.
“That phrase was something Confucius used when talking about how children should behave toward their parents. You’re neither my father nor my mother, so why should I just stand here and let you hit me?”
“You—You…!”
Mengde tried to retort, but she was so out of breath that she couldn’t even finish her sentence.
Her words were cut off by another wave of heavy panting.
‘Should I really start training…?’
For the first time in her life, Mengde—who had always avoided physical training just to be lazy—seriously considered it.
But a moment later, she gave up on the idea.
Because she realized that even if she did train, she might still never be able to catch Liu Bei in a chase like this.
The reason was simple—she was a girl.
While Mengde had always been a staunch advocate of gender equality in both her past and present life, no matter how much she promoted equality, she couldn’t deny one undeniable truth: women were naturally at a disadvantage when it came to physical strength.
As a girl who had started training late, and facing someone like Liu Bei who was born gifted in martial arts, Mengde knew that even if she trained herself into a buff, muscle-bound warrior girl, she still might not be able to beat him.
Thinking that, she immediately sank into a mental slump.
‘Then what’s the point of training?’
‘Wouldn’t it be much better to just sleep in every morning instead?’
Still, she wondered—’was there some way in this world that she could bully and exploit Liu Bei every day, without needing to work out?’
Mengde rested her chin on her hand, lost in thought.
But after a few moments of pondering, she couldn’t come up with a single viable solution.
With a sigh, she shook her head in defeat.
***
After taking a short break, she no longer felt as winded as before.
The girl looked up at Liu Bei and threw out one last threat.
“I’ll remember this! I will get back at you for it someday!”
“Oh…”
Liu Bei smiled lightly at her response.
He knew that by saying that, the girl had more or less moved past the whole ordeal.
‘Would Mengde still remember this little incident in the future?’
That was the thought running through Liu Bei’s mind as he cautiously approached Mengde.
When Mengde saw him, she crossed her arms and let out an annoyed huff.
But even so, she didn’t take the opportunity to retaliate against him.
After all, even if she planned to get her dignity back one day, she had no intention of doing it through such lowly means as tricking Liu Bei into letting his guard down.
If she was going to reclaim her pride, she would do it fair and square.
Around them, the others in the camp looked on and smiled faintly at the sight of the two bickering and then acting like nothing had happened.
Everyone had grown used to this.
Liu Bei and Mengde always found some way to squabble during their journey.
Watching the two from a distance, Jia Xu stroked his chin thoughtfully.
“Should I try to build a relationship with Liu Bei in advance?” he muttered to himself.
As someone skilled in reading people, how could Jia Xu possibly miss the unusual nature of the relationship between his young lady and Liu Bei?
It wasn’t that Mengde had feelings for Liu Bei—at most, one could say she had a certain fondness for him, enough to treat him as a close confidant.
And that alone was significant.
Jia Xu had spent the past month quietly observing and asking around the caravan.
Whether it was the guards or the drivers, all of them said the same thing: Liu Bei was the closest friend Mengde had ever had.
Sure, she had other acquaintances, but none were as close to her as Liu Bei.
And that alone was enough.
‘Who could say?’ Maybe one day, Liu Bei would no longer be his equal but his superior.
Jia Xu smiled faintly at the thought as he watched Liu Bei doing his best to comfort Mengde in the distance.
***
A few days later—
Mengde’s caravan arrived in Qiao County, located within Peiguo.
There were three major families in Qiao County: the Cao family, where Mengde came from; the Xiahou family, home to Xiahou Dun and Xiahou Yuan; and the Ding family, which was her mother’s side—historically, the original Cao Cao’s wife had also come from the Ding family.
These three families had been intermarrying for generations, advancing and retreating together in court, and held absolute power in Qiao County.
Even the county magistrate had to follow their instructions.
They were truly powerful and influential.
Although the Eastern Han had nominally tried to suppress land annexation, its efforts were half-hearted at best.
As a result, the Cao, Xiahou, and Ding families had seized vast swaths of land in Qiao County.
Among them, the Cao family owned the most—about one-third of all the land.
The Xiahou and Ding families together held another third, and the remaining land was divided among minor landlords and self-sustaining farmers.
As uncomfortable as it was, Mengde had to admit the truth: if she had to assign a label to the Cao family, it would undoubtedly be “big landlords.”
In a certain later era, she’d probably be paraded through the streets wearing a tall conical hat.
Because the Cao family owned so much land in Qiao County, many landless peasants had no choice but to rely on them to survive.
This allowed the Cao family to consolidate its lands and implement a popular economic system of the Eastern Han—the manor economy.
The manor economy was very different from the smallholder economy most people associate with ancient times.
In the smallholder model, landlords simply leased land to tenant farmers and collected rent.
They didn’t dictate how the land was farmed.
But in the manor economy, tenant farmers were far more dependent on the landowners.
They had to follow the landowner’s orders, and their personal freedom was heavily restricted—they were, in effect, serfs.
That’s why, during the chaotic late Han period, big landowners could so easily raise armed forces numbering in the hundreds or even thousands.
The rise of the manor economy was closely tied to the state of agriculture in the Eastern Han.
As the population grew, the old slash-and-burn agriculture of the pre-Qin era—where five people could farm over a hundred mu—was no longer viable.
Yet the smallholder economy was too fragile to support the demands of the time.
In contrast, the manor economy offered much greater stability.
And for a period when agricultural technology was still developing, the manor system had another major advantage:
It could finance and organize large-scale irrigation projects, produce and distribute new farming tools, and promote advanced cultivation techniques—things individual small farmers could never achieve.
On top of that, farming in Eastern Han manors was typically done using a method called “two oxen with a beam.”
This system required two oxen and three people to work the land together, something a self-sustaining farmer simply couldn’t manage.
Without the manor economy, ox-driven farming in the Central Plains might never have taken off.
And without that foundation, how could future generations go on to develop single-ox plowing techniques?
‘How could the curved-shaft plow—the quyuanli, one of the great innovations of the Tang dynasty—ever have been invented centuries later?’