Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast.

This is episode 150.

So we're switching things up a bit this week.

Kaiser Guo, the host of the Sinika podcast, is back to do a guest read for this episode.

Kaiser has been a strong supporter of the show and has done a lot to help get the word out

about the podcast. He guest read an episode about a year ago. We had a great time doing that,

and Kaiser told me that one of his favorite characters was the Shu commander Jiang Wei,

so I felt that this week would be an application to have him back for reasons that will become clear

as you listen to this episode. So without further ado, here's Kaiser.

Thanks, John. I'm incredibly happy to be able to do this. Last time, this became the romance of the Two Kingdoms podcast as Deng Ai forced the Shu Emperor Liu Shan to surrender.

Deng Ai then sent a letter back to his boss, Sima Zhao, advising that they leave Liu Shan in the riverlands for now and treat him well, so as to show the Emperor of Wu that, hey,

you should really just, you know, surrender to.

But that advice aroused in Sima Zhao a suspicion that Deng Ai was trying to set himself up to rule the riverlands.

So Sima Zhao now sent two documents.

One was an official decree to Deng Ai. The other was a

handwritten letter to Deng Ai's army supervisor, Wei Guan. The decree heaped praise upon Deng Ai for his

accomplishments and informed him that he was to be promoted to Grand Commandant. He would have an

extra 20,000 households added to his fiefdom,

and his sons would receive titles of nobility and food from fiefdoms of a thousand households each.

After Deng Ai received that decree, the army supervisor Wei Guan showed him the handwritten letter from Sima Zhao.

It said that regarding what to do with Liu Shan, Sima Zhao needed to first run Deng Ai's advice

through the emperor, so he couldn't act on it immediately. Of course, Deng Ai wasn't buying that. I mean,

...