Liu Bei and Cao Cao are two rival warlords vying for dominance in central China. Liu Bei is good and Cao Cao is evil (Moral ambiguity is not one of the novel's strong suites) Unfortunately, Cao Cao is way stronger. He has like 300,000 soldiers and Liu Bei has like a tenth that many.
So Liu Bei wises up and decides to even the odds by finding himself a good strategist. One day when he is out in the fields, some kid riding on a water buffalo tells him about a super smart guy named Xu Shu who lives in the area.
Liu Bei decides to go and persuade him to join the fight against Cao Cao. Unfortunately, Xu Shu is living somewhere off in the boonies precisely because he doesn't want to be pestered by warlords into joining their squabbles. Liu Bei finds him and pesters him to him join the squabble, to such an extent that he can no longer stand it and finally gives in.
Before long he is hatching and devising ingenious plans and strategies left and right. Cao Cao sends his subordinate general Cao Ren with a 50,000 man army to attack Liu Bei. This army gets totally owned due to the help of Liu Bei's newest strategist.
Cao Ren runs home and cries. Cao Cao is hella pissed. He captures Xu Shu's mom and asks her, nicely, to write a letter to her son persuading him to come over to Cao Cao's side. Xu Shu's mom responds by calling him bad names and throwing the ink tablet at him. Cao Cao is so pissed he almost orders her to be beheaded, but then he gets a better idea. Instead, he places her under house arrest and then tells his friend to go every day to her house with presents, pretending to pity her plight.
Every time she gets presents, she writes thank you notes, and after awhile Cao Cao and his friend have gathered enough thank you notes that they are able to imitate her style of calligraphy and thereby fabricate a letter from mom to Xu Shu telling him to come rescue her.
A distraught Xu Shu receives the letter and tearfully bids farewell to his new master, who is equally distressed to see him go. As they are parting for the final time, Liu Bei watches Xu Shu's horse disappear around the bend and angrily declares something to the effect of: "How I wish I could obliterate this forest, just to be able to keep Xu Shu in my line of vision for that little bit longer." It is a very moving scene.
Instead of being relieved to see him, mom is furious with Xu Shu for being duped by Cao Cao's tricks. She chastises him for believing a fabrication and abandoning a virtuous warlord for an evil one. The next day she hangs herself.
The End
