After Guan Yu lost Jing province and was killed, the Sun–Liu alliance was already broken. Liu Bei became emperor in 221 and marched east the next year. The Shu army came out of the gorges and camped along the river at Yiling and Xiaoting. The line looked strong and was also too long to support itself. Sun Quan gave command to Lu Xun, who refused an early battle and let the Shu camps wear down on the bank.
Around the intercalary sixth month of 222, Lu Xun set the camps on fire. Shu broke. Boats and equipment were lost. Liu Bei fled by night and settled at Baidi, where he died the next year. The battle is also called Xiaoting. The Wu commander was Lu Xun, not Zhou Yu. Zhou Yu had been dead for twelve years.
The novel stretches the camps to seven hundred li and has Zhuge Liang read the stars in Chengdu. That is scale and theater. The fire itself is in the biographies of Lu Xun and Liu Bei, so the battle is marked “both,” and the exaggeration has its own page as the burning of the linked camps. After Yiling, Shu had no road back into Jing province.