Chapter 774

In just half a month, the number of Qi State refugees braving the snow to cross the border into Xia Prefecture in search of a way to survive had surged like a bursting dam, crazily breaking through the terrifying threshold of 200,000 people.

Moreover, judging by the urgent secret reports sent back daily by the Mingjing Si hidden agents, this staggering, scalp-numbing figure was still skyrocketing along the border at a rate of over ten thousand people per day.

Zhang Wenqian clutched a stack of household registration bamboo slips so thick and heavy they felt like a small mountain; his official boots made rapid, chaotic sounds against the bluestone floor as he practically collided his way into the heavily guarded study.

He didn't even have the presence of mind for the cumbersome official courtesies; his knees went weak, and his kneecaps slammed heavily onto the expensive Persian carpet as he began an emergency, life-or-death report to Chen Yan, who sat upright in the Grand Master's chair.

"Pillar of State, if we continue to let those Qi refugees into the pass without any restraint, our Xia Prefecture might be completely eaten into ruin."

Zhang Wenqian piled the bamboo slips, weighing several dozen jin, onto the long desk before him; the clattering sound of the slips colliding was jarringly loud in the quiet study.

His sharp mind, usually reserved for calculating the tax revenue of the entire Xia Prefecture, raced; dipping his fingers in saliva, he quickly scribbled rows of shocking consumption figures on a piece of scrap paper, calculating a fatal death-account for this supreme authority.

"Although our Xia Prefecture's treasury recently scraped up massive amounts of real gold, silver, cattle, and sheep from those foreign tribes through that overbearing trade fair, one could say we were rich enough to drip oil."

He drew a huge circle on the scrap paper, enclosing all the figures representing consumption, his tone revealing obvious anxiety and despair.

"But if we really have to fill the bellies of these 200,000 people outside—or perhaps 400,000 or 500,000 in a while—that bottomless pit of grain consumption would be too much to bear even if we tore down the walls of Xia Prefecture to burn as firewood."

Zhang Wenqian raised his weary face, which was covered in bloodshot eyes, his Adam's apple bobbing with difficulty as he proposed the only concessionary strategy he believed could preserve the foundation after deep deliberation.

"Pillar of State, at the current terrifying rate of consuming ten thousand piculs of military grain a day, in less than five months, our reserves for the army to survive the winter and campaign in the coming spring will be completely exhausted; the granaries will be scraped so clean not even a mouse dropping will remain."

He prostrated his body on the floor, his hands gripping the carpet's pile tightly, and earnestly proposed that cold suggestion which violated his principles of benevolence.

"Your subordinate dares to suggest that in order to preserve the foundation of the war that our tens of thousands of troops in Xia Prefecture have painstakingly accumulated, we must immediately issue a military order to seal all border passes."

Zhang Wenqian gritted his teeth, hardening his heart to finish explaining the self-preservation plan.

"Use the border army's force to forcibly repatriate subsequent refugees attempting to cross the border; we absolutely cannot let the great scourge of the Qi State become the poison that finally drags us down."

Facing this massive internal political crisis, which would have made any ordinary feudal lord in the world jump with anxiety—or even immediately order the city gates closed and archers to shoot the refugees—Chen Yan sat high and upright in that purple sandalwood Grand Master's chair.

On his chiseled, angular face, there was not a trace of worry or retreat at the prospect of facing a grain shortage.

Instead, Chen Yan's sturdy chest began to heave violently beneath his casual robes; he suddenly tilted his head back toward the beams carved with intricate cloud patterns and erupted into a deafening, wild laugh that carried supreme arrogance and madness.

That highly penetrating laughter reverberated and surged within the enclosed space of the study, shaking the candle flames of the bronze oil lamps on the desk so violently they seemed about to be extinguished by the shockwave.

Chen Yan stood up abruptly from the spacious Grand Master's chair, the hem of his cloak stirring up a cold wind filled with oppressive force.

He strode with long, powerful legs to the giant military sand table of the Northern Frontier that occupied a massive area in the center of the study.

Chen Yan stretched out his large hands and, without any hesitation or pity, reached brutally into the pile of sand representing the territory of the Qi State.

Like someone sweeping up spoils of war, he forcibly pushed over the dense mass of tiny wooden pieces representing the Qi State's population and mercilessly swept them into the territory of the Great Zhou's Xia Prefecture.

The wooden pieces collided and rolled across the sand table, making a chaotic and crisp wooden sound.

Chen Yan turned around, his cloak behind him like spread black wings, and pointed a long, powerful index finger directly at Zhang Wenqian, who was still kneeling on the ground in shock.

His merciless, blood-letting remarks, which struck like a dimensionality-reduction attack, scraped harshly against Zhang Wenqian's ingrained understanding of governance.

"Old Zhang, Old Zhang, you manage the money and grain of this Xia Prefecture for me, and you are indeed a master who allows for no criticism, but your strategic vision for the overall situation of the world is ultimately too limited—one might even call it short-sighted."

In the depths of Chen Yan's bottomless eyes, like two volcanic craters churning with lava, his tyrannical ambition to swallow the entire chaotic world was constantly being exhaled.

His voice sounded like a thunderclap forming above the nine heavens, exploding in every inch of the study's air, completely subverting and reshaping the worldview of Zhang Wenqian, this feudal literatus.

"In your abacus beads, you think that the successive monarchs fighting to the death for the world on this Central Plains are merely fighting for those few taels of copper-smelling silver in the treasury, or those few lifeless cities on the map?"

Chen Yan took a sudden half-step forward, his boot soles making a dull sound of impact on the carpet, his hands pressing heavily on the rosewood frame of the sand table.

"Wrong, dead wrong. Fighting for the world is fighting for the lifeblood and foundation of the nation. This foundation is not gold or silver, but those living, breathing people who can farm, forge iron, and pick up swords and spears to sell their lives for you."

He grabbed a handful of yellow sand from the sand table and let it spill slowly through his fingers, as if controlling the shifting sands of time for the entire world.

"Now, those gate-clan families in the Qi State, whose brains are filled with excrement, are greedily annexing land, forcing their own people to rebel and flee."

A cold, mocking smile rose to the corner of Chen Yan's lips as he patted away the remaining sand in his hand.

"They aren't shedding a burden at all; they are actively holding a knife, cutting the meat from the arteries of their Qi State bit by bit, to feed and fatten us, this hungry tiger of Xia Prefecture."

Chen Yan viewed these refugees, whom others saw as a burden, entirely as the cheapest and most perfect core resource for war to seize hegemony over the world.

He paced slowly in the study, hands behind his back, using that high-dimensional strategic thinking—like a god looking down on ants—to point out the terrifying, bloodless essence behind this population influx.

"I spend a few months' worth of grain, and this isn't just about taking in refugees out of kindness; I am draining the Qi State's national fortune, which has been barely holding on for a hundred years, at its deepest foundation in one go."

Chen Yan returned to the desk, picked up the tea that had grown somewhat cold, and took a shallow sip, the movement of his Adam's apple revealing a composure that controlled everything.

He looked at Zhang Wenqian's face, which was stunned into a stupor, and continued to lay out his terrifying, closed-loop war strategy that exploited human weaknesses to the extreme.

"As long as these refugees, who have been driven to a dead end, get a full meal in our Xia Prefecture, wear a warm garment without holes, and are allotted a piece of land of their own..."

He set down the teacup, the porcelain base colliding with the wooden table with a crisp ring.

"... they will sincerely treat our Xia Prefecture as the true home that has brought them rebirth."

Chen Yan narrowed his eyes slightly, his gaze reflecting an extreme calculation that made all enemies shudder.

"Old Zhang, use your brain and think carefully: when the snow melts next spring, if the Qi State is blinded by greed and dares to send troops to snatch our Xia Prefecture's territory..."

He slapped the pile of bamboo slips recording the number of refugees on the table hard, the wood creaking under the unbearable weight.

"... do you believe that we won't need our elite border troops to fight to the death on the front lines? These 200,000 refugees, who have eaten their fill and are terrified of the Qi army snatching away their good life again..."

Chen Yan's tone rose sharply, filled with absolute, crushing confidence.

"... as long as I issue a military order, they will immediately pick up the hoes and sickles in their hands and transform into 200,000 of the most fearless suicide squads in the world; they will use their own lives to fill the gaps and tear those Qi troops to shreds for us."

This theory of troop conversion, built entirely on an extreme insight into and mastery of the human nature of the lower classes, was like a ten-thousand-foot golden light illuminating the darkness, piercing Zhang Wenqian's eardrums with extreme arrogance.

Zhang Wenqian felt as if he had been enlightened; his back, somewhat hunched from staying up late, straightened instantly, his breathing trembling violently in his chest, emitting a coarse wheeze like a pulling bellows.

The awe and reverence in his heart for this young master's unfathomable imperial strategy surged into his heart like a bursting, torrential river.

Zhang Wenqian raised his sleeve and wiped away the cold sweat that had broken out on his forehead from shock; although he was completely conquered by Chen Yan in terms of strategic height, his rational official mind still raised a huge question from the practical level of operation.

"The Pillar of State has great foresight, and your subordinate's insight is indeed like a frog in a well looking at the sky, but wanting to settle these hundreds of thousands of people is by no means as simple as just giving them a mouthful of food."

He straightened his body, tidied his appearance, and cupped his hands to speak with extreme seriousness.

"Those illiterate farmers are easy to handle; give them some wasteland and they can survive, but in this huge group of fugitives, there are not only farmers who only know how to farm."

Zhang Wenqian's brows furrowed again, his fingers listing the headache-inducing composition of the people in mid-air.

"There are also a large number of blacksmiths, carpenters, and tanners who were driven to a dead end by the gate-clans in the Qi State, and even those scholars from humble backgrounds who have read their fill of books but have nowhere to apply them."

He turned around and pointed to the map of Xia Prefecture's territory hanging on the wall, his tone revealing a bit of helplessness.

"Our Xia Prefecture has a fixed amount of good land that can be used for farming. If these people cannot be properly assigned jobs and settled, and are left to wander the city idly, it will inevitably become a source of trouble for fighting and causing disturbances in the long run."

After hearing these concerns, Chen Yan's dark and deep eyes showed no worry; instead, a flash of fanatical brilliance that could subvert this era instantly flickered through them.

He snorted coldly, the corners of his mouth pulling into a cold, cruel smile that mocked the rules of the gate-clans.

"I'm worried they have too many people; I'm only afraid that once they are under our Xia Prefecture, they won't be able to show their true skills."

Chen Yan waved his large sleeve and pointed to the wide rosewood desk used for writing official decrees.

"Go, prepare the best xuan paper and grind the thickest cinnabar ink for me."

He walked to the desk with firm steps, his aura—like a monarch descending upon the world—making the air in the entire study stagnate.

"Today, I will personally draft an official decree that can change the fate of the nation. After reading this proclamation, I will make the talents of the entire Qi State run over here to sell their lives, going completely mad and crazy just to become the cornerstone of our Xia Prefecture."