Chapter 775

Zhang Wenqian did not dare to have the slightest bit of negligence.

He ran hurriedly toward the side of the desk.

He spread the roll of tribute-grade xuan paper flat and neat across the wide rosewood table with extreme proficiency.

He picked up the piece of Huizhou ink that emitted a faint scent of pine smoke and ground it with extreme care and force in the Duan inkstone carved with landscape textures on the side, creating a pool of thick, jet-black ink that would not dissolve.

Zhang Wenqian held up the expensive wolf-hair brush with a bamboo handle with extreme respect, saturated the tip with ink, and handed it to Chen Yan's long, powerful fingers.

Chen Yan took the brush, which seemed to carry a heavy burden, and stood before the desk like a god writing the laws of heaven and earth, without the slightest hesitation or pause.

His right hand, holding the brush, moved with broad, sweeping strokes, his wrist exerting force with an arrogant momentum that seemed to swallow the mountains and rivers, leaving lines of iron-drawn, silver-hooked ink marks on the snow-white xuan paper.

Chen Yan was personally drafting a top-secret masterstroke that would cause a terrifying earthquake in the pattern of the Northern and Southern Dynasties and could even directly shatter the foundation of the gate-clans.

At the beginning of the scroll, he wrote the five characters "Proclamation for Attracting Talent and Directing Influx" with such force that they seemed to leap off the paper to kill.

At the beginning of the proclamation, Chen Yan not only loudly publicized the grace of not killing by accepting all refugees to reclaim wasteland, but immediately after, his brush tip seemed to transform into a precision steel knife, cutting directly into the most painful part of the Qi State's brain drain.

Chen Yan threw out a killer-level policy for the lower-class artisans; this proclamation clearly announced heaven-defying preferential treatment specifically for all artisans fleeing from within the Qi State, including but not limited to those carpenters, blacksmiths, and tanners with calloused hands, as well as those scholars from humble backgrounds who were full of knowledge but blocked from official careers by the gate-clans.

His arrogant brush tip wandered across the paper without any obstruction.

"Anyone who settles in the territory of Xia Prefecture, Great Zhou, as long as they have a specialized skill and can pass the public skill assessment set up in front of the Governor's Office..."

Every time Chen Yan wrote a character, Zhang Wenqian's heartbeat jumped heavily with the rhythm of the falling strokes.

"... need not wait in line; the government will immediately take charge and directly allocate twenty mu of high-quality land near water sources, along with exempting these talents and their immediate family members from all miscellaneous taxes and heavy corvée labor for three years."

Zhang Wenqian, standing on the side holding his breath, looked at the generous treatment written in black and white on the xuan paper; he had originally thought that exempting corvée labor and giving good land was already the limit of grace and preferential treatment for those artisans who were like grass.

But in the next second, Chen Yan's wild brush tip, like a lone wolf, turned without any warning.

Against the backdrop of this feudal era, where the gate-clans absolutely controlled the promotion channels for officials, monopolized social classes from the bone, and even viewed artisans as slaves and base-status people lower than commoners by law...

... Chen Yan, in the last blank space of the proclamation, forcefully added an ultimate, subversive promise that could be called a "nuclear-level" bomb dropped on the entire Central Plains.

The veins on the back of his hand bulged slightly from the force, and the black ink stained the paper violently.

"If there are folk geniuses who can improve Xia Prefecture's military equipment to double its power, create farm tools more conducive to turning soil, or have such ingenious ideas that benefit the country and the people..."

A cold, cruel smile of disdain for the rotten rules of the gate-clans hung on the corners of Chen Yan's mouth, and the handwriting under his brush became increasingly arrogant and domineering.

"... I hereby swear that I will never ask about the origins or so-called noble lineage of their ancestors for eighteen generations."

Chen Yan placed a heavy period on the final promise.

"As long as they have true talent and learning, I will not only reward them with a thousand taels of gold as a settlement fee, but I can also directly order the breaking of the base-status shackles in the Great Zhou Law, and the Xia Prefecture Governor's Office will override the rules to grant them a proper Great Zhou official status with a government salary."

These eight ice-breaking characters, "Artisans become officials, talent is the only criterion," landed on the paper.

Zhang Wenqian, who had been bowing and helping grind ink on the side, was shocked into a blank mind by such a shocking official decree; his hands, which had been as steady as Mount Tai for years, trembled uncontrollably.

With a crisp "pop," the priceless Duan inkstone in Zhang Wenqian's hand almost fell onto the rosewood table, and the splashing ink even stained the cuffs of his expensive official robes.

He stared fixedly at the proclamation with wet ink, his eyes filled with shock and extreme disbelief; a twelve-level violent hurricane seemed to have blown up in his heart, rolling up huge waves that could drown a person.

In that instant, Zhang Wenqian deeply sensed the terrifying power of blood flowing like a river behind this decree.

He knew very well that the reward proclamation Chen, the Pillar of State, wrote today was by no means just to recruit a few talents from the enemy country.

This was simply Chen Yan personally swinging a heavy, incomparably sharp iron hammer, smashing against the rock-solid feudal class system of the Qi State and even the entire world in a violent, desperate posture.

Chen Yan was going to tear the bloodline-theory dog-skin that the century-old gate-clans were proud of and used to enslave the lower classes into pieces, extremely cruelly.

This was the Xia Prefecture Governor's Office using an extremely tough posture to openly declare war on all the man-eating, rotten systems in the world; this was a life-and-death, sunny-scheme strangulation.

Chen Yan finished the last stroke and threw the expensive wolf-hair brush onto the desk with extreme casualness; the brush handle rolled and hit the inkstone.

He didn't care about Zhang Wenqian's ghost-like, terrified expression and strode to the sandalwood shelf in the back used for storing secret seals.

Chen Yan reached out his large hand and grabbed the dark red Governor's Great Seal, which represented the highest power of life and death and military-political rule in Xia Prefecture.

He walked back to the desk, held the top of the seal with both hands, dipped it heavily into the thick cinnabar ink, and then stamped this seal with the force of thunder and lightning onto the most conspicuous place directly below the "Proclamation for Attracting Talent and Directing Influx."

A bright red, eye-catching official seal, revealing endless authority and promises, was thus firmly branded onto this paper that could change the fate of countless people.

"Gao Jiong."

Chen Yan's low and highly penetrating voice came from inside the study door.

Gao Jiong, who had been waiting in the corridor outside the room like a ghost, heard the summons, immediately reached out to push open the heavy door, and walked in quickly to receive the order.

When Gao Jiong's eyes, as sinister as a poisonous snake, swept over the content of the proclamation on the table, he felt no fear; instead, a fanatical excitement for such a subversive act surged in his eyes like a bursting flood.

He knelt heavily on one knee in front of Chen Yan, held his hands above his head, and respectfully received the original list that still emitted the scent of ink, as if receiving a divine decree.

"Order all hidden agents and Embroidered Attire Envoys of the Mingjing Si to immediately start all printing workshops to make rubbings overnight."

Chen Yan looked down at Gao Jiong and issued this order that would soon throw the Qi State into chaos.

"It doesn't matter if this reward list is posted all over the walls of the Great Zhou; the most important thing is to have it delivered to every village and every city within the Qi State through those secret smuggling routes, without missing a single one."

The Mingjing Si's massive and extremely cold-blooded intelligence machine operated at extreme high speed at this moment to execute this order.

Tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of rubbings of the proclamation were distributed to those undercover agents who had changed their identities; they broke into small groups, braved the biting wind and snow, and infiltrated the hinterland of the Qi State like mercury seeping into everything.

Overnight, in the quiet counties of the Qi State that were originally covered by wind and snow, on those old notice boards on city gate towers used for posting government decrees, and even on the pillars of tea sheds by the roadside where people rested...

... these reward lists, stamped with the red seal of Xia Prefecture and filled with deadly class temptation, were crazily posted by people like bamboo shoots after a rain.

This was like an invisible giant hand in the pitch-black night where one could not see one's fingers, mercilessly splashing countless hot and explosive terrifying sparks onto the dry firewood pile of the Qi State's lower classes, which was filled with grievances suppressed to the extreme.

The scene switched rapidly and cruelly, like a theatrical transition, to the outside of the high walls of the official Weaponry Bureau in the hinterland of the Qi State, which was heavily guarded and emitted a pungent smell of rust and burning charcoal everywhere.

A biting north wind whistled across the towering bluestone wall, whipping up a few withered yellow leaves and sand.

A "Proclamation for Attracting Talent and Directing Influx," blown down by the wind from somewhere, drifted in mid-air for a few circles under the wrapping of this strange wind, and happened to land like a leaf on a dark corner that never saw the sun.

Just at this moment, the heavy back door of the Weaponry Bureau was brutally pushed open from the inside, and accompanied by a mean scolding, an old man from the Qi State with white hair and a back hunched like an old bow was kicked out of the door by the supervisor inside.

The old man staggered a few steps in the snow and fell under that cold corner.

This old man was the most superb master craftsman in the Qi State and even the entire Northern Frontier; his calloused hands had once forged countless divine weapons that shook the world, but he had suffered decades of bullying and inhuman exploitation in this workshop controlled by gate-clans and bureaucrats.

The thin, tattered cotton-padded jacket on his body could not resist the invasion of the cold wind at all; he didn't even deserve a complete winter garment to cover his shame.

The old man supported the ground with his withered, thin hands, which were frozen purple and trembling, wanting to climb up again, but his peripheral vision accidentally swept over the proclamation half-hidden in the snow.

He curiously pulled the paper out of the snow water and wiped the snow foam off it with his sleeve.

When the old man's eyes—which he had thought would only die like a dog in this enclosure for the rest of his life, and which had been turbid and dead for half his life—recognized the four eye-catching characters "Artisans become officials," which revealed blood color and hope, under the dim snow light with great effort...

... his thin body froze in place as if struck by a heavenly thunder, and then, a raging fire that could start a prairie fire suddenly ignited in his turbid eyeballs.

The old man pressed the proclamation tightly against his violently beating heart, tilted his head back, looked at the gloomy sky of the Qi State, and emitted a suppressed laugh like a ghost crying blood from his throat.

An invisible fuse that could destroy everything had been completely ignited in this snow.

The massive foundation of the Qi State's military industry, which was suppressed to the extreme and built entirely on the blood and tears of artisans, had its most basic load-bearing wall pulled out by this proclamation at this moment, and was about to face a terrifying, destructive collapse that could not be reversed.