Chapter 94: A Jade and Tortoise Destroyed in Their Casket

As for the second piece of bad news, it concerned the Dongjiang Garrison.

Mao Wenlong, the Regional Commander for Pacifying Liao, had submitted another memorial.

Shortly after his "Five Grievances" memorial, he had sent a follow-up memorial demanding pay and provisions.

The memorial stated that the Dongjiang Garrison's arrears in military pay had now reached the staggering sum of five to six hundred thousand taels, that the officers and men were in dire straits, and that morale was dangerously unstable — the court must allocate funds at once.

The Ministry of Revenue and the Grand Secretariat issued their official reply with equal speed, their words full of helplessness: the Dongjiang Garrison's military pay had originally been set at five hundred seventy thousand taels per year, later increased to one million taels, and the state treasury was truly incapable of fully meeting this obligation. They suggested the court issue an edict calling on Liaodong merchants to contribute silver in aid of military pay, with all grain and funds donated to be credited against their accumulated arrears of commercial tax owed to the court.

Strictly speaking, this did not count as bad news — it was merely pay arrears, after all.

To him, still saddled with nearly ten million in debts across the nine border garrisons, five hundred thousand was a mere trifle; if it truly came to it, his privy purse still held one million three hundred thousand taels, which could also serve to tide things over.

The truly bad news came, in fact, from the results of his all-night struggle.

He had more or less grasped the situation in western Liao, Lushun, Denglai, and Tianjin.

But the affairs of Dongjiang alone...

He could not see through them.

Zhu Youjian's long, slender fingers slowly traced across the mountainous piles of memorials.

Finally, he plucked out several military dispatches from Dongjiang.

Absurd.

Utterly absurd.

The reports were, glaringly, filled with page after page of "great victories."

Dongjiang had repeatedly reported great victories, many of them with substantial enemy kills.

He had ordered the Directorate of Ceremonial to tally and calculate: from the military dispatches they had located alone, the Dongjiang Garrison's dispatches claimed kills of Later Jin officers and soldiers numbering no fewer than sixty-six thousand.

This did not even count those vaguely worded "kills beyond reckoning."

What was the total population of the Later Jin, anyway?

At this rate of slaughter, Hong Taiji would surely be a man utterly alone by now, and Liaodong should have been pacified by a mere proclamation.

The most laughable and absurd among them was undoubtedly that report of the "Victories at Manpo and Changsong" from the eighth month of the third year of Tianqi.

Zhu Youjian still remembered, to this day, the exquisite expression on his own face when he dug that memorial out of the dusty archives.

"This officer used no more than a thousand troops; the bandits lost over twenty thousand dead, and over thirty thousand horses dead."

He understood Mao Wenlong's circumstances, and he understood the Dongjiang Garrison's difficulties.

Without money and grain, one could not train a strong army; without a strong army, one could not win battle honors; and without battle honors, there would be no money and grain.

To break out of this death spiral, fabricating battle achievements was the best method.

Otherwise, stranded overseas and clinging to a remote corner, if one did not report some shocking "great victories," how could one ever pry real gold and silver in pay and provisions from the court?

Yet understanding was one thing — this manner of treating the sovereign as a fool, this attitude of treating state affairs as a child's game, truly chilled his heart.

How could the great affairs of the army and the state be built upon a foundation of lies?

Second was the opacity of troop strength.

The Dongjiang Garrison's troop numbers had always fluctuated wildly: at one moment it was said to be one hundred thousand, at another it became one hundred fifty thousand, and after a while it was fixed at twenty-seven thousand.

The civil officials dispatched by imperial decree to review the headcounts, each time they were to conduct an inspection, invariably happened to coincide with an alert of barbarian activity, forcing them to conclude matters hastily.

How could there be such coincidences?!

Was it that the count could not be produced, or that someone was unwilling to have the inspection produce a count?

Zhu Youjian fully understood that eating empty pay was the normal custom of late-Ming military commanders, but surely you could not even report your official troop strength falsely?

Beyond this, there were also a series of vague yet persistent problems: southern troops falsely claiming pay, abuses in merchant recruitment, smuggling in Dongjiang, and the like.

But what truly sent a deep chill through Zhu Youjian were the memorials concerning the Later Jin's "campaign to subjugate Joseon" at the beginning of the year.

His memory could not possibly be wrong.

Hong Taiji had led the campaign in person; Joseon had been forced to submit to the Jin; the Dongjiang Garrison at Tieshan, Pidao, and other places had likewise suffered grievous losses.

It was precisely by this campaign that Hong Taiji had reversed the Later Jin's food crisis in one stroke and greatly elevated his own prestige — which had led directly to the attack on Ningyuan and Jinzhou in the fourth month of the seventh year of Tianqi.

This was, without question, a battle that had altered the entire configuration of Liaodong and even the realm itself!

Yet what lay spread before his eyes was an utterly different picture.

He laid out three related memorials side by side, as though scrutinizing three entirely different faces.

The first was a memorial in Mao Wenlong's own hand, its calligraphy bold and sweeping, brimming with heroic fervor: "... the slave-bandits sat trapped for many days, unable to advance and raid, and retreated in utter disarray..."

The second was a victory report transcribed by the Office of Scrutiny for War, its rhetoric florid, its flattery extreme: "... the slaves, with a host of one hundred thousand, ravaged Dongjiang; yet Mao Wenlong, at the very moment the wild beacon-fires blazed fiercest, roused his righteous fury and swept them away with irresistible might; the barbarian chieftain suffered exceedingly heavy casualties..."

The third, also submitted by Mao Wenlong, was emphatic and earnest: "... the Joseon officials and Joseon people summoned the slaves to harm this officer; this officer held firm and could not be uprooted; our wounded numbered less than a thousand, while enemy kills were beyond reckoning..."

Zhu Youjian extended a finger and tapped each of these three memorials in turn.

His fingertip was ice-cold, just like his mood at this moment.

In these reports, the Later Jin seemed to have suffered an unprecedented catastrophic defeat and fled in panic.

But if it was a catastrophic defeat, why had the defeated Later Jin instead compelled Joseon to conclude a "Brotherly Covenant"?

Lies!

Lies from beginning to end!

Zhu Youjian closed his eyes, as if he could see Mao Wenlong's ever-shifting face.

At one moment, it was the loyal and peerlessly valiant divine general of the Great Ming from the memorials, who had repeatedly routed a powerful foe.

At another, it was the indignant, aggrieved, impoverished frontier garrison commander crying poverty and hardship when demanding pay.

Zhu Youjian gently set the memorials down, his heart heavy with unspoken gloom.

Which one is the real you?

Or perhaps, neither of these is the real you.

The real you — what exactly do you take the realm of the Great Ming for?!

Are you truly still that same Mao Wenlong — the man of honor who once crossed the sea alone, his resolve unshakable?

Dongjiang's clamoring for pay and provisions was nothing but a skin-deep affliction, hardly worth his anger.

The reason for his indignation was that this General Mao's present bearing differed so drastically from the image he knew from later ages.

He had come bearing memories of later times, fully intending to put Dongjiang to great and important use — but now, seeing this, how could he dare?

A military body, from its Regional Commander down to its clerks, in which not a single word of its reports was true.

Then what was a sovereign a thousand li away to rely upon when meting out reward and punishment, when setting the policies of the state?

Was he to rely solely on that "utter loyalty" the man professed with his own mouth?

A military group whose battle merits and troop strength were so opaque — was it, in the end, the Great Ming's Dongjiang, or Mao Wenlong's Dongjiang?!

Beyond these two pieces of bad news, amid the vast ocean of memorials, Zhu Youjian also discovered a few other details that were not terribly pressing.

One was a report from Wang Zhichen, Supreme Commander of Liaodong, dated the fifteenth day of the eighth month — a memorial submitted before his enthronement, which was why he had known nothing of it before.

The report stated: because of continuous heavy rain in Liaodong, many places along the city walls of Jinzhou had been water-damaged, leaving the walls in danger of collapse; the defending troops had no choice but to temporarily withdraw and relocate to Xingshan, somewhat farther away.

Well then — in later ages, people had argued themselves into a tangle over whether to hold Jinzhou or not.

Now there was no need to argue. In the eighth month of the seventh year of Tianqi, the Great Ming had temporarily lost Jinzhou.

As for why it was lost — go ask the artisans and laborers who built those walls just how much of the materials, grain, and silver actually reached their hands.

The other was a memorial titled "A Proposal to Relocate the Dongjiang Garrison," submitted in the fifth month of the sixth year of Tianqi by the former Military Commissioner of Jiliao, Yan Mingtai.

A few lines within it caught Zhu Youjian's interest as he read.

"…Since the founding of the Great Ming, we have passed through who knows how many great wars, yet has there ever been a campaign like the Liaodong affair — so ruinously expensive, so endlessly protracted?"

"…The root of the malady lies precisely in this: there are now those who wish to kill the barbarians, and also those who do not wish to kill the barbarians."

"…Those who wish to kill the barbarians dread nothing more than that the Later Jin should not be destroyed; those who do not wish to kill the barbarians fear, on the contrary, that the Later Jin might perish too swiftly."

"…Since the Dongjiang garrison was established, the barbarian chieftain's firearms and great cannon have grown increasingly fine, now matching our own. As for the source of his gunpowder and iron supplies — none can tell whence they come…"

Between every line, the spearpoint was aimed squarely at Dongjiang's smuggling.

To this, Zhu Youjian neither endorsed nor refuted it.

Did smuggling exist in Dongjiang? It most certainly did.

Even if Mao Wenlong did not actively engage in smuggling, he absolutely could not hold down every man under his command.

Within the Later Jin realm, want was acute: a single dan of grain could fetch a hundred taels of silver; a bolt of python-patterned satin, a hundred and fifty taels.

Profits so heaven-defying were enough to make any man take desperate risks and trample every law underfoot.

Mao Wenlong may not have done it on his own initiative, but those arrogant soldiers and fierce officers under his command — how could he possibly hold down every last one of them?

But the question was, was Dongjiang the only one smuggling?

What of Joseon, gazing across the river? What of the Liaoxi border troops, locked in a jagged standoff with the Later Jin? And what of the Denglai naval fleet, cruising upon the sea?

Most likely, not a single one of them had a clean bottom.

Zhu Youjian rubbed his throbbing brow.

As a transmigrator, he knew better than anyone the course toward which this great ship named "Great Ming" was sailing.

Yet only now, as countless memorials — some true, some false — shamelessly greedy demands, and lies whitewashing reality surged in like a tide, did he truly and personally feel that inescapable air of a dynasty's final days.

Everywhere, corruption; everywhere, rot.

Everyone aboard this great vessel, soon to sink, was frantically gnawing away at the last few intact planks, yet none truly cared where the ship was heading.

He tossed the memorial aside and gently closed his eyes.

In his mind, the tangled threads of intelligence gradually grew clear.

Without: the Later Jin, on the verge of breaking its bonds, about to transform into a dragon. This was what was meant by "tigers and rhinoceroses escape from their cage."

Within: lies, corruption, and ubiquitous self-interest. This could be called "tortoiseshell and jade are shattered within their casket."

Tigers and rhinoceroses escape from their cage; tortoiseshell and jade are shattered within their casket — whose fault is this?

The fault, of course, lies with the keepers!

And he, Zhu Youjian, was the greatest keeper under Heaven.

"He who receives the realm's filth — he is called the lord of the altars of soil and grain; he who receives the realm's calamities — he is called the king of all under Heaven."

Zhu Youjian silently recited these words in his heart, and a flame kindled in his chest.

This realm was his realm.

This burden of guilt, then, was naturally his alone to bear.

And this game of weiqi — in the end, the stones would be placed by his hand!

Within Qianqing Palace, the silence was such that one could hear the rustle of autumn leaves swept up by the wind outside the window.

After a long while, Zhu Youjian's tightly knotted brow at last slowly smoothed out.

In his heart, a plan had already taken shape.

Zhu Youjian opened his eyes. Within those eyes, originally filled with exhaustion and melancholy, there now rekindled a light as sharp as a blade's edge.

His bloodshot eyes turned to Gao Shiming, who had been standing in attendance all the while.

"Gao Shiming, where has Master Sun reached?"

Gao Shiming bowed and replied, "In reply to Your Majesty, he has reached the outskirts of the capital. The men we sent report that the old master Sun is bathing and changing his robes at the post station, and will enter the palace for an audience shortly."

Zhu Youjian nodded, his gaze once more settling upon that crude sand table, a hint of scrutiny and a hint of expectation in his eyes.

Sun Chengzong — posterity calls you the Great Ming's foremost strategist.

Come, then! Let me test just how great your talents truly are!