Chapter 50: Why

(Asking for 80 follow-up reads, and also asking for a bookmark; the bookmark count is truly abysmal...)

Watching Li You, this scholar, eat, Wu Zhuge felt extremely happy in his heart.

He had let his tongue slip and had no intention of stopping, because he enjoyed seeing the look of shock on the face of Li You, this man of letters...

"To tell you the truth, this iron mine originally had a large share for the Cao family; it was only because the times turned chaotic that they cooperated with me. But as for the production and pricing of salt and iron, I am also in the dark.

So, according to what you said, if I were to get rid of Cao Er, wouldn't I be throwing away my own meat for nothing?

Besides, when our Shanzhai usually robs and plunders, where would any government officials come to interfere even a little bit?

Even when we entered the city to wipe out the Luo family, didn't it end up being nothing in the end? Needless to say, the Cao family must have put in some effort there too!"

After Wu Zhuge finished his rapid-fire speech, he wore a mocking smirk and sneered: "So, as you say, how should I centralize power? How should I remove Cao Er? Wouldn't removing Cao Er be the same as removing myself?"

Li You tried his best to keep his "expression unchanged," although a giant wave had already surged in his heart. After learning some things from Wa Qingyun, he had thought he had seen through the essence of things, and he used to talk about "officials and bandits" all day long.

But he truly had no concept of what officials and bandits actually did, how they established connections with officials, or what kind of interest transfers and protective umbrellas they had!

Today, he had been given a harsh lesson by Wu Zhuge, which truly opened his eyes. These details were simply not things that a commoner like Wa Qingyun, or "ignorant people" and "troublemakers" like himself, could know.

Seeing the glib-tongued Li You fall silent, Wu Zhuge continued to add fuel to the fire: "What I told you about is just the Cao family; there are plenty of other families of all kinds. Anyway, in these times, among the powerful gentry and wealthy merchants who can still survive, which one doesn't have a bit of blood on their hands?

Those who are truly honest and upright would have long since been driven to bankruptcy by the government...

Not to mention the distant ones, just take the nearby Cijiaoping. Among those who withstood the oppression of the government and survived the purges of the roving bandits, there is Sun Shucai of Cijiaoping. He started out as a human trafficker. From Huxian in the north, Baihe in the east, Jiezhou in the west, to Ningqiang in the south, basically all the girls in the brothels and pleasure houses were provided by him. A few years ago, he even produced 'slender horses' worth thirty thousand taels, which were sold to the mansion of the Duke of Wei in Nanzhili...

And then there is Leimen Temple, which now controls the land of three townships and four dams; it is all the property of their temple. Where is there any real Buddhist chanting in the temple now?

I heard that the Shaolin Temple on Mount Song has reached the point where, during the tenure of a certain abbot, the more houses and land he acquired, the larger the pagoda built after his death would be.

The behavior of the monks, big and small, is no different from that of ordinary local tyrants and evil gentry... The peasants who scrape for food in the fields all year round are either starving to death or selling their daughters, while those monks in the temple eat vegetarian food and chant sutras, yet they are all fat and ear-heavy, and they have plenty of energy to pull women in, smear them with lamp oil, and 'study Buddhist dharma.'

However, these people cannot be provoked. Master Jinguang of Leimen Temple—Prince Rui is his loyal follower. To provoke the monk is to provoke Prince Rui's own father... As for those dog officials in Mianxian and Baocheng, there is no need to say much. Which one of those who can live comfortably in those positions doesn't have heaven-reaching abilities and a heart as cold as a snake's?"

"From officials, monks, merchants, and the powerful, to the gentry and scholars—how is it that they are all rotten to the point of stench!"

Li You thought to himself, feeling a wave of acrid, coarse air stuck in his throat; he could neither spit it out nor swallow it...