[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-overthrowing-the-ming":3,"chapter-overthrowing-the-ming-overthrowing-the-ming-chapter-59":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"chinese","Overthrowing the Ming",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":19,"prevChapterSlug":20,"totalChapters":21,"novelImage":22},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":16,"translator":17,"content_hash":18},2289286,4476,"Chapter 59: The Sky Changes","overthrowing-the-ming-chapter-59",59,"\u003Cp>Cao Er originally had only about thirty men under his command, including Shi Jiuen, Zhang Zhengxiong, and Chen Shu; this time, when he went down the mountain, half of them followed him.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The only ones left were Huang Mao, Cui Shan, Xu Sanshui, Lian Yu, Shi Youchun, and Xu Lifang; previously, Zhao Ding and Kong Shun died in a landslide, and recently Gu Laosan was butchered by Li You, so fewer than ten remained.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Counting himself, Li You now had a group of fourteen; it could be said that in Cao Er's absence, Li You had become the true person in charge of Nanshan.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Huang Mao, Shi Youchun, and the others were naturally very wary of this group, so they could only endure and wait for their master to return to seek justice, while for the moment, they quickly struck up a rapport with the group of archers under Zhang Cang.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>This group of archers also had extremely complex backgrounds; among them were several border soldiers from Shanbei who had come out from under Shi Dayong, the most arrogant of whom was led by Peng Yun.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The rest were old bandits who had followed Wu Zhuge for many years, but they rarely trained under Zhang Cang, spending their days playing cards and drinking, having long since become gamblers and idlers.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The first thing Li You did was not to train soldiers, but to build houses and fire ceramic bowls; now that he finally had legitimate authority, he had to get life on the right track as soon as possible.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was already nearing the tenth month, and winter was about to set in; the winter here was truly colder than usual, and living in stone pits would surely freeze people to death, so he had to solve the housing problem for everyone first.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>However, doing these things required professional talent, and the information he had collected while mingling with the miners and salt slaves became particularly important.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Besides craftsmen like Lame Liu and Qian Chengzhi, he also knew that Xiang Hu, the leader of the Xiang family group, as well as the apprentice of the Dang family under Le Baofu and Qi Gengxin, were all carpenters; the two salt slave brothers, Ding Zifeng and Ding Zijiang, who followed Qian Chengzhi, had previously run a bathhouse, and one of them had even been a goldsmith.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The mining apprentices under Lame Liu were uncle and nephew, named Lu Qian and Lu Sheng; one was a barber, and his nephew was a cobbler who also knew tailoring.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li You had learned about this many of the craftsmen among the miners; as for the bandits, he mostly observed their individual character, and he did not know much about their manual skills yet, only that Qi Jingkun used to be a traveling merchant and salt peddler, and that Lu Yi and Zeng Changshun were both hunters by trade.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"These people are far more useful than most bandits who do not serve labor and only know how to destroy.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li You thought silently to himself, and this further affirmed his idea of not wanting to leave the Shanzhai; the social tempering he experienced in his past life had long since let him know his own worth, and upon arriving here, his greatest reliance was his \"vision that transcends time and space.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>This allowed him to fully realize what difficulties existed, which paths were dead ends, and which policies were suicidal.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>With such foresight, avoiding mistakes was naturally very easy, but finding the correct path for the present was equally difficult.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As for national affairs, although Li You could not remember the specifics, he at least knew the framework.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>History had already provided the correct answers to many problems: for instance, serfdom is inferior to feudalism, closing the country to the outside world only leads to further backwardness, the system of base status hinders the development of productivity, and long swords cannot defeat cannons...\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>However, when it came down to every village and town, where customs and geography differed every few miles, the reality was vastly different, and the advantages of a transmigrator were useless at the bottom of society.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Therefore, if he wanted to accomplish something in these chaotic times, he had to rely on these professional talents; he could at most provide some guidance on the direction. But the question was whether he could be the guide for this era.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>If he could not be a guide, then all his efforts would inevitably be swallowed by the torrent of history, leaving behind almost no trace.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>At noon, Li You took six kitchen maids to the kitchen.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>These six women were all around twenty-five or twenty-six years old, named Zhang Laihua, Sun Tianding, Wang Xiugu, Li Xiujuan, Huang Yanzi, and Hong Da'e; all six were miserable people, living beasts of burden known by the bandits as \"capable of work and capable of play.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Zhang Laihua, Huang Yanzi, and Hong Da'e were among the twelve women Li You had brought from Lueyang; after days and months of abuse, only these few survived, while others were played to death, starved to death, died of illness, or could not bear it and died by hitting their heads against walls.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Sun Tianding had been abducted to the mountain earlier, and her body was naturally riddled with scars; the reason she was able to survive was mainly because she could work like a beast of burden to provide a meal for others.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>She was originally from Guangyuan, Sichuan; in the seventh year of Chongzhen, the \"Yao-Huang Bandit\" Yao Tiandong made life miserable in Guangyuan, and at that time, her family was on the verge of starvation, so they fled north to Hanzhong, with the whole family starving until they looked like pale ghosts.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Finally, her husband sold her to a well-off family in Xiangziping for a peck of rice, but then Xiangziping was ransacked by Mao'erba, and after the disaster, she was sold again to Longmen Shanzhai...\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Wang Xiugu was the wife of a small landlord in Hejiaying, Hu County, but she was surprisingly literate and could read and write.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>This made Li You feel happy, and he asked, \"Where is your home? Did you attend a private school?\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"I learned to read when I was an inner chamber maid for the young master at the Wu scholar's house.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Wang Xiugu spoke in elegant language at first, but then she pulled at her local accent and cried, saying: \"I am from Jiezhou; my family has been farming for the wealthy in the city for five generations, working like beasts of burden for others, suffering from hunger and cold all year round.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"In the spring of the second year of Chongzhen, my mother starved to death.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"At the end of the fourth year, my father, unable to pay off his debts to the King of Hell and seeing no end to the suffering, hanged himself. As soon as he died, the landlord forced my mother to give up my younger sister to pay off the debt.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"My father was forced to his death, and my sister was snatched away to be a maid; my mother cried to heaven and earth with no response, begged everyone with no help, and after crying for three days without eating, she died on the fourth day from grief and hunger...\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"Before my mother breathed her last, she called my brother, sister-in-law, and me to her bedside and said: 'Heaven has its eyes closed; there is no way for poor families like ours to live in this world. Mother will go before you and wait for you in the underworld...'\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"Sigh... what a... ridiculous world.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li You sighed, looking at Wang Xiugu, who was only twenty-five; he felt a wave of sadness. In his later life, she would have just stepped out of university, in the prime of her youth, yet in this world, she had suffered countless hardships and humiliations.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li Xiujuan was the wife of a hunter from Mianxian, and she was slightly younger, about twenty-two or twenty-three; she was the most beautiful, and there was a scholarly air between her brows that added to her quiet and dignified temperament, which was why she had likely been the most severely humiliated.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Along the way, her clothes could barely cover her vital parts, and there were still dried bloodstains on her legs; she walked with a waddle, yet her face remained calm, and she did not cry or howl like Wang Xiugu or Hong Da'e.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"You all, rest assured, now that you are on Nanshan, no one will dare to harass you in the slightest!\" Li You said to the six of them.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Wang Xiugu was the first to bow and perform a salute, saying: \"As long as the Master can protect us, we are willing to work like beasts of burden!\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Sun Tianding and Zhang Laihua then realized what was happening; unable to perform the salute, they knelt directly, their voices filled with tears as they said: \"We rely entirely on the Master's protection!\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In this Longmen Shanzhai, no one cared whether they lived or died; they worked in Beizhai and were often violated by bandits who felt the urge at night, and even if they died, it was no different than the death of a stinkbug.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Xing and Wang helped them up, and Xing said: \"Don't worry, Master Li is a great philanthropist; we just need to work hard.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"A great philanthropist?\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Hearing Xing's words, Li You felt a heavy weight in his heart, without any sense of moral satisfaction.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Having seen the true prosperous age in another time and space, what was there to be grateful for in feeding people horse feed and pig swill?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>That such behavior was met with gratitude was only because there was a truly remarkable government that left the common people unable to even afford horse feed or pig swill.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li You could not help but mutter to himself: \"Limited ability, average level, all relying on the damn pig-like teammates to set me off.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>When he left the kitchen, he specifically instructed them to use a few pecks of millet, and then cut half of the remaining wolf meat to boil into a meat soup to nourish them.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Following the wolf meat eaten yesterday, because Li You was not there, Xing and Wang did not dare to make decisions on their own, so the four wolf carcasses were still lying by the salt field.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Everyone had actually been thinking about it; today, as soon as Li You returned, not only was there meat to eat, but there was also millet porridge, which immediately made everyone's spirits lift.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Being a bandit to bring glory to one's ancestors was naturally nonsense, but being able to fill one's stomach was the real deal.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The sky over Nanzhai is about to change!\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>[Note]: Qing Dynasty, *The Scholars*, Chapter 4: \"Brought into the morning hall, scolded a few times, talked some nonsense, and was driven out.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Ming Dynasty, Feng Menglong, *Stories to Caution the World*, Volume 7, \"Scholar Qian Wrongly Occupies the Phoenix Match\": \"They were like seeing a ghost! I was like dreaming! When the dreamer wakes up, it is also nonsense.\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The Nonsense Stele is located in the Zhexintai Scenic Area, Chaoge Town, Qi County, Hebi City, Henan Province. It is said to be a tombstone from the Ming Dynasty.\u003C\u002Fp>",1899,"2026-06-20T03:32:06.992Z",1,"Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite","4a4892bda6acaf7438fdc29656be59896c735f2c20acd4230c499dc682794b8e","overthrowing-the-ming-chapter-60","overthrowing-the-ming-chapter-58",71,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Foverthrowing-the-ming-cover.jpg"]