Chapter 682: The Scheme to Change Heaven and Earth: The First Tyrant in All History

Before Luo Fu, throughout history, there had never been a situation like Luo Fu’s.

In the process of unifying the world, Luo Fu and his Luotian Army were more akin to a colonial endeavor than a conquest of heaven.

Those twenty thousand Luotian soldiers, each capable of holding off a hundred men, were Luo Fu’s true power base; everything else—whether the civil officials recruited through Lin Ruhai or the cities that surrendered after he seized half of Jiangnan—

were not his true power base.

Other founding teams feared ministers whose merit overshadowed the sovereign, but here, Luo Fu faced no such concern.

Anyone who accepted the Yuan Energy Seed and gained the power of bloodline Yuan Energy would, without realizing it, become Luo Fu’s devoted follower.

This made Luo Fu’s will increasingly unshakable, capable of being fully implemented across the entire world and all Three Realms.

No matter how frantically Jia Mu, Jia Jing, Jia She, Jia Zheng, and others screamed their innocence—even invoking Lin Ruhai—they were still dragged en masse into the Heavenly Prison by the eunuch supervisor’s men.

Such large-scale actions terrified the entire Ningguo and Rongguo Prefectures.

The womenfolk were hastily herded onto carts by palace eunuchs and sent to the Yetinggong.

The Yetinggong was not, in fact, a fixed structure like the Qianqing Palace or Kunning Palace; quite the opposite, it was like a cold palace, with no fixed location.

Not all of the Jia family’s women were sent to the palace, for the eunuch supervisor had guessed Luo Fu’s attitude toward the Jia household.

Figures like Jia Mu, Lady Wang, and Lady Xing were never even counted among the womenfolk; they were directly thrown into prison.

After all, this was Jingcheng—even the prisons were astonishingly vast.

After Luo Fu seized Jingcheng, the prison became one of the busiest places, so much so that even the massive facility was barely sufficient.

Those with minor offenses, or former dynasty criminals, were released and sent to prisoner camps outside the city.

The Luotian Army swept across the entire world with overwhelming force. Though Jingcheng had lost tens of thousands of elite troops during the Yangzhou battle, its permanent population still numbered nearly a million. During the Luotian Army’s siege, the Beiqing court naturally had no shortage of men who fought to the death in loyalty.

Selecting several tens of thousands of strong young men from a million people was effortless.

After Jingcheng fell, these men naturally became prisoners.

Even with Luo Fu’s two ten-thousand-strong elite force of hundred-men adversaries, he could not casually house several tens of thousands of men; a single misstep might not shake the foundation of his new dynasty, but Jingcheng would surely suffer a great disaster.

Thus, a plot of land outside the city was designated as a prisoner camp, and these tens of thousands of strong men were placed under the guard of second-line troops.

Most of the prisoners in Jingcheng’s prison were also hastily relocated to the prisoner camp outside the city; the emptied cells were not left idle but used to detain people of status and rank.

Such as the male members of the Jia family now.

Whether it was Jia Jing, Jia Zhen, and Jia Rong—the three generations of Ningguo Prefecture who had become Daoists—or the men of Rongguo Prefecture—Jia She, Jia Cong, Jia Zheng, Jia Baoyu, Jia Huan—they were all crammed into the prison.

In addition, the male members of the Jia family’s eight branches in Jingcheng, except for a very few, were also sent to the prison; the vast majority were bundled off to the prisoner camp outside the city.

In a side hall of the palace.

As carriage after carriage arrived, the hall soon filled with waves of weeping.

“Miss, what should we do now?” the maid Ru Hua, her face streaked with tears, asked Jia Xichun, who appeared calm but was inwardly just as anxious.

After steadying herself, Jia Xichun said: “Our Jia household was a former dynasty duke. In this time of sweeping reform, our current misfortune was inevitable. The new emperor has already shown us mercy—he did not send us to the entertainment quarters but to the Yetinggong. Both thunder and dew are the emperor’s grace. We must accept it.”

“Fourth girl, Itachi say the new emperor has shown us mercy?” Wang Xifeng, her hair slightly disheveled yet radiant and beautiful, gripped her handkerchief tightly, looking anxiously at Jia Xichun.

Though Jia Xichun was the youngest among the Jia household’s principal members, she was now being treated by Wang Xifeng as her advisor.

Jia Xichun nodded slightly: “Women of fallen noble families have never had a good fate in any dynasty. Even being given as a concubine to a new dynasty’s powerful noble counts as imperial grace.”

“Then what are we now? Are we also to be given as concubines to the new dynasty’s nobles?” Wang Xifeng asked eagerly.

“Xifeng, calm down first,” Li Wan said. Though she too worried about her son Jia Lan, who had been thrown into prison, she was among the few in the Jia household with any real insight.

After all, Li Wan’s father, Li Shouzhong, had once been the Director of the Imperial Academy.

Simply by examining precedents from the former dynasty, it was clear that their fate—being sent to the Yetinggong—was among the most benevolent in all history.

Of course, this was also because Luo Fu himself was a Han noble, unlike the Manchu Jin dynasty, whose washing court was worse than brothels.

“Sister-in-law, our Jia household is being destroyed—how can I possibly stay calm?” Wang Xifeng said, agitated.

“Listen to me first,” Li Wan then explained to Wang Xifeng, one by one, how women sent to the Yetinggong during dynastic transitions differed from those sent to the entertainment quarters, who were outright sentenced to adultery punishment.

When she heard what the fates of the entertainment quarters and adultery punishment entailed, Wang Xifeng suddenly felt immense relief.

Compared to those two fates, being sent to the Yetinggong now was truly an act of imperial mercy from the new dynasty’s founding emperor.

But when she came to her senses, Wang Xifeng quickly looked bewildered, her cheeks flushed with a faint blush: “The new emperor… he hasn’t taken an interest in us, has he?”

Wang Xifeng’s reaction was not unreasonable.

Though she was indeed married, Jia Lian had effectively vanished for nearly a year since Yangzhou’s fall.

Amid the chaos of war, Wang Xifeng had already prepared herself for widowhood.

She simply hadn’t expected the dynastic change to come so swiftly.

Li Wan glanced at Wang Xifeng: “Itachi actually want to enter the palace as a concubine?”

“My conditions aren’t bad, are they?” Wang Xifeng said. “Whether I become a concubine doesn’t matter—it’s better than…”

Thinking of the fates of the entertainment quarters and adultery punishment, Wang Xifeng suddenly felt a strong urge to be favored by Luo Fu.

In feudal society, human rights simply did not exist.

Victory and defeat were the only truths of the feudal age.

To the victor belonged all spoils; to the defeated, merely surviving was the victor’s mercy.

Setting aside Luo Fu’s current collection of golden hairpins, if we view this from a grand narrative perspective, Luo Fu’s impending new dynasty was already planning a truly earth-shattering scheme.

Though Luo Fu’s unification of the world appeared swift, he had, in fact, made considerable compromises along the way.

Not compromises with scholar-gentry interest groups, but compromises with time.

To the former dynasty’s officials and even the scholar-gentry, Luo Fu was undoubtedly a benevolent teacher; since seizing Yangzhou, he had scarcely slaughtered the scholar-gentry class.

Luo Fu’s reform was more like an internal power shift among the ruling class, without truly touching the core of the world’s wealth distribution.

Even in Jinling, which was essentially Luo Fu’s power base, he had left many former dynasty officials unaccounted for.

He did this purely to accelerate his dynastic transition. Once Luo Fu formally held his coronation and ascended the throne,

he could then turn his attention to thoroughly reorganizing the entire world.

After all, he carried memories from his past life. Even if his current mindset had regressed into that of a staunch feudal warrior, Luo Fu still understood that for a new dynasty to endure, it must redistribute power and wealth.

Especially since Luo Fu raised the banner of the Luotian Army in Yangzhou until now, he had engaged in almost no truly strategic battles with the former dynasty.

Put simply, Luo Fu’s dynastic change had not killed enough people.

For nearly a century under the former dynasty, the world’s wealth had concentrated almost entirely in the hands of a few. After ascending the throne, Luo Fu’s task would be to completely purge these vested interests and redistribute land and wealth.

Only then could the new dynasty’s foundation be truly solidified.

Of course, the dynastic cycle was inevitable.

Even Luo Fu could not solve this problem.

Moreover, as a staunch feudal warrior, Luo Fu would never willingly revolutionize himself. But if he couldn’t reverse the dynastic cycle entirely, he could at least delay it.

In Luo Fu’s view, developing productive forces was the way to break the three-century ceiling of dynasties.

If paired with periodic internal purges, his dynasty might truly last for ten thousand generations.

After all, Luo Fu was no ordinary earthly emperor. With his power, he could even carve out a new world.

But the key reason he hadn’t done so lay in his own understanding of civilization.

In Luo Fu’s view, as ruler of a nation, every dynasty, after a century of development, must undergo internal reform and change.

But such reform must not be too brutal. Though dynastic change indeed propelled civilization forward, this earth-shattering transformation was, for civilization itself, akin to bone-deep cauterization.

One misstep could cause civilization to stagnate; with external interference, it might even regress.

This theory was, in principle, feasible—but in a world without any supernatural power, it would be pure fantasy.

After all, after a dynasty had existed for a century, how many emperors had come and gone? Their authority had long faded, and internal power struggles among the ruling class would trap even the most ambitious monarchs in narrow confines, making internal renewal and purification nearly impossible.

But for Luo Fu, this was no problem.

The development of civilization required population and land as prerequisites—like a mathematical formula: only with sufficient population and land could civilization continuously ascend.

In this process, if one pursued only territorial expansion and population growth, what difference was there from raising pigs? Civilization was not merely people and land—those were prerequisites. Productive forces were not merely technological advancement; culture, art, institutions—all were included.

As someone who had read Marx and Engels backward, Luo Fu clearly understood that productive forces determined production relations, but production relations could also, to some extent, influence productive forces.

The dynasty Luo Fu now established might be viewed differently by the people of the world. For instance, right now, because Luo Fu had not yet purged the former dynasty’s vested interests, the scholar-gentry class regarded him as a sage ruler rivalling the Three Dynasties of Confucian texts.

But once Luo Fu completed his coronation, absorbed all former dynasty military forces, and turned to purge them, he would become the first tyrant in all history.

But none of this mattered to Luo Fu—who, after all, saw the entire world as something he had created at his own whim?

After all, the world had never seen a founding ruler who, from vowing to overthrow the former dynasty to seizing the entire realm, took only a year and change.

Even Han Gaozu Liu Bang, counting from when he emerged from Hanzhong, took five years to unify the realm; if counted from his days in Pei County, it took seven.

Luo Fu, however, used borrowed power to seize control of the Caobang , selected twenty thousand strong young men, bestowed upon them the Yuan Energy Seed, and forged an invincible force of twenty thousand hundred-men adversaries.

From Yangzhou onward, Luo Fu’s Luotian Army was undefeated, with negligible casualties. In comparison, any resistance from Beiqing crumbled instantly before the Luotian Army.

Just months after the Yangzhou battle, the Luotian Army had already earned an unbeatable reputation across the entire world.

This meteoric rise, so swift it bordered on myth, was unprecedented in history.

Yet it was merely Luo Fu’s violent retaliation after being oppressed by the Jia household’s servants.

After completing his plan to collect the golden hairpins and punish the Jia family, Luo Fu naturally advanced rapidly from the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy—basic needs—toward psychological needs.

Of course, this did not mean Luo Fu had lost his base desires.

On the contrary, he still had a strong possessive desire for the golden hairpins—but at the same time, he began to view the entire world as a meticulously crafted work of art.

Or rather, this was an experiment in which Luo Fu placed himself above the entire world.

(End of chapter)