Chapter 283: A Conjecture

Wang Ancheng, who had brought Daniu and Niuniu back to the imperial estate in the capital from the streets of Ji County, had now risen through merit to the rank of Centurion. In the ninth year of Chongzhen, he was entrusted with an important mission and led his officers and guardsmen to Yanzhou to establish a new centurion post.

"Your subordinate thanks the Centurion for the favor of promotion! This matter relied entirely on the Centurion and the two Platoon Leaders' excellent planning; your subordinate was merely following orders. The Centurion and the two Platoon Leaders should receive the primary credit!"

Qiao Cun, a horse-faced man from Qiao Village who was ugly but far from stupid, immediately tossed aside the flattery upon hearing Wang Ancheng's words.

"Promotion is hardly the word—I, Wang, am certainly not one to claim credit for myself and shift blame onto others. What is due is due! Li Li, report to me!"

"Reporting to the Centurion: Zhang Wenxiang, Qiu Yulian, and Huang Yun have boarded the pre-arranged carriage and are on their way back! We conferred several times during our return and all agreed that this operation left no trace of flaw! Even if a coroner examined the body, he would rule it a drowning!"

Platoon Leader Li Li reported in reply.

"Once Zhang Wenxiang and the others return, let them rest briefly, then immediately transfer their entire families to Jinan Prefecture—arrangements will be made for them there. Yanzhou Prefecture can no longer be their home; if they are recognized by someone from the Kong Mansion today, there will be trouble! Inform the three women that starting next month, their superiors will double their families' salaries!"

Those three women were all peripheral personnel of the Embroidered Uniform Guard, appearing in their daily lives as street-performing entertainers. Their families were also peripheral members of the Guard, and each month at the appointed time they would go to a designated secret location to collect their salaries and expenses from the Guard—enough to live comfortably. After this meritorious deed, the Guard's Records Office would naturally double their pay.

"Your subordinate receives the order!"

Li Li replied with a cupped-fist salute.

"The rules for this matter are as usual—family members and relatives must not be told!"

Wang Ancheng cautioned, and Li Li and the other two all nodded in agreement.

This was an old rule within the Embroidered Uniform Guard. Li Li and the others were all from hereditary backgrounds and naturally knew the Guard's regulations inside and out. Wang Ancheng's reminder came from his superior's caution, which was why he reiterated it once more.

This operation to assassinate Kong Yinzhi was carried out under Zhu Youjian's authorization and Luo Yangxing's orders. Apart from those who participated in the assassination itself, no one else knew of it.

Upon receiving the order, Wang Ancheng immediately summoned Platoon Leaders Li Li and Zhou Qiang for secret consultation, seeking to complete the superior's directive flawlessly.

Assassinating Kong Yinzhi was not difficult in itself—after all, throughout millennia of dynastic changes, no one had ever laid a hand on the head of the Kong family, and the Duke Yansheng's mansion had no armed forces, only a few household retainers, with virtually no defense against outsiders. So eliminating Kong Yinzhi secretly would have been very simple. But Luo Yangxing's secret order was to make the outside world believe Kong Yinzhi had died by accident, unrelated to anyone—that suddenly multiplied the difficulty severalfold.

Wang Ancheng, Li Li, and Zhou Qiang disguised themselves as merchants, beggars, farmers, wandering Taoists, and other identities, and traveled separately to Qufu to learn Kong Yinzhi's daily habits. After months of tracking and investigation, they finally mapped out some of Kong Yinzhi's patterns of life.

Returning to Yanzhou, the three held repeated discussions and finally settled on today's action plan. Wang Ancheng then designated Qiao Cun—a guardsman nicknamed "Shui Yazi" (Water Duck) within the post—as the one to carry out the deed, with Li Li and Zhou Qiang providing support.

After Qiao Cun and the others conducted several reconnaissance visits, the personnel involved rehearsed and practiced the operation several times during this period.

From Zhang Wenxiang and the others drawing away the retainers' attention, to the time Qiao Cun entered the water and swam silently to within Kong Yinzhi's very sight, to dragging him to the bottom of the lake and drowning him before escaping back, to the three of them using the cover of weeds and underbrush to run to where the horses were tethered several li away, to Zhang Wenxiang and the others going behind the treeline to depart by carriage—the time consumed by each of these details was controlled to near-perfect precision. Only after confirming there was virtually no possibility of failure did Wang Ancheng give the order to act.

Near noon, Kong Yinzhi's bloated and deformed corpse was hauled ashore from the lake. A plainclothes spy of the Embroidered Uniform Guard mixed in the crowd swiftly rode to send the news back to Yanzhou. Moments later, two fast horses galloped out of Yanzhou Prefecture, heading straight for the capital.

Three days later, Zhu Youjian in the palace received the news of Kong Yinzhi's drowning. While marveling at the meticulous planning and arrangement of the operation, he instructed Luo Yangxing that the officers involved must be generously promoted and rewarded, and that when higher positions became vacant, they should be given priority for advancement—a talent capable of devising such an airtight plan must not be allowed to go to waste.

The reason Zhu Youjian wanted Kong Yinzhi eliminated was purely out of righteous indignation from his later-era way of thinking—a textbook case of hotheaded extremism.

As for Kong Yinzhi, that turncoat who had served three surnames, the later-era Zhu Youjian had already held his conduct in utter contempt.

Bearing the titles of Grand Preceptor of the Heir Apparent and Grand Tutor of the Heir Apparent of the Great Ming, Kong Yinzhi, when the Great Ming was on the verge of collapse, first surrendered to Li Zicheng, then to the Manchus, and was the first to shave his head and change his clothing when the Qing army reached Shandong. His actions had completely lost the backbone of Confucianism, turning him into a thoroughgoing opportunist—a base and despicable man who would abandon his nation and people for the sake of family interests.

As early as last year, Zhu Youjian had ordered the Embroidered Uniform Guard to spread rumors that the Southern Branch of the Kong family, unable to bear its increasingly declining state, intended to lay claim to orthodox Confucian supremacy and seize back the title of Duke Yansheng.

This was his way of laying the groundwork for future division and weakening of the Kong family's position in the scholarly world. Whether it would succeed was still uncertain, but using the opportunity to weaken the Kong family while reforming Confucian thought was already an inevitable trend.

The Kong family's position was not something that could be shaken overnight. The result of acting rashly was obvious: he would become the public enemy of all the literati under heaven, every official in the court would become his opponent, and the entire government would be paralyzed, with state affairs left unattended. The consequence would be that before long, the Great Ming would descend into chaos—and the Great Ming would fall.

As for raising the blade to exterminate a family to the ninth degree of kinship, a picture would surface in Zhu Youjian's mind: Japanese pirates using bayonets to impale a swaddled infant, because that infant too was a member of the nine degrees of kinship.

The ignorant fear nothing, and the ignorant possess enormous destructive power—the typical representatives being the roving bandits and the Manchus of his previous life.

Zhu Youjian was extremely disgusted by those who, in the name of righteousness, forcibly imposed upon many ignorant young people their own barbaric and backward ideas filled with violence, evil, destruction, tyranny, devastation, cruelty, ruthlessness, and misanthropy. If such people became top-level decision-makers, what they would bring to the entire nation would be a colossal disaster and trauma.

Fortunately, such fools had traveled back in time to plague the ancients instead.

Righteousness is not slaughtering one's own compatriots—how would that differ from the Japanese pirates?

If such narrow, crude, barbaric, and backward thinking were to prevail in later generations, how terrifying would that be? Disobey—kill. Then, in the name of liberating slaves, create a new batch of servile lackeys.

How much evil is committed under the guise of justice.

In Zhu Youjian's understanding, every ideology has its merits, and Confucianism is no exception.

But no ideology or doctrine should become a tool or excuse for rulers to oppress and exploit the common people. Take Confucianism: benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness are its foundations—but the implementation of these foundations must not be directed only at the lower classes; rather, it must be carried through consistently from the top down.

In other words, all excellent virtues must first be practiced by those in power, rather than demanding others do what they themselves are exempt from.

But ideals are beautiful while reality is cruel. If one wants those with vested interests to give up their private gains, relying solely on reforming thought cannot restrain them—only strict laws and institutions can possibly succeed in constraining them.

The fundamental idea of Confucianism's "extending innate knowledge" attempts to use morality to restrain people's words and deeds, but countless facts of later generations have proven that using law to constrain citizens' behavior is far more effective than using morality.

Kong Yinzhi's death this time inevitably touched upon a sensitive issue: the succession of the title of Duke Yansheng.

By conventional reasoning, Kong Yinzhi's eldest son, Kong Xingxie, was the natural successor as the sixty-sixth Duke Yansheng. But in Zhu Youjian's plan, the title of Duke Yansheng was to be left vacant for a period of time.

Weakening the Kong family was weakening Confucianism. Eliminating the current Duke Yansheng, then using other means to provoke internal strife within the Kong family over the succession to the dukedom, and finally causing their prestige and influence in both scholarly circles and among the common people to plummet—this was Zhu Youjian's goal.

The gentleman understands righteousness; the petty man understands profit.

These were the words of the Sage.

But if, for the sake of the profit of the Duke Yansheng title, one turns to open conflict, completely disregarding the righteousness of the gentleman—then are you not a petty man?

When the symbol of Confucianism becomes, in the eyes of all, a petty man fighting over profit, then what qualification does Confucianism have to govern regions and people with its doctrine?

This is merely a conjecture; actual implementation would likely prove quite difficult. After all, they are descendants of the Sage and must consider face. For the long-term interests of the entire family, they would not easily tear each other apart over the title.

Moreover, successive dynasties had regulations prohibiting the Kong family from internal strife over the Duke Yansheng title, considering that such behavior would disgrace the face of scholars and lose the proper duty of Confucians.

Strictly speaking, the Southern Branch was the orthodox line of the Duke Yansheng.

In the second year of Jianyan, Kong Duanyou, the forty-eighth-generation direct eldest grandson of the Sage, crossed south with Emperor Gaozong Zhao Gou of the Song, settled in Quzhou and established the family temple there, receiving the title of Duke Yansheng from Emperor Gaozong. It was not until the nineteenth year of Zhiyuan in the Mongol Yuan dynasty that Kublai Khan summoned Kong Zhu, then the sixth-generation Duke Yansheng of the Southern Branch, to the capital to discuss the succession. Kong Zhu stated that since five generations of his ancestral graves were already in Quzhou, he found it hard to abandon them, and since the Qufu descendants had meritoriously maintained the tombs, he was willing to yield the title to the Northern Branch. From that point on, the Northern Branch established its present lofty position.

In Zhu Youjian's view, the reason the Kong family had split into Southern and Northern branches was entirely a speculative act of hedging their bets on both sides for the family's survival—a practice common among great clans. Just as in a certain later era, fathers and sons, brothers and brothers, would ostensibly turn against each other over so-called ideals, when in fact it was all arranged by the elders of the clan. Whichever side ended up ruling the realm, the entire family would still reap sufficient benefits.

Just as Zhu Youjian was plotting to weaken the status of Confucianism, in the prosperous and wealthy Jiangnan region, a disturbance sparked by the court's imposition of commercial taxes was also brewing.