Chapter 160: The Great Xin's Dragon Vein

As descendants of the Tian clan of Qi, the Wangs of Yuancheng originally lived in Qi territory. It was not until the time of Emperor Wu of Han that they moved here to escape a feud. Decades later, Wang Zhengjun became the Han Empress Yuan, the Five Marquises rose to power, and Wang Mang supplanted the Han. For a time, this unremarkable little town on the edge of Wei Commandery became a land where dragons arose: taxes and levies were waived, grain was kept in full, every household was granted noble rank, and all rejoiced.

Yet in times of chaos, such a place became a juicy prize in the eyes of refugees and bandits.

East of Yuancheng, within the vast refugee-bandit host slowly advancing westward, a man clutching his never-fillable belly gazed ahead longingly and said, "I hear Yuancheng has stockpiled ten years' worth of grain — enough for us to eat until we die of old age."

"I hear every household in Yuancheng decks its doors with colored silk."

Someone in the ranks shivered. "I don't want colored silk. I just want a warm fur coat. It's already spring, and it's still this cold."

"Then you'll have to strip it off the rich folk."

They let out a round of lewd laughter. "I'll strip more than just the rich households — I'll strip their wives and daughters too."

But they were quickly silenced by their bandit chief's shout: "If Granny Chi hears that, do you lot want to die?"

The crowd sheepishly shut their mouths. Unlike other bandit gangs, the River Blockade Bandits from Pingyuan had one rule: no mistreating women — for their commander was a woman.

Though Chi Zhaoping went by the name "Granny Chi," she was in truth barely past thirty. Ten years ago, the great river burst its banks. Yuancheng was spared from the flood, protected by levees the court had spent heavily to build, but downstream Pingyuan Commandery suffered terribly.

At that time, Chi Zhaoping had just been married. As a woman of recorded name and lineage, she too came from a small landowning family, and her life after marriage was quite happy. Who could have foreseen that in a single night, the surging floodwaters would roar in and destroy everything?

When she opened her eyes, the farmland and village hamlets were gone — all she saw was boundless murky water all around. Her family was scattered, and her husband had fallen into the flood. He had been known throughout the countryside as an expert swimmer, but in the violent torrent, his once-elegant strokes turned into the frantic flailing of a dog. Her final impression of him was his hand, ceaselessly reaching out and struggling, and the yellow water rushing into his mouth as he opened it wide to shout.

Chi Zhaoping's originally lovely voice was ruined from weeping in that flood. To this day, she speaks as though her throat is full of grit, as if the silt-laden water that drowned her husband had poured into her mouth as well.

Chi Zhaoping survived by clinging to a roof beam with her child in her arms. After the fiercest crest of the flood passed, months of torment followed. Houses and hamlets, fields and farmland — all were submerged. Grain was either washed away or soaked and rotted. Hundreds of thousands struggled on the line between life and death. Yet the court only busied itself debating whether to restore the nine ancient river channels from Yu the Great's time. The province barely distributed a few tens of thousands of shi of relief grain — a mere drop in the bucket.

That year, those who died in the waters numbered in the tens of thousands.

In the decade since, because no proper control was undertaken, the Yellow River could only seek its own new course across the great plain. One moment it seized the Huzi River, the next it sought to merge with the Ji River, twisting and writhing like a giant serpent through Yan and Qing provinces. The common people were mere ants trembling beneath its body; every shift brought utter catastrophe.

The irony, oh, was that the court had given Pingyuan a new name: "He Ping" — the River Pacified.

Have they no shame?

"River pacified? River pacified? The river is not pacified!"

Shouting such grievances, the displaced people trudged aimlessly through the waters. Starving corpses collapsed by the roadside, cooking pots hung from ropes, and cannibalism became an annual, commonplace sight. Chi Zhaoping could only clutch her child tightly, avoiding the sinister gazes cast upon mother and child, and she absolutely refused to reach the point of trading children to eat.

That Chi Zhaoping, a mere woman, survived to this day was thanks to a trade she had learned in her maiden home: gambling.

The Chi family had once run gambling dens, hosting games of liubo and eight-throw. They always drew crowds of idle men who would wager their entire family fortunes, abandoning work and duty, forgetting sleep and food, playing from dawn to dusk and then continuing by oil lamp and candle, their eyes fixed on those tiny bone dice.

Even amid the flood, even at the end of the world, the gambling dens in town still thrived. People who had lost everything staked it all on one last throw, hoping to win back the beauty of the past.

Chi Zhaoping had secretly read her family's Classic of Gambling. She first persuaded the men who had seized control over her with gentle words, then put up the stakes and opened the tables. She won without fail, and the people thought her a divine being. Later, she established her own gambling den. In this trade, the house always wins, and Chi Zhaoping's reputation only grew more mysterious. She did not deny it, and quite enjoyed the aura.

Her wealth accumulated more and more, and many people flocked around this female gambling boss, willing to serve as her enforcers.

Then, in the summer of last year, the unpredictable floodwaters came again. Chi Zhaoping once more lost everything. This time, even her child was swept away in the flood crest and never found again.

When the waters receded, all she had left in her hand was a single filthy bone die.

Chi Zhaoping hated the great river. She hated that despairing yellow — which was also the virtuous color of the Xin Dynasty.

The renown she had built running gambling dens and setting up tables drew many lost souls to Chi Zhaoping's side. Following the hoarse voice of this furious mother, they began to pick up their sodden farming tools and sharpen wooden staves. No longer resigned to their fate, they charged in rage toward the counties and townships that had been spared from disaster, killing officials and throwing open the granaries.

Refugees who had once again lost their livelihoods to the river's havoc kept joining, from hundreds to thousands, and the band swelled day by day. The Governor of Qing Province dispatched a host of over ten thousand troops to drive the refugee bandits out. They thus left their homeland, which held nothing but floodwaters and tears, and entered Shouliang Commandery in Yan Province.

At the start of spring, General Jing Shang's great army and the Governor of Yan Province launched an assault on Mount Tai to the east, seeking to annihilate Fan Chong. For the moment, Chi Zhaoping and the others were left unchecked. They therefore moved into the rear of the government forces, following the old river course southwest, groping for survival, and gradually drew near Yuancheng.

It was at this moment that eleven years of pent-up resentment within Chi Zhaoping suddenly erupted.

"I have heard that if the Emperor would merely spend one-tenth of the coin, grain, and manpower used to campaign against the Xiongnu, he could return the great river to its old course. The reason he lets the river run wild and ravage the plains is entirely because he fears that if the river returns, it will flood the Wang family's ancestral graves in Yuancheng!"

Some even said that the flood that year had originally been headed straight for Yuancheng, but the Emperor, to protect his old home, had ordered the great levee breached, letting the downstream plains take the disaster in their stead!

Whether conspiracy theory or truth, Yuancheng had become the target of the flood victims' fury. By now, they had long since abandoned all hope of amnesty or relief.

Chi Zhaoping gave direction to the aimlessly wandering bandits: "Everything is because of Yuancheng."

There was not only grain there, not only rich households, but also the very culprit that had driven them from their homes!

"Take Yuancheng, and we'll have food."

"Dig up the Emperor's ancestral graves, and we'll have our revenge!"

Chi Zhaoping's hoarse voice cried out: "The immortals have told me — destroy Shalu, and the floods on the plain will recede!"

When Wang Zhengjun passed away, Diwu Lun's teacher Yang Xiong had been ordered by Wang Mang to compose the "Dirge for the Empress Yuan" for her. It expounded at great length upon the history and virtuous fortune of the Yuancheng Wang clan: "From Chen and Tian to Wang, they built their ancestral halls. Crossing the River and the Ji, the numen of Shalu. Essence of the great yin, Heaven-born sage bearing. In Yu were auspicious signs, made a match for Han..."

Although Wang Mang's usurpation of the Han rested on the nonsense claim that "the spirit of Han's Exalted Emperor personally abdicated to me," few believed it. Stripping away the saintly halo he had crafted for himself, the true reality was that the Wang family, as imperial in-laws, had risen to power entirely on women's skirt hems.

That, after all, did not sound particularly good when spoken aloud. After the Xin Dynasty was established, the Wang clan could only frantically play up all manner of auspicious omens that had occurred in Yuancheng — such as the dead tree at the ancestral temple bursting into a second spring — and artificially manufacture various sacred sites, to which they rendered sacrifices. Outside Yuancheng County, they built Wulu City to enclose their old home of Weisu Hamlet and the ancestral graves, and they also constructed the Sha Pavilion to protect Shalu, the Wang clan's sacred site.

In short, Yuancheng had become nothing less than the dragon vein of the Great Xin, receiving considerable attention from the court. A thousand commandery troops were permanently garrisoned there, and it was mandated that should any incident occur, the surrounding commanderies of Shouliang, Zhiting, and Weicheng must rush to its aid at once!

Therefore, upon receiving the intelligence, Diwu Lun first made an excuse to leave behind his subordinate, Clerk Shi Xiong, and the others, and began to discuss the matter with Ma Yuan in private.

"According to the urgent dispatches from Yuancheng, this group of refugee bandits is different from the usual sort. Sending troops to drive them off not only fails to scatter them, but their numbers only grow. Moreover, they are directly assaulting Wulu City and the Sha Pavilion. Each of those two places has two to three hundred troops, and both are besieged. Meanwhile, the Yuancheng garrison is also blocked within the county seat and cannot render mutual aid."

Ma Yuan, like Diwu Lun, held the court's dragon-vein claims about Yuancheng in contempt. He simply asked him, "What does Boyu think? To rescue, or not to rescue?"

"Of course we must rescue them!"

Although he usually never missed a chance to gripe about how Yuancheng flaunted its special status and refused to fulfill its annual accounting obligations, Diwu Lun could distinguish the urgent from the trivial.

"If Yuancheng falls, the Emperor is bound to fly into a towering rage. My tenure as Grand Governor of Weicheng, which hasn't even warmed the seat yet, would come to an end — and I would likely be the first held to account."

Ma Yuan, for his part, was indifferent. Going home would be fine — it would spare his daughter from being a grass widow. But if Wang Mang grew too furious and lopped off Diwu Lun's head, turning a living widow into a real one, that would be unfortunate.

As far as personal sentiment went, if the old Wang family's ancestral graves were dug up, what was that to him? Diwu Lun might even clap and cheer. But as a matter of principle, Yuancheng could not be left unrescued. As for how to rescue it, there were subtleties to consider.

Diwu Lun said, "Shi Xiong is impatient and wants to dispatch two thousand commandery troops at once. But the refugee army's arms and armor are uneven, and they know nothing of siegecraft. Wulu City and the Sha Pavilion both have high walls and deep moats; they will be hard-pressed to fall in a short time. In my view, delaying a few days would not be out of the question."

Ma Yuan, worthy of being a father-in-law, immediately grasped Diwu Lun's intent. He pointed at his son-in-law and laughed. "You want to borrow the bandits to intimidate your superiors, so that afterward you can plead hardship to the court and negotiate terms?"

Exactly!

Diwu Lun mused — wasn't there a saying from the Cold War, that Berlin was the West's family jewels?

Well, Yuancheng was the imperial family's family jewels. Never mind squeezing them until they burst — if the refugee bandits so much as grazed them, old Wang would be beside himself with anxiety, howling in pain.

"Why has Yuancheng come under bandit attack? Because Weicheng Commandery has not trained enough troops and could not detach forces to garrison it."

"Why not train more commandery troops? Because all the grain, by imperial decree, has been handed over to General Jing Shang, and the number of commandery troops is restricted — there is simply no way to train them."

In a single sentence: "Your Majesty, your home region was attacked by refugees and nearly lost — all because the Grand Governor of Wei Commandery, Diwu Lun, lacked sufficient authority!"

The increased militia training and self-collected grain that Diwu Lun had been hoping for were both wrapped up in this affair.

Ma Yuan understood. "What Boyu means is that we must rescue Yuancheng, but we cannot make the rescue look too easy."

No money to read novels? We're giving away cash or reading coins, claim within 1 day! Follow the official account 【Bookworm Base】 to claim for free!

Diwu Lun nodded. "Exactly. We must delay, yet we must drive off the refugees before reinforcements from other commanderies arrive — otherwise it will still count as dereliction of duty."

This was by no means a simple rush to the rescue and strike at the bandits; it required fine control, a precise grasp of timing and degree.

He cupped his hands toward Ma Yuan. "A burden this heavy — who else but you, my elder, could bear it?"

……

PS: Chapter 2 at 18:00, will be a bit longer.