Chapter 734: Being a Treacherous Minister Is Not So Easy Either

The Divine Capital, Luoyang.

Ever since Pei Yuan was appointed Right Vice Director of the Secretariat, Vice Director of the Luantai, Chief Commander of the Palace Guard and Imperial Horse Army, and Governor of the directly administered prefectures and counties, Empress Cao Yanxi had done one great thing.

She had her second son, the eighth imperial prince Zhang Xianzai, only three years old, handed over to her elder sister, the Noble Consort Cao Yannai, to be brought to the Divine Capital, Luoyang.

And after Cao Yannai arrived in Luoyang, the Purple Tenuity Palace in Luoyang immediately went under martial law.

The entire palace guard was placed under the command of Luo Tongda, the last surviving great general of the old Guiyi Army and the former chancellor from the time of Zhang Zhao's father, Zhang Chengfeng.

The defense of Luoyang itself was entrusted to Cao Yanming, Duke of Ziting Commandery, who had just stepped down as Commissioner of Divine Capital Construction.

Eighty percent of the men used in this guard system came from Hexi and Longyou, and of that eighty percent, more than sixty percent came from the various families of the old Guiyi Army of Guazhou and Shazhou.

It could be said that, apart from people of the old Guiyi Army faction, no one else could get anywhere near it.

At the same time, Cao Yannai kept Zhang Xianzai with her, living in deep seclusion within the Purple Tenuity Palace.

And the reason Empress Cao Yanxi wanted to do this was that she had seen the surging waves beneath the seemingly calm surface.

In the less than a year since Zhang Zhao had left the capital at Chang'an for Liangzhou, the things Pei Yuan had done were each dangerous enough to be called perilous.

Some of these things, even Cao Yanxi felt Pei Yuan had gone too far, and was playing too recklessly.

The Eastern Capital, Kaifeng Prefecture.

After Zhang Zhao sent an imperial envoy to announce the appointment, everyone assumed Pei Yuan was going to become a treacherous minister who monopolized all power.

But quite the opposite — at first, Pei Yuan made no move at all, and even attending court seemed like a perfunctory formality, as if he were merely clocking in.

For two full months, he seized no power and handled no major affairs.

At first everyone thought Pei Yuan was pretending, but when they saw him keep slacking off for a full two months, many people came to believe it.

Privately it was rumored that Pei Yuan had long since fallen out of favor, and had been sent by the Emperor to take the blame, and that now he dared do nothing in order to protect himself.

Hmm! Quite reasonable.

With that, since the Emperor was absent and the "treacherous minister" who could be said to be wielding regency over the court had been cowed, why not hurry up and start having fun?

For a time, all manner of demons and monsters came out — the old military nobility who had been frustrated after Sage Zhang took control of the Central Plains, the fortress strongmen who had suffered heavy losses, and the great Buddhist establishments who bore grudges after their money houses were seized — all immediately began stirring up trouble.

Then, Pei Yuan let them run loose for another month, and suddenly launched a thunderous operation.

Using his authority, Pei Yuan transferred the patrol office troops and garrison troops of the directly administered Hezhong Prefecture and Shanzhou Prefecture directly into the Eastern Capital, Kaifeng Prefecture, and then, based on the evidence of crimes collected over those three months, arrested people one by one.

To be honest, an emperor like me, Sage Zhang, comes from a later era with relatively relaxed politics, and is not a harsh ruler at all.

One could even say that, compared to the rulers of all previous dynasties, within the categories of founding heroes and wise sovereigns, Sage Zhang was quite lenient.

In ranking, he would probably only come after Emperor Guangwu of Han and Fu Jian of the Former Qin.

In this Great Zhou, as long as you did not openly oppose Sage Zhang, did not break the king's law, and did not go out of your way to make trouble, Sage Zhang rarely killed anyone, and rarely made those below him suffer just for the sake of manipulation.

Was this style good or not?

On the whole it was very good. One must know that since the late Tang and Five Dynasties, the rule of the blade had prevailed — from top to bottom, military men (the emperor himself being a military man) simply did not reason or follow law with you. When something happened, it was one stroke of the blade, and the whole of society had been driven into a pathological state.

So Zhang Zhao's lenient manner quickly brought a long-missed gentleness to this violent society.

This was also the reason why Zhang Zhao, using the East-Returning faction that had entered the Central Plains and the Liang-Lan Six Valleys faction, had taken over most of the benefits of the old Hedong and Daibei military nobility without causing much unrest.

Everyone was longing for a stable society with rules.

However, without unrest, and under this atmosphere of leniency, there was no shortage of wrongdoing and lawbreaking.

People, after all, mostly remember the food but not the beating. Having finally been quiet for a few years, these fellows who had suffered losses in the process of the new dynasty's establishment began to make their moves.

Although they could not compete with the dragon-following meritorious officials from Hexi and Longyou, the losses they had suffered still had to be recovered somewhere, right?

If I can't beat the dragon-following meritorious officials, can't I still beat these commoners below?

So when Pei Yuan arrived at the Eastern Capital, Kaifeng Prefecture, he discovered that the social order of the Great Zhou had reached a point where it absolutely had to be turned around.

Although Zhang Xichong was strict, that strictness was directed at officials. He did well in matters of moral integrity and in pressing officials for efficiency.

In the few years since the founding of the Great Zhou, the court had campaigned constantly north and south, and in the supply and allocation of grain, fodder, baggage, mules, horses, carts, and boats, Zhang Xichong had provided flawless support without a single slip.

One could even say that, with the assistance of Commissioner of Military Affairs Guo Tiance, the central government of the Great Zhou that Zhang Xichong built was, of the hundred-odd power centers that had taken turns on stage since the An Lushan Rebellion, the most efficient and most complete, and the most successful in restraining the arrogant soldiers and fierce generals of former years.

But in other respects, faced with the lawless acts of large numbers of old and new meritorious officials, and the encroachment on the people's wealth by the Hexi Chamber of Commerce, the money houses, and the Buddhist establishment, Zhang Xichong had most likely deliberately turned a blind eye.

Because his most important task at the time was to use finances that were not ample to begin with to supply the great army's campaigns north and south.

So Pei Yuan knew what he had to do, and that was how the three-month-long fishing expedition came about, followed by the closing of the net.

On the eleventh of the sixth month, Pei Yuan arrested a large batch of old Hedong and Daibei meritorious officials who had forcibly seized people's farmland, abducted women, robbed shops, and even beaten people to death.

For these people, Pei Yuan strictly followed the law — beating with the plank, sentencing to hard labor, and exile.

A few unlucky ones were even beheaded as a warning to others, and even the cousin of Consort Kang in the palace — the grandson of Kang Fu — was sentenced to immediate execution by beheading.

One must know that Kang Fu had once shown great kindness to Zhang Zhao when he was weak and alone, and Consort Kang, with her exceptional beauty and skill in song and dance, had also borne an imperial prince and was greatly favored. Yet her own cousin — Pei Yuan had him killed without so much as blinking.

On the twenty-seventh of the sixth month, the father of a concubine of Duke of Su, Li Cunhui, had forcibly demolished the waterwheels of the common people along the Bian River over an irrigation dispute, and had ordered his household thugs to beat one commoner to death and injure more than ten others.

Pei Yuan, without the slightest mercy, detained this fool who was called the father-in-law of the Duke of Su, and the four thugs who had beaten and killed the commoners were all directly executed.

In the seventh month, Pei Yuan directed the remaining staff of the Secretariat and the Ministry of Rites to form an Inner Court Censorate, and began conducting surprise audits and investigations of the Hexi Chamber of Commerce and the money houses.

In these years, the Hexi Chamber of Commerce and the money houses of the Great Zhou had been in a state of almost completely unchecked growth.

Because Zhang Zhao knew nothing about finance to begin with, yet had gone and created paper money and money houses precisely in order to raise funds for war and to control the Buddhist establishments of the Central Plains.

By now, although the Hexi Chamber of Commerce and the money houses had indeed made great contributions to the court, after Zhang Zhao's lax oversight, their power had swelled to the point where they were beginning to contend with the Ministry of Revenue for fiscal authority, and were even called by officials the "true Ministry of Revenue."

Pei Yuan struck at crimes within the Hexi Chamber of Commerce and the money houses such as corruption, dereliction of duty, and competing with the government for profit.

At the same time, he prepared a memorial to Zhang Zhao, proposing that most of the functions of the money houses be merged into the Transport Commission, and then combined into a new office — the Gold, Silver, Salt, and Iron Transport Commission — placed under the direct management of the Department of State Affairs, while the remaining small portion would simply be turned into private property of the imperial household.

As for the Hexi Chamber of Commerce, Pei Yuan further suggested that certain of its functions be abolished and merged into the Brocade Guard.

But somehow, before this memorial was even sent out, it was leaked, and immediately provoked a huge outcry of opposition.

The head of the Hexi Chamber of Commerce, Cao Wanjin — the father-in-law of Zhang Liecheng — even openly drew his waist saber and declared that as long as Pei Yuan dared to send this memorial up to the imperial ear, he would come to Pei Yuan's door and fight to the death.

Upon hearing this, Pei Yuan said not a word, and immediately seized on the dirty-handed misdeeds of Cao Wanjin's youngest son and threw him into prison. Cao Wanjin frantically sought help everywhere, but could not get his youngest son out, and his prestige plummeted.

But from then on, Pei Yuan also needed heavy guards of armored soldiers whenever he went out.

Even at court assemblies, armed warriors stood guard with hands on sword hilts, for otherwise he might well be beaten — the very picture of a treacherous minister.

In the eighth month, just as Zhang Zhao was preparing to march east against the eight Dilie tribes, Pei Yuan made his move against the Buddhist establishment of the Central Plains.

First, on the pretext that the Emperor's birth mother, the Compassionate Sage Empress Dowager, would soon celebrate her birthday, he ordered the eminent monks of the four provinces of Zhili, Hebei, Hedong, and Jiaodong to assemble at the Eastern Capital, Kaifeng Prefecture, to chant sutras and pray for the Empress Dowager's blessings.

He further explicitly required that the abbots and senior seat-holders of the great temples in each region come in person.

As soon as these eminent and virtuous monks arrived, Pei Yuan immediately dispatched elite cavalry from Hanhai Garrison, working in coordination with local military inspectors and patrol officers, to launch surprise inspections of the ordination certificates held at every temple.

This was luring the tiger from the mountain, then striking at its heart!

One must understand that ever since the An Lushan Rebellion, and especially after Emperor Wuzong of Tang's persecution of Buddhism, the court had essentially stopped issuing ordination certificates to monks.

And as the court's control weakened, many temples had stopped taking ordination certificates seriously altogether.

The actual situation now was that most temples, apart from a handful of monks, simply had no ordination certificates at all.

Thus, in little more than ten days, Pei Yuan had thoroughly mapped out the information on all the great temples with more than three hundred monks, and registered every monk lacking an ordination certificate.

After that, he ordered the local authorities of every region to investigate all temples large and small within their jurisdictions — even those with only three or five monks had to be inspected.

Although Pei Yuan did not go so far as to announce what would be done with monks lacking ordination certificates, every major temple caught an extremely ominous whiff of what was coming.

And so, very quickly, in response to the government's campaign of certificate inspections, temples across the five provinces of Zhili, Hedong, Hebei, Jiaodong, and Jianghuai erupted in resistance, even armed rebellion.

The reason was simple: what sort of person would willingly become a monk?

Only two kinds. The first were those with ties to the temples — they voluntarily donated themselves to a temple, fraudulently registering their own fields as temple land under false names, all to pay less tax or none at all.

The second were those who had committed crimes, mostly serious ones. They entered the Buddhist order either to escape their enemies, to evade the authorities, or even simply to use the identity of a monk as cover, making it easier to travel freely about.

This practice was extremely prevalent from the late Tang through the Five Dynasties and Northern Song, and even into the Ming dynasty it remained a common means of concealment. One need only think of the tricks of Lu Zhishen and Wu Song in Water Margin to understand.

This was no Buddhist order — it was a den of bandits.

Historically, before Guo Rong's persecution of Buddhism, he specially formed the Palace Guard Cavalry and Infantry as a personal army to replace the imperial guards, whose strength had declined and which had been dominated by warriors from Daibei and Hedong.

And when recruiting brave warriors from all quarters into the Palace Guard Cavalry and Infantry, Guo Rong almost called out by name for those hiding in the temples to come forth and join him.

Only after the armed forces that so many temples relied upon had been largely dismantled did the subsequent persecution of Buddhism proceed smoothly.

In Zhang Zhou, however, the warriors Zhang Zhao had brought from the Hexi and Longyou regions were already formidable fighters, and he had also gained the following of the Guanzhong sworn followers, an army formed of over ten thousand men of Guanzhong.

Later, though some personal troops and imperial guards were recruited in the Central Plains, their scale could not compare at all with Guo Rong's in history.

Moreover, under Zhang Zhao, the topmost positions for warriors had long been filled to the brim, so the attraction was far weaker than that of the historical Later Zhou.

Thus, in the countryside and the great temples, quite a number of utterly vicious and desperate men still lay hidden.

This was also why Pei Yuan needed to mobilize the patrol-inspection troops of the two prefectures of Hezhong and Shanzhou, which lay close to Guanzhong, as well as the garrison troops of the prefectural and county guard stations.

Because this was a hard fight — a security war, quite unlike large-scale field operations.

Over the course of two months, across five provinces, from towns to the countryside, the fighting raged everywhere at once.

Even patrol inspectors of the inspection bureaus — the local tyrant-officers who ruled their patches at the grassroots of Zhang Zhou — seven of them died in battle, which shows how fierce the fighting was.

The fiercest of all, of course, was at the Eastern Capital, Kaifeng Prefecture. A day earlier, Pei Yuan had been riding in his carriage to morning court when, just as he was about to reach the imperial city, a band of assassins suddenly burst out.

They were highly skilled, with clear division of labor, and were even equipped with Fuyuan crossbows.

One group held off Pei Yuan's bodyguards, while several sharpshooters armed with Fuyuan crossbows had long since lain in ambush atop tall buildings. Within the space of a few breaths they loosed six bolts in succession, all of them striking the carriage.

But Pei Yuan, a treacherous schemer accustomed to ambushing others, was naturally extremely cautious himself.

He had reinforced both sides of the carriage with steel plates, wore at all times a coat of mail weighing more than twenty jin and woven from steel wire, and never traveled with fewer than thirty armored escorts.

The outcome, naturally, was that of the nineteen assassins, thirteen were slain on the spot, and the rest were wounded — presumably they could not have fled far.

In the Eastern Capital, Kaifeng Prefecture, in an unremarkable courtyard, a tall, lanky youth slipped in with great agility through a very well-hidden dog hole at the base of a wall.

His movement was extraordinarily smooth — he did not even get much dirt on his robes. One could tell he must have crawled through it many times; he was very practiced at it.

"Second Uncle, I've found out. Of the Fuyuan crossbows they used, three indeed came from the Hedong Arsenal. Their base in the Eastern Capital was a small traveling merchant from Hebei. On the surface, everything points away from Huainan and Huaibei."

The "Second Uncle" the youth addressed was none other than the "great treacherous minister" Pei Yuan, who had just survived the assassination attempt.

Pei Yuan gave a cold snort. "A clumsy cover-up. What they never dreamed of is that in the black markets of the entire Zhili region — the two capitals and three prefectures of the Eastern Capital, the Divine Capital, Zhengzhou, Guide, and Xuchang — of the Fuyuan crossbows, those head-chopping contraband weapons, fifty percent are controlled by the Brocade Guard, and another forty percent answer to the Brocade Guard.

No matter how they cover their tracks, the moment they used Fuyuan crossbows, they could not escape the court's surveillance."

The youth chuckled too. "With the wits of that Huaibei bandit Li Renshu, he would never understand that the feud between you, Second Uncle, and Cao Wanjin is merely an act, and that Commander Zhang of the Brocade Guard is far from wishing you dead.

But Second Uncle, you must not take such risks again. If anything were to happen to you, our Wenxi Pei clan would truly be in deep trouble."

In Pei Yuan's long, narrow, uncanny eyes there appeared, for once, a trace of warmth. He patted the youth before him on the shoulder.

"There are some things only your Second Uncle can do. The Sage has difficulties of his own.

I took this risk precisely to draw out Li Renshu and his people. These men lurk in the shadows, and they were even able to deliver Master Cixian into the heavily guarded Xiangji Temple. If we do not wipe them out in one sweep, the Sage's journey to Bozhou will be fraught with peril."

Having said this, Pei Yuan seemed somewhat moved. "The Wenxi Pei clan! In the Great Tang alone, it produced seventeen chief ministers, and gave forth a peerless talent like Duke Xian (Pei Xingjian). Yet now, only you and I, uncle and nephew, remain.

Zhongpu, once this matter is settled, I will recommend you to the Secretariat. With my old face to call upon, the Sage will surely keep you at his side.

Whether our Pei family can produce another Duke Xian — that will depend on you."

Pei Yuan had reason for such emotion. The reason he dared to act so ruthlessly, leaving many matters only half-finished before stopping, was clearly that he was blazing a trail for the Emperor.

Thus, those who knew Emperor Zhang's temperament and were politically astute all understood who stood behind Pei Yuan — and this was a major reason Pei Yuan did not meet with universal opposition.

Yet after Pei Yuan had done these things, even his own father, fearing that Pei Yuan would implicate the entire Pei clan, publicly severed relations with him and returned to the family's old home in Wenxi.

Of the several dozen members of the Pei family, the only one who remained at his side was this cousin's son, Pei Ji, Pei Zhongpu.

Pei Ji was overjoyed. He prostrated himself and kowtowed to Pei Yuan. He knew how rare this opportunity was — how many people would smash their heads and run their legs off without ever finding such a path.

To serve directly at the side of the Sage, the Son of Heaven! And his uncle had not kept such an opportunity for his own son, but had given it to him. It was truly an immense kindness.

Historically, Pei Ji was almost the last glory of the Wenxi Pei family. In war, he could lead armored cavalry to slay thousands of Khitan heads in battle; in peace, he could bring order to a region and achieve great governance.

He was also the last Han commander in Shuofang, dying in battle when Li Jiqian took Lingzhou. After him, Shuofang did not return to Han hands until the time of Zhu Hongwu.

Pei Yuan helped Pei Ji to his feet, then drew a short blade and held it out to him.

"I cannot bring myself to do it. You do it!"

The fifteen-year-old Pei Ji shook his head violently. "Uncle, why must you do this? Your nephew... cannot bring himself to do it either!"

"If we're putting on a show, we do it properly. You've trained in martial arts since childhood and know better than I how to judge severity. This cut must look serious to outsiders — bad enough that I can't handle affairs for at least ten days or more. Hurry up and do it!"

Pei Yuan gave a low shout. Tears streamed down Pei Ji's face. Only after taking three or four deep breaths did he steel himself and drive the knife into Pei Yuan.

The smell of blood suddenly spread through the air, and the sky began to lighten to the pale white of a fish's belly. A piece of news raced wildly through Kaifeng Prefecture in the Eastern Capital.

Duke of Zhao Pei Yuan had been assassinated and gravely wounded. He had still not risen from his bed, and even the imperial physicians from the palace had rushed over.

Along with the news of Pei Yuan's injury, the undercurrents that had long been stirring beneath the surface now surged into open waves.

The Emperor's expedition into the northern desert had ended in uncertainty; the Empress Regent was in a panic; the fate of the minister entrusted with state affairs was unknown. This was the perfect moment.

What some people would never realize was that Pei Yuan's ultimate purpose in stirring up these towering waves was to muddy the waters further — to force certain creatures lurking at the bottom to reveal their true faces, whether willingly or not.

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