Chapter 1003: Xuzhou and Jianzhou

Cao Huachun was originally the adopted son of Wang An, the Director of the Directorate of Ceremonial, and a favorite within the palace. But after Wang An was hounded to death by Wei Zhongxian, he was dispatched here, and his circumstances grew increasingly dire — word was he would soon be exiled to the frontier for hard labor. Cao Huachun was, by nature, loyal and honest; mindful of his family's fondness for children, he had always cared for Zhu Youjian with utmost devotion, and the bond between them was quite strong.

"Companion Cao, I'm writing a few names on the screen so I'll always remember them, and when I get the chance, I can bring them up more often with my Imperial Brother," Zhu Youjian said with great solemnity.

Cao Huachun smiled wryly. He knew how this habit of Zhu Youjian's had formed — a eunuch had told him stories from the Water Margin, recounting how Emperor Huizong wrote the names of the Four Great Bandits on his screen. As a result, Zhu Youjian picked up this fondness, and the fine screen was now stained with ink in many places. But the screen was a trifling matter; for a prince of the blood to refuse contentment in leisure and instead constantly voice opinions on state affairs — that was a path to inviting disaster.

"Your Highness, His Majesty may be willing to hear you speak of these things, but others may not be so willing, and when the time comes, it could bring harm to Your Highness. This slave does not know how much longer he can remain at Your Highness's side to serve. Your Highness must be prudent!" Cao Huachun urged, lowering his voice.

The imperial palace was a place of perilous hearts. Though Zhu Youjian was young, his mind had matured far beyond his years. Hearing Cao Huachun's words, he pondered in silence for a moment, then nodded firmly and said, "Companion Cao, I will remember."

"The decree enfeoffing Your Highness as Prince of Xin will arrive by the eighth month. When that time comes, things will be far better for Your Highness than they are now." Cao Huachun offered this with a smile to console him, then glanced at the screen. On it, he saw four crooked, ungainly characters written — two place names: one was "Jianzhou," the other was "Xuzhou."

"My Imperial Brother is always fretting over the Jianzhou Jurchens in Liaodong. Every time he speaks of them, he grows very troubled," Zhu Youjian said.

Cao Huachun nodded and said with a smile, "Your Highness concerns himself with state affairs. A pity that in the future, he can only be a feudal prince..." As he spoke the latter half of the sentence, Cao Huachun instinctively lowered his voice, realizing he had misspoken. Yet in that moment, a thought he could not suppress flashed through his mind: His Majesty expends no effort on his consorts; if he were to have no children...

At this, Cao Huachun shook his head to himself. First preserve yourself, then speak of other things. His Majesty is so young; having children is but a matter of time. Why trouble yourself with so many thoughts?

Amid the clamor and bustle of Xuzhou, a batch of prisoners was taken from the city's main jail and escorted under guard to the refugee stockade village on the eastern shore of Luoma Lake. These prisoners had not been subjected to much torment, but during the escort, their mouths were bound so they could make no sound, and they were specifically assigned an equal number of militia guards for the journey. Quite a few people saw these prisoners weeping bitterly as they walked, yet no sound came out.

Among the upper ranks of the Zhao Camp, this batch of prisoners was no secret. They were the various agents sent to Xuzhou by the Prince of Lu's estate — subordinate officials of the estate, estate servants, and even relatives of the princess consort and the like. They had all arrived assuming they could throw their weight around and extort a great fortune from Xuzhou, never imagining they would be thrown directly into the great jail and locked in confinement. Every one of them had shouted that they were men from the Prince's estate, that to touch them was rebellion, a capital crime punishable by beheading and confiscation of property. Yet in jail, the most that earned them was a beating, or a few days of hunger. Gradually, fear set in for all of them — with such utter lawlessness, who knew if their lives would be taken?

In the end, however, they were dealt with as captured refugees: forbidden to leave their assigned stockade village. There was not even a need to silence them. Not to mention that the Prince of Lu's estate had sent no further men for several months, once word spread of the extermination of the Lu lineage in Shandong, everyone in the Prince of Lu's estate could naturally guess at some of what had happened and was terrified. They had even gone so far as to entrust merchants from Henan, through several layers of intermediaries, to send word, claiming only that the men they had dispatched had all been found — murdered by greenwood bandits within Henan territory — and that the bodies had already been collected. It had nothing to do with the Zhao Camp, they said; all that had come before was mere misunderstanding and jest, not to be taken seriously.

According to reports sent back by the Internal Guard from Weihui Prefecture, the Prince of Lu's estate was surrounded by tight security. With no government troops available for the moment, they had begun spending their own money to muster local braves and militia for protection. Though it was of little practical use, it was always good for bolstering their courage.

The Zhao Camp never regarded the Prince of Lu's estate as a threat. The two were separated not only by the Yellow River but by several prefectures in between. No matter how much trouble the Prince of Lu's estate stirred, it could pose no substantive threat to the Zhao Camp. Moreover, those local braves and militia of the Prince of Lu's estate were utterly useless. The Zhao Camp's Internal Guard had been steadily buying off people inside the Prince of Lu's estate; dealing with them would be entirely different from dealing with the Prince of Lu in Shandong.

The government troops who had suppressed the Incense Sect refugee rebellion had yet to disperse, but the Zhao Camp's Cloud Mountain Firm had already begun its operations in Yanzhou Prefecture. First came the illicit salt trade: within the Zhao Camp's sphere of influence, all salt dealings had to pass through the hands of Yan Heilian and his associates. Then came the grain trade. Controlling this stretch of the canal was tantamount to seizing the lifeline of Yanzhou Prefecture's grain business. To Zhao Jin and his comrades' surprise, one of the three grain houses in Jining City belonging to the Prince of Lu's estate had actually been bought out by the Kong Manor of the Duke of Yansheng.

Qufu County was very close to both Jining City and Ziyang City. The Kong Manor surely understood the full cause and effect of this refugee chaos, yet they still dared to snatch food from the tiger's mouth. Such audacity was truly unexpected. Furthermore, when Cloud Mountain Firm acquired the other two grain houses, it had not been as easy as they had initially predicted. Both overt and covert tactics had been employed, and extra silver had been spent before they finally secured them.

"... Have they lost their minds?" To this development, Zhao Jin and his comrades had only this single thought.

However, the spoils of the Zhao Camp were not so easy to swallow. To conduct the grain business in Jining, especially large-scale bulk grain trading, one had to be tied into the canal transport system. Waterway shipping was cheap, while overland cart and horse transport was prohibitively expensive. Not to mention that the waterways could bring in cheap grain from the south, driving prices down even further.

The manager sent by Cloud Mountain Firm to Jining, while dispatching a man to report to Zhao Jin, simultaneously gave orders at the canal docks: no business whatsoever was to be accepted from the grain house taken over by the Kong Manor of the Duke of Yansheng. There was no "or else" — because everyone knew the consequences. Thus, although the Kong Manor had taken over this grain house, it could not conduct a single deal.

"In the past, Big Brother always emphasized having all the paperwork in order and following every rule to the letter. I always found it a nuisance, but only now do I see the benefit of this approach," Wang Zhaojing could not help but sigh. Ru Hui shared the same view.

When the Zhao Camp seized the farmlands of the various counties and districts in the western part of Yanzhou Prefecture, they did not rely on brute force to occupy them. Instead, they spent silver, transaction by transaction, to purchase the land. Admittedly, most of the land no longer had owners, and one only needed to spend a small sum at the government office to obtain the title deeds. Moreover, after their great victory, the Zhao Camp could have swaggered in and forcibly occupied the land, and from the common folk to the officials, not a single person would have dared raise an objection — everyone wanted to live a long life.

Yet once the situation had stabilized, the buyers and stewards dispatched by the Kong Manor began buying up farmland on a massive scale wherever the Prince of Lu's estate had held manors and wherever the refugee chaos had erupted. The Duke of Yansheng's Kong Manor had been entrenched in Shandong just as long as the Prince of Lu's estate. Moreover, since the land of Qi and Lu venerated Confucius and Mencius, and since local officials all relied on the Confucian classics to pass the examinations and secure their posts, the Kong Manor's influence was even greater than that of the Prince of Lu's estate. If the Zhao Camp had not held the title deeds in hand, there would certainly have been entanglements. No one dared clash head-on with a great magnate like the Zhao Camp, but troublesome matters would have been unavoidable. It might even have alarmed the government troops, leading to another round of bloodshed. Even with the Zhao Camp's strength, after this great battle, they needed to rest and recuperate, to digest the fruits of victory; they did not wish to start another major conflict.

Thus, Zhao Jin's practice of doing things by the rules had yielded a great advantage this time. No matter how much face the Duke of Yansheng's Kong Manor had, no matter how unwilling they were to accept it, they had no way to forcibly seize farmland and estates that already had owners. Trying to use force would be a joke — would you dare play rough in front of such a powerful magnate?

"This time we've crushed the Incense Sect as an enemy, but we've raised up new foes: the Duke of Yansheng's Kong Manor, and those Shandong officials and gentry who want to take a bite out of the Prince of Lu's legacy. They'll certainly find us an eyesore now," Zhao Jin thought this through very clearly.

Having been through so much, Zhao Jin's comrades had also become quite philosophical: "The larger our territory, the more people we encounter, and naturally, the more enemies we have. All they can do is use their official status to pressure others. That kind of wealth, rank, and prestige — it doesn't work so well here in our Xuzhou."

By now, the Zhao Camp controlled two-thirds of the territory of Yanzhou Prefecture. The remaining third — the region west of the boundary formed by Zou County and Teng County, the area around Fei County and Yizhou — was already part of the Yimeng mountain range. Travel in and out was not easy, there was little flat farmland, and its value was far inferior to the western region.

On the lands of the counties and districts they controlled, even if the local gentry and strongmen harbored discontent, they had no capacity to resist. They had all been gravely weakened in the Incense Sect rebellion and knew well the Zhao Camp's power. The outlaws of the rivers and lakes, the mounted bandits and highwaymen, dared not make the slightest reckless move. Those who had attached themselves to the Incense Sect had either been completely wiped out or captured and turned into serfs. The rest all knew the Zhao Camp's strength, or were simply already under the Zhao Camp's control.

To put it plainly, the two greatest powers on the underworld paths of Yanzhou Prefecture were one tied to the canal trade and one tied to the illicit salt trade. The lifeblood of both these powers was firmly gripped by the Zhao Camp, and they had long since submitted.

"... This humble one and several loyal sect members arrived in Jining and sought out reliable, familiar contacts from the old days to go to various places to restore order. We never expected that in the area around Jining, Ziyang, and Yuncheng, there were already people spreading the faith. Though their movements were furtive, we could still trace their origins: the Southern Infinite Teaching of Yizhou, the Wooden Club Society of Qingzhou Prefecture, and the former White Lotus Sect..."

This was the news sent back by Zheng Quan, You Zhenrong, and a few others from Jining. The Incense Sect, which had secretly spread its teachings and organized and incited the common people, had been smashed. The other sects it had once suppressed were now rapidly expanding and infiltrating the area. Moreover, they all held a hostile attitude toward the Zhao Camp. In the eyes of these local sects, what the Zhao Camp was doing was no different from their own activities — they simply had more money, grain, swords, and guns. Toward a power that was a competitor in this way, submission or alliance was naturally impossible.

Taking into account a suggestion from reader "Pig-Shaped Sloth" in the comments section: the processing capabilities of that era could not achieve mass production, and there were no real tolerances to speak of. This meant that the performance of pre-loaded cartridges would vary from one firearm to another. In many matters, we must always consider the manufacturing and processing capabilities of the time.

Thanks to "Yuan Heng Li Zhen," "Lin Hai Guan Tao 2014," "huifly," "Yi Shen De Mei Wei," and "hotbeast" — both new and old friends — for your tips. Thank you all for your subscriptions and monthly tickets. Thank you, everyone.