Chapter 1118: The Yellow River Embankment

At this point, Wang Zhaojing cleared his throat and said with a solemn expression, "Big Brother, do not be angry. Since this Li Yuliang and the Li family wish to serve our Zhao Character Camp, all the more reason for you to take Miss Meng into your household."

Seeing Zhao Jin's expression change, Wang Zhaojing instead stood up and said with even greater gravity, "Big Brother's private affairs are ordinarily not for outsiders to comment on, but this concerns the balance within our Zhao Character Camp. No matter which side grows too powerful, even if that side's loyalty to Big Brother never wavers, it will still be a source of calamity and chaos."

Liu Yong and Ruhui exchanged a glance, both revealing bitter smiles. They had each thought of this, but every attempt to offer counsel was indeed awkward. Among the brothers, Wang Zhaojing had the best standing to speak these words.

Unlike before, however, this time Zhao Jin did not argue back. He merely nodded thoughtfully. Liu Yong, knowing Zhao Jin did not wish to continue the topic, quickly spoke up and asked, "Big Brother, for this celebration, did Mister Yu come?"

For a ceremony like this, Yu Zhiyuan would naturally not miss it. Given his relationship with Zhao Jin, he could sit at one of the foremost tables during the banquet — this was a moment to display his own status and his ties to the Zhao Character Camp, and also an opportunity to deepen the friendship between both sides. Not only did he come, he brought lavish gifts and arrived very early. Yet Yu Zhiyuan made no mention of the movements of the fleet below, as if the cooperation between the two sides was perfectly seamless, and as if he had been diligently training the personnel sent over by the Zhao Character Camp all along.

After receiving this reply, Liu Yong said with a laugh, "This time I had his Yu family fleet come ashore at the Haizhou port. I expect that young master Yu will be hurrying over again."

Everyone naturally understood what was going on. Hearing Liu Yong say this, they all could not help but burst into laughter. With Yu Zhiyuan's tactful and astute way of handling matters, he naturally knew what reaction to make. Perhaps these little maneuvers of the Yu family had nothing to do with him, but as the head of the Yu family, this responsibility was his to bear.

Liu Yong also shared his plans for those one hundred households of Pi Island Liaodong refugees. Since these hundred-plus households were all respectable families from Pi Island, they would certainly be persuasive to the other refugees. The next time Pi Island recruited Liaodong refugees, these people would be used as guides to speak from personal experience.

Although the agreement reached with Mao Wenlong's side was an exchange of population and timber for supplies, people were not livestock. Once they boarded the ships, someone had to soothe their emotions before they would settle their minds and come to Xuzhou. Nor was there any worry about the people selected from these hundred-plus households doing anything improper. Whatever they thought in their hearts, their families were the best hostages. After enough time passed, they would naturally become part of the Zhao Character Camp.

"Xiaoyong has rendered great merit this time!" After hearing all this, Zhao Jin could not help but say.

Making this one trip was tantamount to opening the sea route to Liaodong. Barring any unforeseen mishaps, the population and timber from Liaodong would flow continuously into the sphere of influence of the Zhao Character Camp via the sea route.

Everyone who heard this news was extremely excited. Zhao Jin and Wang Zhaojing immediately arranged to send word to the Li family's ships at Haizhou port. With matters having progressed to this stage, ships should be dispatched north as quickly as possible, though everyone knew that even with fast horses carrying the message, matters like assembling seagoing vessels could not be accomplished instantly.

After arriving at He Village, they rested for a day. Early the next morning, they handled affairs in the council hall. Once the discussion of the Liaodong sea situation was finished, everyone had a simple lunch. In the afternoon, however, Zhao Jin did not follow his usual routine of inspecting the drills of the personal guard brigade and the various regiments. Instead, he called out to a few people, "All of you, come with me to the riverside for a look."

Liu Yong was somewhat bewildered, but still followed the group out of the courtyard. Outside, over a hundred mounted household retainers were already on standby. Liu Yong was well aware of the protocols for escorting Zhao Jin: even for a temporary departure, it required nearly half a shichen to mobilize and arrange. The current state of affairs indicated that trips to the riverside had already become routine.

Riding from He Village to the banks of the Yellow River took over two shichen. If they did not hurry back through the night, they would have to spend the night on the Yellow River bank today.

Along the entire journey, Liu Yong noticed that the local militia and village braves of the farmsteads and stockaded villages along the road were all undergoing consolidated training. Passing by the household retainer encampments, he also saw training proceeding without pause. The household retainers were one thing, but for the local militia and village braves, this was abnormal. One had to know that this was the busy farming season. If the local militia and village braves toiled in the fields by day and still had to train, they would certainly be utterly exhausted, and it might even delay the farm work.

"They are paying twenty percent less of their share this year, and we will also allocate some of our stored grain to them, so they can eat their fill and have the strength," Wang Zhaojing, seeing Liu Yong's puzzlement, spoke up to explain.

If such arrangements had been in place when he left, he would certainly have known about it. It must have been something that happened in these past two months. Liu Yong hurriedly asked, "Are all the farmsteads arranged this way? How could our stored grain possibly be enough? Are we mobilizing supplies from Qingjiangpu?"

Paying twenty percent less and receiving allocations back — given the vast number of tenant households currently under the Zhao Character Camp's control, the quantity of grain consumed would be truly enormous.

"No, only the estates along the Yellow River are like this."

Hearing this, Liu Yong finally breathed a sigh of relief. The grain consumption for the population within this area was still acceptable. He did not continue asking why; in any case, he would see once they reached the Yellow River bank.

The road built between He Village and the Yellow River ferry crossing was broad and level, making the ride very easy. Along the way, they constantly saw fast horse messengers coming head-on toward them. Each of these messengers would be stopped by Zhao Jin's escorting household retainers, come over to report the situation, and then turn back.

After listening a few times, all the reports were about the water conditions of the Yellow River. Liu Yong also discerned a pattern: roughly every shichen, someone would come to report.

Upon reaching the bank of the Yellow River, the embankment here looked rather imposing. Before the Zhao Character Camp grew powerful, the Yellow River embankments in Xuzhou had been dilapidated and broken, all water conservancy works abandoned. The surging Yellow River normally provided no convenience for irrigation, yet whenever it flooded, it became a great calamity, severely harming the cities and villages along its banks. In the years since the Zhao Character Camp took control, every year during the agricultural off-season, they mobilized the tenant households and the common people of Xuzhou to undertake water conservancy projects, dig channels, and construct embankments. Over these years, the Xuzhou and Pizhou sections of the Yellow River channel had been widened as much as possible. The silt from the river was used to fertilize the fields, while the excavated channels diverted water for irrigation.

The quality of the crops depended entirely on whether there was sufficient water. Irrigated land was worth more than twice as much as dry fields that depended on the whims of heaven. The digging of these channels increased the harvests of the Zhao Character Camp's farmsteads, and the gentry and commoners of Xuzhou also benefited from it.

The embankment, however, drew many cynical remarks. It was nothing more than: every year there's a drought, yet you still spend all this effort building a river embankment. It's just a few young men who have never managed so many people before, wanting to stir up some project to show off. Some even said that a dragon god dwelled within the Yellow River, and no river embankment could stop this dragon god. Once it stirred, even an embankment cast from iron would be smashed to pieces — what use was there in building it?

Words aside, this sturdy river embankment still set people's minds at ease. Wang Youshan once told Wang Zhaojing that during the Zhao Character Camp's expansion, many of Xuzhou's gentry and powerful families had suffered losses. Why could most of them remain largely calm and composed? Apart from the pressure of force, it was also this Yellow River water conservancy that steadied people's hearts.

Anyone who was a native of Xuzhou carried a fear in their heart — the fear that the Yellow River beside them could burst forth into catastrophic floods at any moment. It was hard for people to leave their native soil. When the flood came, there was nowhere to hide: houses collapsed, fields were ruined, and in an instant, families were destroyed and lives lost. But as this embankment was built more and more completely, everyone grew more and more at ease.

By means of these water conservancy works, the Zhao Character Camp firmly secured the hearts of the people of Xuzhou and Pizhou. This was truly a measure that achieved multiple goals at once!

Liu Yong often visited the Yellow River ferry crossing near He Village, and he quickly noticed what was different now. Near the great embankment, a full thousand local militia were actually stationed. On and around the river embankment, people could be seen patrolling back and forth on foot and horseback at all times.

On the storage yard on this side of the river embankment, large quantities of bamboo cages could be seen piled up, and people were continuously making more. He had no idea what this was for.

Once he followed Zhao Jin up onto the river embankment and saw the Yellow River, Liu Yong understood what all these arrangements were for.

"The water has risen so quickly! When I left, the river flats were still exposed!" Liu Yong asked in astonishment.

In these years of successive drought, the Yellow River had dried up severely. The river flats on both sides were often exposed, and commoners greedy for a bargain even planted crops on them. When Liu Yong went north to Shandong, the surface of the Yellow River had also been very narrow. Yet now it looked as though the waters were surging, bearing a rather vast and mighty aspect.

Zhao Jin stared at the water's surface for a while, then walked along the river embankment in silence for a stretch. He carefully examined every part of the embankment, then said in a muffled voice, "This year Xuzhou has had favorable weather, but the rainfall in Henan has been heavier than in previous years. The Yellow River's waters are rising day by day. This is a great trouble!"

Wang Zhaojing explained at the side, "Big Brother has made preparations for this. Currently, over thirty thousand village braves along both banks of the Yellow River can be mobilized at any time. Now, in addition to their farm work, they must all prepare to reinforce the embankment, stockpiling earth and stone around the river channel. If anything happens, these people must step up."

If something went wrong with the Yellow River in the Xuzhou section, if the Yellow River flooded and submerged both banks, then the Zhao Character Camp's most essential region would be destroyed in a single day. The Zhao Character Camp would be thrown into great chaos. To have one's painstaking efforts ruined by a natural disaster — how could anyone bear that?

"If there truly is some breach, so long as the entire river embankment isn't destroyed, we can still hold out. We have sufficient manpower and sufficient supplies. Those bamboo cages, when the time comes, can be filled with earth and stone and thrown directly into the gap — it can still be sealed. Moreover, with all these years we've spent digging channels for irrigation and dredging the various waterways within our territory, diverting and channeling the water will be somewhat better than elsewhere..." Zhao Jin spoke of his arrangements, but after a few sentences, he sighed.

Shaking his head, he added, "But all this is merely doing what is humanly possible. How it truly turns out still depends on heaven!"

Zhao Jin's face was full of helplessness. He had always believed in the saying that man could conquer heaven, but the organization that could utter that phrase in his memory was one that could mobilize an immensely colossal force, from people to materiel. Even so, their response to great floods was still fraught with trepidation, each time met with full, all-out effort.

Compared to a force like that, what he himself now possessed was truly pitiful. For thousands of years, Huaxia had thrown the entire nation's strength into dealing with the Yellow River's floods, and it was perhaps even because of these floods that Huaxia had coalesced. But what did the Zhao Character Camp have now? Counting by distance, what could be used to deal with this Yellow River was only Xuzhou and Pizhou. If anything happened, the thought truly made one shudder.

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