Chapter 388: What Seems Absurd Is Actually True

Zhao Jin was stunned, and so were the other brothers in the room. His official identity was nothing more than a village chief, or perhaps a runner status that hadn't been struck from the prefectural magistrate's office. On what grounds could he go save the people of Fengyang? And he was in Xuzhou, a man of Xuzhou — what connection did he even have to Fengyang?

Hearing the silence from Zhao Jin and the others, Zhong Gonghui looked up, tears streaming down his face, his expression full of grief as he cried out hoarsely, "Master Jin, a hundred thousand people of Fengyang Prefecture have no homes to return to and catastrophe is about to strike. Master Jin, please save them!"

"A hundred thousand." At that number, Zhao Jin's gaze sharpened, but he said, "Do you know how many refugees I've killed? The mountains of corpses and seas of blood outside Xuzhou city — that was all the work of us brothers. You're a refugee yourself, yet you come begging me. Are you right in the head?"

The words sounded like mockery, but as he spoke, Zhao Jin made a hand signal. Liu Yong immediately went to the door, pointed outside at the men beyond, and then made a gesture as well. The guards outside silently withdrew from the courtyard. Until summoned, no one would come near the area.

"Master Jin, you have killed countless, but you have also saved countless. If you had not acted, these nearly twenty thousand people of Shandong would likely have all drowned in the Yellow River, perhaps not even surviving this winter. Yet now they have food to eat and shelter to live in. This is your great kindness, your great compassion, Master Jin. It was precisely seeing your kindness and compassion that gave this lowly one the courage to come and beg for your help." This speech had clearly been prepared long in advance; Zhong Gonghui delivered it in a torrent.

As he spoke, the four girls kneeling there kept looking up at Zhao Jin, as if studying exactly what kind of man he was. Whenever their eyes met his, they would shyly shrink back.

Being watched by girls, and beautiful girls at that, was a pleasant feeling, but Zhao Jin caught himself at once. He smiled and said, "Did you prepare these four girls as a gift of introduction?"

At this question, Zhong Gonghui froze, and the four girls trembled, their faces flushing bright red. Before Zhong Gonghui could open his mouth, Zhao Jin continued, "Since you're refugees, I imagine you couldn't produce anything of value. Zhao and his brothers are all young men, so you decided to cater to our tastes?"

Watching Zhong Gonghui's dumbstruck expression below, Zhao Jin said with a smile, "Xiaoyong, take these four girls out and find a few experienced women to question them. Zhong Gonghui, if what you've said doesn't match what the four of them say, none of you will live!"

Ji Xiang had been staring at the four girls the entire time. Hearing Zhao Jin say this, a look of regret immediately appeared on his face. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no sound came out.

The girls had never imagined they would be handled this way. Hearing the words "none of you will live," all of them turned pale with terror, their bodies trembling uncontrollably. Two of them burst into tears outright and looked toward Zhong Gonghui, sobbing, "Uncle Zhong..."

Yet upon hearing Zhao Jin's words, Zhong Gonghui instead grew calm. Still kneeling, he turned his head and said, "Don't be afraid. Just say whatever you know. Nothing will happen to you."

Zhao Jin and his brothers had been watching Zhong Gonghui's expression and reactions the whole time. Seeing that he showed no panic or unease, they exchanged glances and all nodded.

The girls were led out. It was a while before Liu Yong returned. During this time, Zhao Jin remained silent, and Zhong Gonghui, kneeling on the ground, showed no signs of alarm either, simply kneeling with his head bowed in calm composure, without the slightest improper behavior.

Once Liu Yong returned, Zhao Jin finally spoke: "Tell me in detail."

That morning he had heard the plight of the Qi brothers, and now he was hearing about the plight of the Fengyang refugees. He hadn't thought of any of this during the bridal chamber the night before.

"Master Jin, the people of Fengyang have suffered terribly!" Zhong Gonghui began, his voice trembling. Being allowed to explain in detail — this was a good start.

Before coming, Zhong Gonghui had harbored some crafty intentions. He had painstakingly assembled these beauties and assumed that Zhao Jin and his men, all young and full of vigor, would be susceptible to his schemes. He had never expected to find such a composed group of young men. And beyond their composure, their killing aura was simply too intense. With several of them sitting around staring at him, he felt a chill spreading through his body again and again, and even his mind slowed.

Still, being older had its advantages. Once he realized he couldn't play clever tricks, he simply spoke honestly.

Fengyang Prefecture had suffered a disaster this year. Zhao Jin and his brothers were well aware of this. That year, disasters had struck everywhere — Shandong, Henan, and the Southern Metropolitan Region — it was nothing rare.

Shandong was overrun with refugees. Over three hundred thousand refugees had gathered along the Huai River in Fengyang Prefecture and were led by certain schemers toward the Pizhou area. This resulted in Xuzhou's Assistant Regional Commander Zhou Baolu leading his troops to quell the unrest, leaving the Xuzhou region completely undefended. Of those several hundred thousand refugees, some died in Pizhou, some returned to Fengyang, and some never left at all.

After the worst of the drought passed, many of the refugees who had survived by luck were already thinking of returning home. A little rain had fallen; if they hurried to plant something, they might still get a harvest.

But no one had expected that the troops of Fengyang Prefecture would never return to their camps, instead continuing to purge the refugee bandits. The local strongmen's militia and village braves also pursued them like madmen. The refugees who were caught were either sold into slavery or butchered outright under the blade.

Some people went to the yamen to file complaints, but they simply vanished without a trace. The scale of this was too great for no word to leak out at all. Eventually, the refugees vaguely learned the truth: from top to bottom, the officials and the gentry had colluded to completely swallow up the farmland left behind by the departing refugees.

The benefits in this were immense. The drought had destroyed not only farming households but also many small and mid-sized landlords. The combined acreage, in both quantity and quality, was top-grade. Swallowing it up meant staggering, heaven-sent profit.

The Fengyang Garrison Eunuch and the Fengyang Grand Coordinator had reached a tacit understanding. As long as they kept silent, there would be no refugees returning home within Fengyang Prefecture. Any refugees wandering about were refugee bandits, and the government troops and militia were blameless in exterminating them.

In the past, the authorities, because of tax collection and corvée labor impositions, had not been on good terms with the local gentry and strongmen. Incidents of militias and yamen runners clashing with government troops were not uncommon. But this time, throughout Fengyang, especially north of the Huai River, everyone from top to bottom was united as one.

It was said to be a famine year, yet the profits were greater than in a year of plenty. With a bit of luck, doubling one's family fortune several times over was easy; if done on a large scale, it could even multiply dozens of times.

There were gentry whose consciences stirred, but in such an environment, if you didn't join in the mire, you would only be eliminated by the others, your family property swallowed up by them.

Some refugees tried to return home to test their luck, but on the road, because they couldn't produce the newly issued travel permits, they were treated as bandits. Those who offered the slightest resistance were killed; the rest were sold into slavery. The bitter irony was that these slaves, worked like beasts of burden, might well be tilling their own family's land — only now they were doing it for someone else.

In truth, those captured as slaves were still the lucky ones. Originally, the various districts of Fengyang Prefecture had also planned to capture these refugees as slaves. After all, swallowing up the land was pointless if there was no one to farm it. But now, refugees from Henan were coming into Fengyang Prefecture along the Guo River, the Hui River, and other tributaries of the Huai River. They had heard various rumors about Xuzhou and feared going there to be killed, so Fengyang Prefecture became their choice.

News traveled poorly in those times. Although word of Fengyang Prefecture's disaster had spread somewhat, the early blockades by the prefecture kept it from being widely known. In contrast, the story of Zhao Jin of Xuzhou exterminating the refugee bandits, being legendary in its own right, had spread far and wide — and had been exaggerated countless times over.

It was a case of one waning as the other waxed. Refugees dared not go to Xuzhou and instead believed there was a path to survival in Fengyang Prefecture, so they flooded in in great numbers.

The land they had worried would lie empty now had people to farm it — and these were outsiders who would work for nothing more than food, people with no roots and who were even easier to control.

With this far better option available, the original local refugees and disaster victims of Fengyang became a pestilence of refugee bandits that had to be swept away.

Zhao Jin was in Xuzhou. Although he used traveling merchants and couriers as eyes and ears, Fengyang Prefecture was crawling with soldiers and bandits, making the roads difficult to travel. Moreover, an outsider traveling would mostly stick to the official roads and lodge in city inns — how could they possibly see what was happening in the countryside? So he had no knowledge of any of this.

But upon hearing Zhong Gonghui mention the Henan refugees, Zhao Jin and his brothers exchanged bitter smiles. Sure enough, any principle you understood, others could think of too. Zhao Camp had kept the Shandong refugees to farm the land, and the local tyrants of Fengyang Prefecture had thought of the same principle — and likely carried it out even more thoroughly than Zhao Camp.

As for Zhong Gonghui's own story, it wasn't hard to guess. He had originally been a licentiate in the countryside of Suzhou, with two thousand mu of land to his family's name. After failing the provincial examinations several times, he had settled down to live off this family estate, leading a life of modest comfort and prosperity.

In the Ming dynasty, after the Zhengde reign, landlords skilled in agriculture began to emerge. By improving tools and techniques, cultivating seedlings, deep plowing, increasing fertilizer, and so on, they raised yields and income through better farming methods. Zhong Gonghui was just such a landlord. His family's two thousand mu produced more grain than another family's three thousand mu, and he also grew vegetables and the like, carting them into the city by horse-drawn wagon to sell, earning even more income.

When the great disaster struck, what most local tyrants did was loot the burning house, scraping away the last bit of savings from the local farming households, forcing them to sell their fields, their land, their sons and daughters.

Zhong Gonghui, on the other hand, did his utmost to aid his own tenant farmers and even helped his neighbors survive the crisis. This act was in itself a good deed, but it drew the bitter envy of all the surrounding tyrants and gentry. Even the officials felt that this man was using the famine to buy the people's hearts and must harbor seditious intentions.

Then, when everyone from top to bottom forbade the refugees from returning home, Zhong Gonghui stepped forward and spoke words of justice. He not only went to the yamen to file complaints but also wrote letters to friends serving as officials elsewhere, asking them to find a way to stop this.

As a result, the yamen accused him of reckless talk and even threatened to strip him of his scholarly rank. And the letters he wrote to friends elsewhere — no sooner had they left his household than they were handed over by a servant.

The very next night, the Zhong household caught fire in the middle of the night. A gang of masked "bandits" stormed in, killing everyone in sight. Zhong Gonghui was no weak, bookish scholar helpless before a chicken. Working the land had given him some strength, and with several of his hired hands fighting desperately to save him, he managed to escape. His entire family, young and old, died at the hands of the "bandits."

This time, Zhong Gonghui had learned his lesson. He did not report the case to the authorities but fled outright. Word soon followed: the officials declared the case the work of refugee bandits and said that Zhong Gonghui had died in his home...