Chapter 626: Come to the Wild Grass Flats to See the Private Secretary

When the refugees had first been relocated here, they were mostly able-bodied young men. Their food was tribute grain transported from Yutou Town. For shelter, they could only dig into the ground and cover it with grass hovels. All day long they clutched bamboo-spear weapons, keeping guard in constant fear. Some fell ill from the unfamiliar climate and harsh conditions, and could only grit their teeth and endure. Those who couldn't pull through had no way to keep their bodies whole. To prevent the spread of plague and stop corpses from contaminating the water and soil, the dead were burned outright.

Now things are different. Even the poorest houses are rammed-earth and thatch, and the proportion of brick-and-tile buildings is already considerable. Between the estates, thick smoke can be seen billowing — those are the brick kilns firing bricks and tiles.

Every so many households form a stockade, roughly the size of a village. A moat is dug outside and walls are built up. Inside the stockade there are storehouses, hidden channels, and wells — more orderly than some of the remote villages in Xuzhou.

When enemies attack, these small stockades serve as strongholds of resistance. They also serve another purpose: they divide the refugees into many small blocks, preventing them from all living together and forming a single self-contained body.

The largest stockade, which also has the most brick-and-tile buildings, has the deepest surrounding moat and the highest rammed-earth walls. It is a scaled-down replica of the He Family Village encampment of the Zhao Camp.

Zhang Hubin's retainer company and the Xuzhou militia are both stationed here. The conscription and training of able-bodied men drawn from the various refugee settlements also takes place here. If anything happens, this location is the closest to every village stockade. The Xuzhou militia garrisoned in the new refugee stockades are all drawn from Suzhou — they will never collude with the locals.

On the outskirts of the village stockades, there are also marketplaces. With so many people reclaiming land and settling around Lake Luoma, others might not have known at first, but over time, word inevitably spread. Although the refugees had no silver money, they did have the grain they grew. They were allowed to keep a small portion of their harvest, which they could barter. Where there is commercial opportunity, merchants will naturally come.

However, grain prices around Lake Luoma were extremely cheap. If the refugees traded their harvest directly, they would take a heavy loss. The Zhao Camp specially allocated a sum of silver to buy sundry goods at market price, then used Xuzhou grain prices as a ratio to exchange those sundry goods for the harvest — which in effect took in another portion of the grain.

The most flourishing trade was in salt. Several salt works over in Haizhou, because most of the land there was not permitted to be reclaimed and could only remain as wild grassland for cutting grass to boil salt, had grain prices that stayed persistently high. The refugees here also needed to eat salt. Each side took what it needed, and both were thoroughly pleased. Because of this salt market, even some small salt smugglers and salt peddlers came here to buy salt and ship it away.

The prosperity here even attracted some blind, reckless riffraff, as well as outside believers of the Smelling Incense Sect who came to proselytize. But in the closed environment of the new refugee stockades, there was no place for them at all. Further east, on the even harsher Wild Grass Flats, these people are all locked up doing hard labor, with no day of escape ever.

When Zhao Jin and his guards arrived here, besides all this, they also saw something else different. The refugees coming and going between the fields and the villages had smiles on their faces, and curiosity as well.

"Two years ago when I came here, the refugees' faces held only blank numbness. To them, dying over there was the same as dying here — coming here made no difference. A year ago when I came here, fear began to show on their faces. They knew their own situation: the slightest disobedience, and we would kill them. Now they feel that life can go on like this for the long term — stable and fed. They know to feel gratitude toward us. They are happy living here, and they also know they have a path to rise." Zhao Jin spoke freely from horseback.

The only person accompanying him this time was Wang Zhaojing, who nodded with a smile from his horse.

On both sides, the refugee households, seeing Zhao Jin and his party, all shrank aside in awe. Unlike before, when they kept their heads lowered and dared not raise them, now some already watched Zhao Jin's group with envy, perhaps thinking about whether they could become one of them.

Being far away, they naturally could not hear what Zhao Jin said next.

"But we also can't let them grow too secure. We can't let them feel that living here is something they're entitled to. Once that happens, they'll start haggling and will be unwilling to go to war and exert themselves for us."

"This art of mind — where did Big Brother learn it? Could it be insight gained from Sister-in-Law?" Wang Zhaojing asked with a smile.

Zhao Jin coughed once. Wang Zhaojing did not press the question, but only said with a laugh: "Looking at it now, it seems a bit difficult. After all, we are in the interior of the Great Ming. No matter how unstable and chaotic things get outside, it will be very late before it reaches here. And these wild flats are a world unto themselves — even if great chaos breaks out outside, this place can remain stable. Making them always keep a heart of gratitude won't be easy."

"Then we'll keep them moving — rotate them without pause. We are not here to raise people out of mercy." Zhao Jin answered with a smile.

In the distance, billowing dust could be seen. Two more riders ran ahead. At twenty paces they hurriedly dismounted, ran forward, knelt, and reported: "Company Commander Zhang is right behind. We are late in welcoming you — we beg Master Jin to forgive our offense."

Zhao Jin had departed from Xuzhou without telling anyone. From leaving He Family Village all the way through crossing into Pi Prefecture, no one knew whether he was going to Qingjiangpu or to the refugee stockades. He changed direction only at night, precisely to prevent anyone from grasping his pattern.

Only after arriving in the area of the refugee stockades did he send someone to notify Zhang Hubin. This made Zhang Hubin extremely nervous, afraid that some mistake on his side would be discovered.

But when he came before them and found that both Zhao Jin and Wang Zhaojing's attitudes were quite amiable, he finally relaxed. He merely said with an ingratiating smile: "The visitor from Haizhou has grown impatient waiting. If Master and Third Master hadn't come, he would have run back the day after tomorrow to spend the New Year."

Haizhou was the hub of Huai salt production, and Huai salt was the very lifeblood of the Great Ming's tax revenue. Although this place was a remote coastal area, its status among prefectures and counties was very high. The Salt Censor — who was also the Regional Inspector for the Jiangbei region of South Zhili — had a dedicated office in Haizhou. Other officials connected to salt administration and salt affairs also came frequently. Add to that the rolling wealth the salt industry brought, and any posting in Haizhou was a grade higher, or even more, than elsewhere. Every official in Haizhou, great or small, walked with his nose in the air.

With Haizhou as the center, the coastline stretching north to Ganyu and south to the Yellow River's mouth was covered everywhere with salt works. Some were government-run, while others were the private property of the grandees of Yangzhou — though public and private were not so clearly distinguished.

All these salt works, whether public or private, boiled the sea for salt. Just like the military households in the guard-battalions, the salt works also maintained stove households, who boiled salt for generations, living like slaves.

Huai salt supplied the entire realm. Every year, a colossal quantity of Huai salt flowed out from these salt works. The fuel used to boil this Huai salt was the wild grass of the Wild Grass Flats. Dry grass burned with a steady, easily controlled fire, and had been used for all these years.

In recent years, however, trouble had arisen. Salt works multiplied. The government works were manageable, but private salt works grew more and more numerous, and the demand for grass grew larger and larger. Once the refugee stockades were built, wild grass became utterly insufficient. The refugees used wild grass for fuel, and also to build their hovels and bed frames, and to thatch their houses. As more and more refugees moved in, the amount of wild grass they used grew larger and larger as well.

Although the area they lived in was still near Lake Luoma, the area from which they cut grass grew ever larger. Because once the wild grass was cut away, they would build earthen dikes to enclose the wetlands, drain the water, and then reclaim the land for farming. Reclaiming fields from such wild flats yielded a very low harvest the first year, and only showed some improvement the second year. But to the refugees, this was still farmland. No matter how small the harvest, it was still a benefit. They had long been terrified of hunger — every little bit counted, and a little more farmland was always good.

As a result, the grass that the Haizhou salt works could cut grew even scarcer. Their own annual consumption was also colossal — otherwise, a full third of Huai'an Prefecture's area would not have been deliberately left wild.

If anyone else had done this, without the authorities even needing to act, the various salt works would have long since scraped together a force to go and attack. A few deaths out on these Wild Grass Flats meant nothing. But now, who dared lift a hand? Haizhou had learned the news about Xuzhou even earlier than Qingjiangpu had.

The Feng family of Yangzhou — their entire household had been wiped out, alive and in the flesh. The Feng family's private soldiers and the government troops from Wolf Mountain had both been utterly annihilated by the Zhao Camp. Who would dare offend such a ruthless and formidable power?

Privately, no one dared. Officially, they dared even less. If you couldn't boil salt, you could solar-evaporate it. If you couldn't use dry grass, you could use something else. As long as salt could be produced, why go out of your way to clash with that lawless gang of savages from Xuzhou? For government affairs, as long as things could be maintained, that was enough. Besides, those private salt works were very tightly entangled with the Zhao Camp. Quite a lot of private salt was stored and shipped out from the refugee stockades. The interests involved were tied together in every direction. Many people in Haizhou had their regular perks connected to this. To put it more bluntly, many Haizhou officials' own salt works had relationships of one kind or another with the Zhao Camp.

The Zhao Camp's several major campaigns had essentially wiped out the armed forces connected to large-scale private salt operations. If you wanted to produce and sell salt in peace, you could only rely on the Zhao Camp's armed protection and shelter. As for the Xuzhou salt market, it had already become a distribution hub — people all the more could not afford to offend Zhao Jin's side.

Since they could not resort to force and could not afford to offend, the only option was to plead with good words. Haizhou's salt affairs had many connections to the Wang Zhaojing family. Although those ties had cooled in recent years, they were still a channel of contact after all. Add to that the fact that these people in the salt business all had heaven-reaching methods, and through many twists and turns they had re-established contact.

The person who came was the private secretary of the Haizhou Prefect. Though he held no official rank, the coordination between the government office and those below, and the arrangement of all public and private affairs, all relied on this private secretary's hands-on management. In terms of real power and standing, he ranked among the top few in Haizhou. His appearance here represented the joint nomination of the officials and the managers of both the government and private salt works below.

The purpose of Zhao Jin's visit this time was precisely to meet this private secretary.

This meeting was not really to negotiate anything, but to give the other party face, and also to give the other party a judgment to make: there was no room for reversal on this matter.

"... The wild flats are going to become fertile fields. We need the stalks for burning and composting — we can't give them to you..."

"... If you can't use grass, can't you use firewood? You say there isn't much brushwood here — then you can use coal. Xuzhou produces coal. We can send it over to you by water, which is even more convenient..."

"... The price is negotiable. You can directly trade salt for coal..."

The shortfall in dry-grass fuel could all be made up with coal, and they could trade salt for coal. It went without saying that some benefits were promised to this private secretary who was handling the matter.

Thanks to old friends "Sweet Sugarcane" and "Yuan Heng Li Zhen" for their tips, and thank you everyone for your subscriptions and monthly tickets.