Chapter 47: Destination, Wei Family Fortress
Although the man in the bamboo hat did not quite understand, he did not raise any objections. Since Song Qi said so, he must have his reasons, perhaps because that Xiao Zhi was full of tricks and schemes.
After acknowledging the order, the man in the bamboo hat took his leave and departed.
Shortly after, the steward entered the room. "My lord, should we deal with the two women, Jiang Zhu and Jiang Jun, or arrange for someone to take them away?"
Song Qi pondered for a moment and finally shook his head.
After hesitating for a long time, he said, "No, that won't do. Not appropriate at all..."
"Severing ties with them is nothing; they are merely two courtesans, and the Song family can easily afford to let them go."
Xiao Zhi's whereabouts were unknown, and nobody knew what he was up to. Song Qi did not want to stir up extra trouble at this juncture. If he were to anger Xiao Zhi, the animosity between them would be laid out entirely in the open. By that time, upon returning to the capital, Xiao Zhi would let off the officials in the Ministry of Revenue and turn instead to tear into him.
Not to mention, there was also Tang Sanjian.
Tang Sanjian...
At this moment, Tang Sanjian was indeed in Henan. He had obtained the things Xiao Zhi left for him and was examining the depositions left behind by those several chiliarchs.
During the years he sold his labor to the Song family, Tang Sanjian naturally knew that the family was embezzling military provisions. Yet, he had never imagined the scope to be so vast and the sums involved to be so staggering as to leave one speechless.
And these were merely the confessions of three chiliarchs, whereas the Song family was an entity capable of swaying the entire Ministry of War of the Great Chu.
Having perused these blood-stained depositions, Tang Sanjian had no choice but to believe them, unwilling as he might be.
At the same time, Tang Sanjian knew that he could never return to the Song family; going back meant certain death.
Now, it seemed there was only one path left before him: to follow Xiao Zhi and serve as his bodyguard.
Moreover, on the day Xiao Zhi spared him, he had made a promise to help him exact his revenge.
Tang Sanjian did not know who his enemies were, nor how he was supposed to take this revenge.
Was it the Song family? Not entirely.
From Song Qi, the Minister of War, down to chiliarchs and vice-chiliarchs, everyone was plundering military funds.
His enemy was everyone; it was this dark and corrupt officialdom.
After wandering for a few days, Tang Sanjian finally made up his mind to head north toward the border fortresses.
It was not because he wanted Xiao Zhi to avenge him, but simply because he had nowhere else to go.
Xiao Zhi loved executing corrupt officials, and Tang Sanjian's tragedy had stemmed from corruption in the first place; thus, he was more than willing to kill corrupt officials as well.
He mounted his horse, strapped on his saber, and ambled slowly northward along the official highway.
When his horse grew tired, it would graze, and he would lie down in the grass to snatch a nap.
When he grew weary, he would lodge at an inn and enjoy a hearty meal.
He had no schedule for when he would reach the border town; arriving whenever he got there was enough, as Xiao Zhi was not going to run away.
At the southern foothills of Yashan Mountain, Xiao Zhi had taken a nap and woke up full of vigor.
The Xie family had not only provided this estate for Xiao Zhi's use but had also assigned servants to wait upon them.
Once Xiao Zhi and his men had slept their fill, whole roasted lambs were slammed onto the table.
The fatty mutton was still sizzling with bubbling grease, and some men could not wait, directly drawing the long sabers at their waists to hack the meat into pieces, each hugging a chunk and devouring it ravenously.
Looking at these men, there was not a shred of resemblance to Imperial City Directorate officials; they were utter bandits.
The servants arranged by the Xie family also brought out jars of fine wine, the mud seals of which suggested they had aged quite a few years.
However, Xiao Zhi forbade anyone from drinking.
No drinking while robbing, no robbing while drinking—this was the code of conduct for the modern-day highwayman.
All this wine was to be kept for a celebratory toast after the mission was accomplished.
At the hour of *you* (around 5:00 to 7:00 PM), as darkness fell, the group donned their masks, mounted swift horses, and set off toward their target: the Wei Family Fort, ninety miles away.
Xiao Zhi rode side by side with Mu Weihu, and asked, "Tell me about the situation at the Wei family."
Mentioning the Wei family, Mu Weihu first let out a sneer, then began to recount the details at a leisurely pace.
Since they still had dozens of miles to cover, Xiao Zhi treated it as listening to a story.
This Wei family was no venerable clan; at best, they were local tyrants who preyed upon the common folk.
From their founding until now, it had only been three generations. Yet the deeds these three generations had committed were far more dramatic than those of the millennium-old Xie family.
Tracing the Wei family back four generations, they were private salt smugglers who frequently engaged in murder and pillaging.
The one who truly made their fortune was the generation of the current head's grandfather.
This fellow was also a peculiar character; he stopped smuggling salt and went south to become a pirate.
A smooth-talker gifted with the gift of gab, within half a year he actually managed to rise to the position of third-in-command, playing the role of a strategist or counselor.
As fate and fortune would have it, the imperial court eventually offered amnesty to this band of pirates, and he was granted a fifth-rank military title.
With this status, the Wei family became the overlords of their locality. Yet old habits die hard, and he could never shed his pirate nature.
They say people grow more placid as they age, but not this old wretch; at fifty, he resigned his military post, acquired a ship, and took up smuggling.
As the national power of Great Chu waned day by day, the court was forced to implement maritime trade bans to preserve the foundation of the state. Consequently, smuggling reaped exorbitant fortunes.
He pursued the smuggling trade for a mere decade because at sixty, he died aboard a ship.
The father of the current head of the Wei family was no angel either, bullying the weak and committing every conceivable evil.
Within a radius of a hundred miles around the Wei Family Fort, as far as the eye could see, all the farmland belonged to the Wei family.
It could truly be called forcible seizure and plunder.
It was around that time that the Wei family and the Xie family became sworn enemies.
This Wei family was a newborn calf that feared no tiger, daring to openly challenge the Xie family.
In the eyes of the Xie family, the Wei family were nothing more than upstart country bumpkins.
Yet when open tactics failed, the Wei family resorted to underhanded tricks, keeping their own band of bandits.
And so, they forced the Xie family to pay annual tributes of money and grain to buy temporary peace.
"What does the Wei family do for a living nowadays?" Xiao Zhi asked.
Mu Weihu replied, "Wei Song, the current head of the Wei family, has revived the smuggling fleet, trading back and forth with Yingzhou, Silla, and Jiaozhi."
Xiao Zhi sneered. "Is the evidence of their crimes conclusive?"
Mu Weihu answered, "It took almost no effort at all; digging into the shady dealings of the Wei family yields results every single time. Recently, two of the Wei family's merchant ships docked in Jiangsu, and I have already made arrangements. Once matters are settled here, we will immediately dispatch men to seal them off."
Xiao Zhi nodded. "This Wei family—do not wipe them out completely down to the last root."
"Why?" Mu Weihu asked in puzzlement.
Prior to this, the established strategy was to leave no one alive among the members of the Wei family—not even chickens or dogs.
For no other reason than that the Wei family's reputation stank to high heaven.
Xiao Zhi needed to break the deadlock as soon as possible.
Making the Wei family proactively donate to disaster relief, the way the Xie family did, was virtually impossible.
If they were to sack the Wei family, the wealth, grain, treasures, and landed estates were simply too vast to carry away. Nor could they handle such assets in the short term.
Therefore, Xiao Zhi changed his plan: since his own men were not enough, he would use the officials of the local government.
He would do nothing else but specialize in raids and confiscations.
Using the Wei family as a starting point, he would spread outward from this single point to the entire surface.
After taking inventory of the Wei family's wealth and grain, he would hand it over to the local magistrate.
If the magistrate embezzled from it, he would raid and confiscate the magistrate's estate. Then, following the clues of those implicated by the magistrate, he would raid and confiscate everything step by step.
He would use rolling heads to terrify these people; whoever failed to perform their duty would be executed, heads rolling in the dust until their souls trembled with fear.
In other words, from now on, they could no longer move about in the guise of bandits; they had to don the official robes of the Imperial City Directorate once again.
The previous strategy had been entirely wrong.
This was the result of Xiao Zhi, as a transmigrator unfamiliar with this era, taking a wrong turn.
His earlier ideas had been far too utopian and idealistic, proving utterly unfeasible in practice.
A few hundred strings of copper coins weighed a ton, and thirty to forty thousand taels of silver also weighed a ton—to say nothing of mountains of grain and unhusked rice.
The entire Imperial City Directorate, even including the scouting unit expanded by Mu Weihu, numbered just over two hundred men. With such a meager force deployed across the two provinces of Shandong and Jiangsu, they were vastly inadequate; they could neither transport the loot nor carry out disaster relief.