Wei Yuan emerged from seclusion. One of his eyes was clear and bright, while deep within the other flickered an endless array of curves and figures.
Sweeping out with his divine sense, he effortlessly split off more than five hundred strands of consciousness to clear the backlog of official documents and read through the recent reports and military dispatches.
In the tenth year of Tianqi, signs of great turmoil were already spreading across the realm. Five of the Nine Kingdoms were actively locked in war with one another. Aside from Jin and Zhao, Southern Qi was fighting two enemies at once, splitting its armies north and south, beating both Northern Qi and the State of Ji into submission. Zhao had also dispatched a secondary force to carve out territories across Ji, looting and plundering under cover of the chaos.
As the war progressed, this secondary detachment grew steadily larger, gradually threatening to outstrip the Western Jin frontline.
At this moment, Wei Yuan’s position as Grand Minister of Southern Military Affairs was as stable as Mount Tai. Ever since reclaiming the two commanderies of Hanyang and Huangping, his word was absolute throughout the five commanderies; levying grain or conscripting men depended entirely on his whim.
Anyone who dared oppose Wei Yuan—even if they were a direct blood relative of the Left or Right Prime Minister—was arrested without hesitation.
Once seized, they were all tossed into the dungeons without charges, justification, or any mention of release. They were simply kept locked away, subjected to routine beatings every few days. Lashes from leather whips soaked in cold water taught these smooth-skinned lords and ladies what it meant to prosper by yielding and perish by resisting.
Wei Yuan’s perverse and tyrannical conduct naturally drew unanimous condemnation from across the imperial court, while many scholars with estates and assets in the three commanderies unleashed a fierce barrage of written criticism against him. Wei Yuan showed them no indulgence. He organized a massive cohort of literati of his own to slander them right back, with an overwhelming momentum that thoroughly crushed the opposition.
Wei Yuan personally drafted their literary battle plan: they were not to waste effort justifying his actions; instead, they were to fling filth at the enemy with abandon, denouncing them as race traitors, scoundrels of the realm, renegades, liars, and worse.
Furthermore, they concentrated their fire entirely on private conduct—such as addictions to lewdness, keeping male paramours, a fondness for the submissive role, and transgressing human decency. If an opponent so much as glanced at someone on the street, Wei Yuan’s writers would seize upon it and insist that filthy, shameless lust had stirred in his heart.
Naturally, the opposition refused to admit to such slander, whereupon Wei Yuan’s side challenged them to produce evidence of their innocence. When someone did bring forward proof, they nitpicked every flaw within it. As a general rule, the moment someone was forced to prove their own innocence, they had already lost the dispute.
Such mudslinging set an unprecedented milestone in the literary world. Both sides quickly strayed far from the original topic, raising the curtain on endless ad hominem attacks. As for the dispute's initial cause, everyone had long forgotten it.
Wei Yuan’s faction commanded a distinct advantage in volume, and they had even cultivated over a dozen shockingly capable, utterly unprincipled scholars. Some of them went so far as to author serialized popular romances that cast their opponents as the main characters, filling the pages with scandalous household incest and predatory trysts with the wives and families of sworn brothers.
The resulting romances flew off the shelves the moment they were printed, with one tale centered on an affair between a father-in-law and daughter-in-law shattering all publishing records of the past century. The venerable scholar who had been turned into its protagonist coughed up three mouthfuls of blood in pure fury and was struck bedridden. Even with him in such a state, his daughters-in-law and sons-in-law had to maintain their distance to avoid suspicion, all while enduring whispering and pointed fingers from onlookers.
The reason these writers possessed such vicious ferocity, aside from their innate talent, was largely thanks to the generous writing fees Wei Yuan provided. The handsome pay allowed them to exceed their normal abilities, unlocking hidden potentials they never knew they possessed and distinguishing themselves from ordinary literati.
In the end, after trimming away the mediocre, these core writers were known throughout the literary world as the Thirteen Grand Protectors of the Wei Clan—universally loathed by gods and ghosts alike, feared wherever they went.
The war of words raged for three whole months, ultimately ending in Wei Yuan’s total victory.
Wei Yuan was not the least bit surprised by this outcome. When it came to quarreling, Sky Azure Hall was the true authority. Backed by Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World constantly fine-tuning their strategies and vast sums of Qingyuan smoothing the road, success had been inevitable.
As for the moral integrity of scholars, facts proved that when faced with cold Qingyuan, the vast majority could manage just fine without it.
Yet it could not be denied that among the three major military commissioners of Western Jin, the Military Commissioner of Yunxiang had his home base completely wiped out with no hope of reclaiming it. Zhao continued to pour troops into that theater, whittling away Western Jin's territory while maintaining peace talks.
Wei Yuan, by contrast, stationed only a hundred thousand troops at the Southern Military Camp. Zhao had sent forces to test him several times, only to end up battered and bleeding. Except for the Crown Prince, several princes and princesses of Zhao had their records of invincibility shattered at Wei Yuan’s hands. The disgraced princes and princesses unanimously egged the Crown Prince on to lead the battle, but the Crown Prince feigned deafness and dumbness.
So long as the Southern Military Camp stood, the Southwestern Five Commanderies were as secure as Mount Tai.
Yet while external enemies could not enter, internal troubles never ceased. Aside from the two commanderies of Hanyang and Huangping, which had been thoroughly plowed through by both the armies of Zhao and Qingming, the remaining three commanderies were plagued by horse bandits running wild with extreme insolence.
Whenever the bandits rode through, even the county magistrates and commandery governors had to step out to host them for meals, dragging every local official along to keep company. Otherwise, the bandits would kidnap all the beautiful concubines, maidservants, page boys, and attendants from their residences, locking them away for ten days to half a month before letting them go.
Faced with this threat, officials great and small had no choice but to comply, for none wished to see themselves cuckolded. The bandits were all robust and brimming with vigor; spending a single day in their clutches would wear those captives out more than a whole year serving their masters.
Of course, any master capable of becoming an official possessed a pliancy far beyond ordinary men, so such an outrage had never actually come to pass.
The bandits practiced a sort of honor among thieves: they stole silver, grain, and people, but they never touched the land deeds or official registries. This allowed every prominent household to breathe a sigh of relief.
In their eyes, gold, jewels, jade, calligraphy, paintings, and domestic slaves were merely transient wealth. Even if not a single servant remained and not a copper coin was left, as long as the land and estates stayed in their hands, receiving a single remittance of funds from their ancestral clans in the capital would restore their vitality within twenty years.
As long as the bandits left ownership of the fields and estates untouched, everyone could endure the rest. Some even praised the bandits for understanding propriety, harboring thoughts of winning them over or latching onto them.
This, too, was a strategy Wei Yuan had devised. The time had not yet come to touch the bottom line of these prominent clans. Wei Yuan wanted people, while the grand households wanted land and property; fundamentally, there was no mortal conflict between them.
With the situation firmly under control, Wei Yuan reopened the grain trade at modest prices. The prominent families flooded in, purchasing grain in massive volumes. Wei Yuan turned no one away, selling as much as they wished to buy.
Moreover, the great houses soon discovered that canned military rations were barely more expensive than raw grain and rice, making them far more cost-effective. They promptly shifted to buying canned food in bulk.
Yet despite the open grain market, the stream of refugees forced to flee due to famine did not diminish in the slightest.
This also fell entirely within Wei Yuan's expectations. After all, it was the wealthy clans purchasing the grain; they had no obligation to distribute it, and the peasantry possessed no money to buy any. The occasional clan that set up congee stalls did so only to keep people from dropping dead on the spot.
Furthermore, even after Wei Yuan sold off vast quantities of grain, the prices within the three commanderies did not fall by a single copper. All the grain remained hoarded away in the private storehouses of the lords; without money, no one could hope to acquire a single kernel. Having tasted the glorious era when a single jin cost an entire tael of silver, none of them wanted to return to the days where a tael bought ten jin.
Thus, while everything outside Qingming boiled in misery, Qingming itself flourished. On the first day of the Lunar New Year, with the arrival of another wave of displaced refugees, the population of Qingming officially crossed thirty million.
Chapter 809