Chapter 592: - Making a Fortune (Bonus Chapter for the Update-Circle Invitation Event)

Autumn, in truth, had already left. Even its tail could no longer be grasped.

Winter had, in fact, already arrived. Yet nearly everyone on this land still tacitly insisted that it was autumn. As long as no snow had fallen, as long as the world had not yet been wrapped in silver, people felt that winter had not truly begun.

Because under the circumstances they now faced, people could no longer bear the fact that winter had already arrived.

Winter was a hurdle for all living things.

To pass the winter was also called enduring the winter.

If you endured it, there would be another year.

If you could not, then there was no need to endure anything ever again.

Count Pingye sat on horseback, looking at the long convoy stretching ahead.

Most of the people being driven along within it were Chu subjects.

It was genuinely difficult to imagine just how terrifying the accumulated wealth of those great noble houses could be.

For an ordinary rich household or powerful local gentry family, managing to preserve its inheritance for a century was already extremely rare. Most could not escape the old rule that wealth did not survive three generations.

One generation rose.

One generation prospered.

One generation preserved the house.

Then came the generation that ruined it.

Again and again, the cycle repeated. Wealth accumulated, then scattered.

But those great noble houses whose fortunes had practically risen and fallen together with the state itself were different.

They were like blood leeches parasitizing Great Chu.

And like Pixiu, they only swallowed wealth in.

They never spat it back out.

Across several centuries, the fortunes they accumulated were enough to make anyone click his tongue in disbelief.

Compared with them, the imperial treasury was not even fit to stand on the same stage.

Because a government treasury was not meant merely to store wealth. Its money had to be spent.

Generations of scholars in this world loved writing poems and essays urging rulers to cherish the strength of the people and avoid extravagance, as if Heaven beneath all could become peaceful so long as the sovereign lived like an ascetic monk.

But officials who truly managed the Ministry of Revenue understood perfectly well that if silver and coin stopped circulating, the consequences could be equally severe.

The defensive forces on these nobles’ fiefs naturally had no chance of stopping Great Yan’s wolfish iron cavalry.

In truth, most of their private troops had already been contributed to Zhennan Pass long ago.

Right now, they were already pitifully weak.

After one round of plunder, Count Pingye discovered that the places holding the greatest wealth were not actually the nobles’ treasure vaults.

Many of the locations listed for him by the Regent pointed directly toward the nobles’... ancestral tombs.

Yes.

The true wealth was underground.

These great Chu nobles were hereditary imperial stock down to the bone. Their fiefs had been passed from generation to generation, and their ancestral graves stood within their own domains.

So they had never needed to worry much about grave robbers.

As a result, the tombs were not especially difficult to excavate.

There were none of those mysterious anti-theft mechanisms from legends either.

And Count Pingye had yet to hear any subordinate report running into one of Liang Cheng’s relatives down there.

A vigorous grave-robbing campaign immediately erupted throughout Zheng Fan’s army.

To better stimulate the soldiers’ enthusiasm for excavating tombs, competitions were even organized inside the army.

Who dug up the most.

Who dug the fastest.

Who chose the most accurate locations.

Everything would be recorded, and afterward Count Pingye would personally award commendations.

As for taboos and bad luck?

That was a joke.

Which of these common soldiers had not seen blood on and off the battlefield?

Which of them had never killed a man?

Men like that were hardly going to care about some graveyard taboo.

Besides, digging graves to replenish military funds, borrowing money from the Bank of Heaven and Earth, had always been a standard practice of warlords in chaotic times.

Most of the Chu nobles whose ancestral graves were being excavated chose to swallow their rage.

They gathered together and watched their family tombs torn open.

Watched their ancestors’ bones tossed casually onto the ground and left beneath the open sky.

A few clans with genuine backbone dared resist.

They were exterminated from top to bottom almost immediately.

Count Pingye still remembered Tiger Head City years ago.

He had stirred his soldiers into storming one local household.

That night, he had gone back alone to the ruins and stood there thinking for a very long time.

Now?

There really was nothing in this world that could not become ordinary through repetition.

Do something often enough and eventually you went numb.

As for those Chu nobles who chose compromise, swallowed their anger, and kept their heads down, Count Pingye showed a little mercy.

He did not kill them.

Nor did he seize them.

Put plainly, he and his elder brother-in-law were indeed using each other.

Zheng Fan understood perfectly well that his elder brother-in-law was using this brother-in-law of his like a saber, asking him to clear away obstacles that might hinder future rule over Chu.

But this saber had thoughts of its own.

I only cut the meat I want.

As for the hide left over and that rotten chunk inside?

I am not scraping those clean for you.

Their fiefs had been ravaged.

Their family fortunes looted.

Even their ancestral tombs dug open.

What could these nobles do afterward?

There was only one thing.

Go find their emperor.

Kneel before him and weep.

Of course, Zheng Fan also knew his elder brother-in-law would never allow those nobles to recuperate and rise again.

But so what?

If nothing else, he could still make things disgusting for the man.

Fourth Lady had been so busy lately that her feet barely touched the ground.

She had to catalogue all the plundered goods.

The sheer volume was enormous.

More troublesome still, the variety was absurd.

The accounting itself was genuinely difficult.

Count Pingye deliberately found time to ask her for a rough estimate.

He had Fourth Lady convert everything into equivalent amounts of silver and gold.

The result left Count Pingye staring with his mouth open for a very long time.

But once he remembered that the spoils had to be divided among several hundred thousand soldiers of the army that invaded Chu, not to mention so many Garrison Commanders, the number became somewhat easier to accept.

At moments like this, it was time to revive the glorious Zheng Army tradition first practiced at Cuiliu Fort, then Shengle City, and finally Snow Sea Pass: lining one’s own pockets.

Anyone who had ever handled logistics or distribution understood one thing.

It was genuinely difficult not to skim a little.

And outsiders understood too.

If you claimed you had taken nothing at all, that was almost impossible to believe.

The truly skillful man could arrange matters so that everyone knew he had probably taken something, yet the accounts remained beautiful and spotless.

No one outside would believe he had taken nothing.

But they would conclude he must have taken very little.

Given Count Pingye’s present status, no one would object even if he claimed a somewhat larger share.

The moment this thought occurred to him, Count Pingye could not resist telling Fourth Lady to make the books even more ruthless.

The livelihood and development of eastern Jin would depend on this fortune in the future.

Naturally, a sudden flood of gold, silver, and goods could cause purchasing power to decline.

But financial problems like that were not matters eastern Jin needed to worry about now, nor for the next several years.

For the time being, the more the better.

If things truly became inconvenient, Count Pingye could suffer a little and build a few more golden toilets inside his residence.

Transport labor was the real difficulty.

Soldiers could personally carry some things, and Count Pingye turned a blind eye to that.

Military discipline officers only arrested men who tried to carry away so much that it became ridiculous.

Two horses.

Good heavens.

Both animals could barely lift their hooves under the load.

What exactly were you trying to do?

They were still in Chu territory.

Peace talks were peace talks.

But who knew whether the Chu might suddenly turn hostile?

Did none of them remember how they themselves had treated the Chu?

If battle suddenly erupted, could horses loaded like that still charge?

The soldiers naturally had to participate in escorting the spoils, but they could not spare too many men for the work.

So they captured as many Chu people as possible to serve as transport laborers.

In other words, slaves.

Once these people were hauled back to Shanggu Commandery or into Jin territory, they themselves would count as “population wealth.”

Naturally, they would be kept.

Count Pingye had originally wanted to imitate the first Marquis of Zhenbei from a century earlier and carry out a massive population raid like the one against Qian’s Three Frontiers.

Unfortunately, once Nian Yao’s army crossed the Wei River, it immediately made camp.

That was no longer a needle.

It was an enormous iron pestle planted directly in their path.

Because of it, the Yan army could no longer let itself run wild without restraint.

It had to maintain the highest state of readiness against Nian Yao’s troops.

Even so, what they had taken was already enough.

The army’s withdrawal proceeded in good order.

Count Pingye checked the list.

Roughly seventy-five percent of the intended targets had been plundered.

Some were too far away, so they skipped them.

Some were too remote, so they skipped them.

Others happened to be lucky enough to lie behind positions blocked by Nian Yao’s army.

Naturally, those were abandoned too.

Everything came down to one principle.

Safety first.

Give the Chu army no opportunity whatsoever to launch an offensive.

The army returned laden with wealth.

In separate batches, they crossed the Wei River and withdrew into Shanggu Commandery.

On the day Count Pingye himself crossed the Wei River and returned to the region around Jing City, great goose-feather flakes began falling from the sky.

The Yan and Chu armies took the Wei River as their boundary.

Both sides established camps and began a new round of confrontation.

The Yan army had finally pulled itself free.

The Chu could once again draw their gate shut.

They no longer possessed the mighty Zhennan Pass.

But when Great Chu’s navy stretched across the surface of the Wei River, Chu soldiers still breathed long sighs of relief.

Would the two sides fight again in the future?

No one could say.

But for the moment, at least, there would be no more fighting for some time.

The Yan-Chu War, which had lasted an entire year, finally lowered its curtain.

There was one small episode before the curtain fell completely.

Count Pingye wrote to Nian Yao.

He proposed that the two of them meet aboard a small boat on the Wang River, each bringing only one guard.

Nian Yao refused.

...

“Here. Eat.”

Guo Dong handed a strip of dried meat to Xu An.

Xu An was now one of Jin Shuke’s personal guards, remaining at Jin Shuke’s side at all times.

One could say his future prospects were limitless.

Guo Dong was doing well too.

He had already changed into a new suit of armor.

Even the saber at his waist was now regulation issue.

He looked unmistakably like an officer.

And now he had somehow obtained dried meat to share with his good brother.

Xu An did not stand on ceremony.

He accepted the meat and started chewing.

Truthfully, he respected Jin Shuke.

Xu An could feel the spirit buried inside this Barbarian general.

He was a man who did things.

A man who knew how to do things.

A man capable of getting things done.

The only problem was that in daily life, this Barbarian general was extremely harsh on himself.

He absolutely refused special treatment.

As a result, his personal guards ate essentially the same food as ordinary soldiers every day.

“With this, that Miss A’Shui back home won’t be getting away from you. You’re an officer now.”

A commandant already counted as stepping into the officer class.

“Whether I’m an officer or not doesn’t matter much. The important thing is that the Count personally appointed me. Hehehe.”

Guo Dong laughed while repeatedly stroking the commandant’s badge on his body.

He still remembered the scene two days earlier when the Count summoned several of them onto the platform to receive rewards.

The Count had even personally patted his shoulder.

There had been a layer of armor between them.

Even so, Guo Dong had felt that the Count’s palm was broad, solid, and warm.

“What sort of commandant are you, exactly?”

Great Yan’s lower-level military system was, in truth, extremely messy.

In the regular army, the rank of Commandant was still fairly standardized.

At the local level, it could mean almost anything.

Back in Beifeng Commandery, most fortress masters possessed hereditary Commandant titles.

Zheng Fan’s earliest title of “Trade Protection Commandant” had likewise been something the Commandery Princess casually invented on the spot.

By contrast, titles such as City Defense Commandant or City Patrol Commandant belonged to somewhat more formal systems.

“Here. Look.”

Pride covering his face, Guo Dong unfastened his badge and offered it to Xu An with both hands.

Xu An held the dried meat between his teeth.

He accepted the badge and looked down.

Two large characters had been carved across it:

TOMB RAIDER.

[End of Chapter 592]