Take control of Wei Zhongxian at the start and confiscate 100 million from him!

Chapter 219 He knows everything!
At midnight, the night was as dark as ink.

In the distance, the faint sound of string and wind instruments drifted on the wind, like weeping and lamenting. It was a night banquet being held in a luxurious mansion in the city, a scene of singing, dancing, and decadent indulgence.

This fleeting dream and the backyard of an inconspicuous silk shop in Huating County form two completely different worlds.

In an inconspicuous side room in the backyard, the air seemed to have frozen.

Li Ruolian's figure sat in the dim light.

He had been sitting there for two whole hours, like a lifeless stone statue.

After finishing his business in Qufu, Shandong, he received a secret imperial decree and traveled day and night, leading a group of the most elite officers of the Embroidered Uniform Guard southwards.

Their mission was to consolidate and close in.

All the intelligence gathered by the secret agents of the Embroidered Uniform Guard, who had been spreading seeds throughout Songjiang Prefecture, was gathered into a giant net that could kill the enemy.

The candlelight outlined his profile with sharp, chiseled features, his eyes as sharp as an eagle locking onto its prey in the dark. His eyes were bloodshot from prolonged intense concentration, but his hand holding the cinnabar brush was as steady as a boulder embedded in a mountain.

Two pictures were laid out in front of him.

One of them is the official "Songjiang Prefecture Fish Scale General Register".

The pages of the booklet are slightly yellowed, carrying the texture of time, and each plot of land officially registered is divided in an orderly and clear manner.

But in Li Ruolian's eyes, this is a book of lies that has been meticulously compiled over decades.

Every word, every stroke, exudes an aura of decay and sin that is enough to fill the air.

The other picture is quite different.

It is a completely new image, outlining large, irregularly shaped red areas, densely packed and shocking to the eye.

These are the "shadow fields".

It was the secret agents of the Embroidered Uniform Guard who, through on-site investigation, coercion, and bribery, and through cross-referencing, finally confirmed the bloody truth and drew up the map.

Each newly added red patch represents a piece of farmland that has been forcibly seized, and behind it may lie the lives of more than one innocent person.

The door to the room was pushed open silently, and a captain, his face covered in dust, walked in. His steps were light, but they carried an undisguised urgency.

Li Ruolian ignored the captain's advice to rest; his gaze fell upon a file.

This file is thicker than any other.

This document contains no elaborate contingency plans, nor any single bloody incident; rather, it is a comprehensive record of the Dong family's decades of crimes.

In Huating County alone, the Dong family concealed their land holdings through methods commonly used by gentry, such as "deceptive registration" and "false submission," and actually owned one-tenth of the county's cultivated land!

Behind all this lies a brutality without any moral boundaries. In the case files, the names of Dong Qichang's second son, Dong Zuchang, who was famous throughout the world for his calligraphy and painting, and his servant Chen Ming, among others, appear repeatedly. They forcibly took women, destroyed houses, and beat people until they were crippled for a few cents of rent... one crime after another, too numerous to recount.

Their evil deeds were no secret; they were a sword hanging over the heads of the people of Songjiang Prefecture, ready to fall at any moment.

The Dong family even had that "people's uprising against Dong the eunuch" that shocked Jiangnan!
It was a rage that was forcibly suppressed, a so-called "civil unrest" that was whitewashed by local officials and gentry.

But Li Ruolian knew that it wasn't chaos, but rather an eruption of pent-up resentment.

Now, this pent-up fire, suppressed for so many years, only needs a bolt of lightning from the sky to erupt once more, burning the entire Dong family and the land beneath their feet, irrigated with sin, to ashes.

……

The next day, at the hour of Mao.

Before the sun had fully risen, a thin layer of morning mist shrouded the wide river like a veil, but the official wharf in the outer harbor was already packed with people.

On the river, the fleet's flagship was slowly and imposingly approaching the dock.

The massive ship, with its golden dragon flag, fluttered in the morning breeze.

On the shore, the thunderous shouts of "Long live the Emperor!" had already resounded several times.

But if you listen carefully, you can hear the artificiality and deliberateness in the voice. It's not genuine reverence, but rather a carefully choreographed and repeatedly rehearsed harmony.

The crowds on the dock formed a vivid and laughable diagram of power dynamics.

Kneeling at the very front, in the first row, was Zhang Guowei, the prefect of Songjiang, leading all the main officials of Songjiang Prefecture and its subordinate counties of Huating and Shanghai. They were all dressed in crisply starched official robes, their faces bearing expressions of respect tinged with apprehension. Following closely behind were the gentry and wealthy merchants, led by Dong Jing, the current head of the Dong clan. They wore even more magnificent and dazzling Suzhou embroidered silks than the officials, and their heads were adorned with priceless jade crowns; they knelt behind the officials.

Dong Jing wore a perfect smile, a smile that contained humility, obedience, excitement, and flattery, as if he were a wanderer who had been away from home for many years and had finally seen his beloved ruler.

Behind the officials and gentry were thousands of ordinary people.

They were reliable tenants carefully selected overnight from their respective estates by the Dong family and other gentry. Everyone was required to wear brand-new clothes, but their expressions were mostly numb, their eyes empty. They simply followed the crowd in front of them under the supervision of the stewards, shouting out a slogan that they might never understand in their entire lives.

Finally, under the watchful eyes of everyone, a figure appeared on the enormous dragon boat flagship.

The emperor was dressed in a black robe with a dragon design, without the winged crown that symbolized supreme power. He simply tied up his black hair with a warm white jade hairpin.

His face appeared somewhat stern in the morning light, his eyes deep and unfathomable, as if they could absorb the morning mist on the river and the hearts of people on the shore.

He stood at the bow of the ship, with Wang Chengen following closely behind him, and a group of sword-wielding guards whose murderous aura was concealed.

The moment he appeared, the shouts of "Long live the Emperor!" from the shore reached their peak, the sound almost dispersing the thin mist on the river.

Zhu Youjian slowly walked down the long gangway.

His pace was neither fast nor slow, but rather rhythmic, unmoved by external things.

The welcoming ceremony reached its climax the moment he stepped onto the dock.

However, the emperor ignored all of this.

He didn't look at Zhang Guowei, the prefect of Songjiang, who was kneeling at the very front, almost burying his head in the ground, nor did he look at the group of trembling officials of all ranks behind him.

His steps did not falter even for the slightest bit because of the deafening cheers.

His gaze, like a drawn blade, passed over the bureaucrats in the first row and landed precisely on Dong Jing, the man in the second row with the brightest smile and the most humble demeanor.

It was in that instant.

Time seems to have frozen.

Dong Jing's perfectly crafted smile, which he had meticulously prepared and rehearsed countless times, seemed to freeze instantly under that icy gaze, as if chilled by the cold current of Liaodong.

That gaze lingered on his face for only a moment, so brief that it was almost an illusion.

There was no anger, no questioning, not even any emotion that could be interpreted.

That was a purely condescending scrutiny.

In Dong Jing's view, that was the look one would give to an inanimate object.

In that instant, Dong Jing felt as if that gaze had completely pierced through him, from his very skin to his very soul.

All his pretense, all his schemes, all his self-righteous arrogance, and his darkest secrets were laid bare under that gaze, completely exposed!

Zhu Youjian withdrew his gaze, as if he had merely glanced casually at the dust on the roadside.

The emperor's figure quickly disappeared into the layers of ceremonial guards.

The shouts of "Long live the Emperor!" on the dock became incredibly awkward after losing their target, fading away and eventually disappearing completely.

Dong Jing remained kneeling, but his face, which had been flushed with excitement and the performance, had turned deathly pale, like a sheet of rice paper soaked in water.

He couldn't feel the tingling, numbness, or pain in his knees; instead, he felt a bone-chilling cold spreading throughout his body.

Beside him, another gentry member closely associated with the Dong family cautiously approached and asked in a barely audible whisper, "Brother Dong... what does His Majesty... what does His Majesty mean by this? He hasn't said a word... this..."

Dong Jing's lips twitched a few times, but his throat felt like it was filled with dry sand, and he couldn't utter a single word.

His mind was devoid of any plans or glimmers of hope. Only one thought, like wildly growing weeds or a deadly serpent, swirled and shrieked wildly in his mind, gripping his heart so tightly that he could barely breathe.

"He knows!"

"He knows everything!!"

(End of this chapter)