The Ming Dynasty: Starting with the Carpenter Prince!

Before dawn, the lights in the side hall of Cining Palace were still on. Several items wrapped tightly in coarse linen were quietly carried in through the back corner door under the cover of darkness.

Sun Chengzong had asked an old acquaintance in the Ministry of Works to pay a small fee for tea, and secretly retrieved old military equipment returned from Liaodong from the Ordnance Bureau's warehouse—three suits of iron armor, two bows, a bundle of arrows, and a wrought iron tag with a batch number.

The reason for this was nothing more than that half a month ago, when Zhu Youxiao was reviewing the memorials from Liaodong, he saw that the number of soldiers in Puhe was inconsistent and sighed: What's the use of just staring at the ink marks on the paper? You have to touch the actual object to know how rotten it is underneath.

After the cloth bag was untied, Zhu Youxiao stepped forward and casually picked up a suit of iron armor, but was slightly taken aback on the spot.

No other reason than that it's too light.

According to Ming Dynasty military regulations, a suit of infantry armor, with its layers of armor plates riveted together and lined with cowhide, should weigh around thirty jin (approximately 15 kg). However, upon holding it in his hand and weighing it briefly, he determined that it was at most a little over twenty jin (approximately 10 kg). Having worked as a carpenter for fifteen years and handled countless materials, he knew that while wood and iron differed, the feel of weight was unmistakable.

Zhu Youxiao expressionlessly flipped over his armor skirt, casually pulled off a piece of armor and placed it in his palm. Then, he pinched the two edges of the armor with his thumb and forefinger and suddenly squeezed it with force.

The sensation from the fingertips made the crown prince pause for a beat.

too thin.

The iron armor of Ming dynasty infantry was typically three-tenths of an inch thick. A three-tenths-inch thick piece of wrought iron should, under normal finger pressure, remain completely still, at most turning the nail root white. Yet, the piece he was holding had been forcefully pinched by his fingernail, leaving a shallow white mark.

"One and a half minutes," Zhu Youxiao suddenly said coldly, "at most one minute and seven seconds."

Chen Wenju, who was standing nearby, was startled. He quickly found a specially made wooden pliers, placed the leaf flat on the table, clamped it with bamboo strips, and carefully examined the markings under the lamp.

"One to six," Chen Wenju blurted out.

It was only a fraction different from Zhu Youxiao's previous touch.

The side hall fell into a deathly silence. The students from the six training institutes looked at each other, none of them daring to utter a word.

Zhu Youxiao remained silent, only turning around to pick up the bow and half-draw the string. The bow arm deformed drastically, and the bowstring was like a piece of burnt ox tendon that had been over-scorched by the blazing sun, its rebound weak and limp. When he loosened the string and examined the joint of the bow arm, the fish glue had already dried and cracked, peeling off easily with a fingernail.

As for those arrowheads, they were even more shocking. Zhu Youxiao picked one up and examined it briefly in the dim light coming in from the window. He saw that the iron was dark gray-blue, and the broken edge was densely covered with sand holes and bubbles.

pig iron.

The arrowheads used to pierce infantry armor should be forged and quenched from wrought iron, resulting in a dense and shiny cross-section. However, the ones in front of us are clearly cheap imitations hastily cast from pig iron! They wouldn't even be able to penetrate the thick cotton armor of the Eight Banners soldiers, let alone the thin iron sheet in front of us.

"Draw a design." Zhu Youxiao put down the arrowhead, his tone eerily calm. "The standard thickness for the arrowhead is three-tenths of an inch, but the actual thickness is one-sixth of an inch. Make a comparison chart. Record the bowstring tension and arrowhead material accurately, ensuring the quantities are absolutely precise!"

The two tenant farmers immediately accepted the order. They were used to being military clerks, so drawing such comparative diagrams was a piece of cake for them.

At the corner of the table, nine-year-old Zhu Youjian stared intently at the nail plate, speechless, his tender face completely drained of color. He had just joined in the fun by pinching the nail plate, and for a moment, when his fingernail dug in, the child even thought he was pinching a piece of tin.

Is this the iron armor that the soldiers of Puhe wore to protect themselves from swords? They were wearing this kind of scrap metal to withstand the heavy arrows and long swords of the Jianzhou Jurchens?

No one needs to say anything more; the nail plate itself, so thin that you can leave a mark with your fingernail, tells the whole story perfectly.

About half an hour later, the design was mostly complete. Zhu Youxiao sat upright at his desk, examining the draft while picking up an axe leaf to look at the inscription on the back.

According to regulations, all Ming Dynasty weapons had a system for tracing their origins. The back of each armor plate was engraved with the name of the manufacturing office, the supervising official, and the serial number. However, the characters were extremely fine and could only be seen clearly when the plate was brought very close. Zhu Youxiao gently removed the rust with the tip of a small carving knife and held the armor plate up to the window light, squinting slightly to examine it for a couple of breaths.

"Made by the Armor Factory of the Ministry of Industry's Ordnance Bureau"—the eight characters are quite clear.

However, when Zhu Youxiao saw the inspector following behind signing his name, his hand suddenly froze.

Amidst the blurred handwriting, three characters stood out—Zhou Yingqiu.

As if a bucket of ice water had been poured over his head, Zhu Youxiao's fingertips suddenly turned cold. Almost instinctively, he flipped the nail plate face down onto the table, only to casually flip it back over in the next instant. The whole sequence of actions took less than a breath, so fast that no one noticed, but he knew perfectly well that his heart had skipped a full beat in that instant.

Zhou Yingqiu.

Zhu Youxiao, with his memories of his past life's experience within the system, was very familiar with this name. When checking funds, the first thing to look at is the signature, but the signatory is often insignificant; what's truly dangerous is who stands behind that signatory. Zhou Yingqiu was a Jinshi (successful candidate in the highest imperial examination) in the 23rd year of the Wanli reign, having served in office for a full 25 years, wasting half his life and repeatedly suffering indifference; now he was merely a sixth-rank official in the Ministry of Works' Ordnance Bureau. In his previous life, such a resume would have made him either mediocre or without any powerful backing.

But Zhou Yingqiu happened to have powerful backers.

This person's mentor was Wang Shaohui, the Director of the Personnel Selection Department of the Ministry of Personnel. And who was Wang Shaohui's mentor? It was none other than Fang Congzhe, the Grand Secretary of the Cabinet at the time!

In the officialdom of the Ming Dynasty, the bond between three generations of teachers and students had long since formed an unbreakable web of interests. When Zhou Yingqiu affixed his seal to this piece of armor, what he was signing was not merely his personal name. Behind that small mark lay the annual flow of six thousand taels of silver for materials and labor at the Ordnance Bureau, and the hard-earned money of the common people that ultimately ended up in the accounts after layers of allocations from the Ministry of Revenue.

With a stroke of his pen, this sixth-rank official deemed the armor plate acceptable. After passing through layers of erosion, it reached the hands of the soldiers guarding the Puhe River, becoming a thick sheet of cast iron, forcing Ming soldiers to use their flesh and blood to block the arrows of the Eight Banners. The signature of a lowly bureaucrat was enough to kill someone a thousand miles away, and behind it all lay the Grand Secretary.

Zhu Youxiao remained outwardly calm, but his mind was racing. To be fair, Fang Congzhe, as the Grand Secretary who had served as the sole prime minister for seven years and was extremely busy with state affairs, would never have personally overseen the acceptance of the military equipment. This embezzlement was most likely the work of Zhou Yingqiu and his associates. But whether they knew about it or not was one thing; whether they could investigate was another.

If you investigate Zhou Yingqiu, he will surely implicate Wang Shaohui; if you investigate Wang Shaohui, he will definitely try to climb up to Fang Congzhe. Once it gets to that point, it will no longer be about rectifying corrupt practices, but about completely undermining the political foundation of the Grand Secretary.

Unless the evidence is strong enough to overturn the outcome, this card should never be revealed. If it alerts the enemy, they might destroy the ledgers or transfer personnel, rendering this small amount of evidence useless.

"Is the drawing finished?" After a long pause, Zhu Youxiao finally spoke again, his voice as steady as ever.

"Your Highness, the draft is complete, but it still needs to be copied neatly," Chen Wenju hurriedly replied.

"After you have copied it, lock it together with the armor plates into the hidden safe, and hand the key to me." Zhu Youxiao casually picked up the other two armor plates to compare and inscribe them, his expression calm and unhurried, as if the momentary stiffness just now had never existed. Only his left hand, resting on his knee, had its five fingers unconsciously curled slightly, and his knuckles were white.

In the afternoon, everyone dispersed.

Zhu Youjian was the only one who didn't leave. He insisted on staying in the side hall and spent another hour retracing the comparison diagram.

Although the handwriting of the nine-year-old child was crooked, the measured numbers were meticulous.

After finishing the last stroke, Zhu Youjian looked up at his elder brother, hesitant to speak.

"Say whatever you want to say."

"Big brother, those soldiers at Puhe..." the child's voice trembled slightly, "are they wearing this?"

"Um."

Zhu Youjian lowered his head again, staring intently at the line of words he had personally drawn: "Regulations are divided into three parts, actual measurement is one part to six."

He didn't speak again. A nine-year-old child naturally couldn't explain systemic corruption, but he could clearly see that the difference of one and a half cents was not just ink on paper, but the lives of countless people.

As evening fell, only Zhu Youxiao remained sitting alone in the side hall.

The nail plate lay flat on the table, the inscription facing upwards. He gazed through the window at the withered branches in the courtyard outside, lost in thought for a long time.

The Zhou Yingqiu line is absolutely untouchable right now. It's not that we don't want to, but the time isn't right. The system for verifying Liaodong military pay has only just been implemented, and the training institute is still walking on thin ice under Fang Congzhe's nose. If we were to poke holes in the Ordnance Bureau at this juncture, given Fang Congzhe's methods, he would definitely turn around and uproot the training institute.

When investigating a case, finding out exactly ten points is like flipping the table; right now, the information he has is only about three-tenths of what he could possibly know.

"Lock it up," he muttered to himself, his face ashen. "Wait until it grows into a knife, then uproot it completely."

After saying this, he stood up and put all the armor plates into the safe. With a crisp "click," the copper lock snapped shut.

He tucked the cold key into his sleeve, pressing it tightly against his wrist, its chill penetrating to the bone.

……

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Hetu Ala.

The night was deep, and the candlelight flickered in the main hall. Nurhaci sat cross-legged on a heated kang (a traditional heated platform bed) covered with thick, colorful animal hides. A bowl of liquor sat on the low table in front of him, untouched for a long time.

Below the hall, a scout was kneeling on one knee, reporting military intelligence.

"Your Majesty, although the Ming army camps around Puhe have an official strength of three thousand soldiers, our scouts have been counting them for days and found that there are less than a thousand wisps of smoke rising from their cooking fires. Apart from one hidden sentry post on the south side, the east, west, and north sides are practically non-existent."

Upon hearing this, Nurhaci picked up the bowl of liquor, took a sip, and then slammed the bowl down heavily on the kang table with a thud.

"A camp of three thousand men, a thousand wisps of smoke." The Khan of the Later Jin Dynasty pondered this number carefully, then suddenly let out a cold laugh.

The smile didn't reach his eyes at all.

"The Ming army of the Southern Dynasties is like their city walls; they appear imposing and invincible from the outside, but are rotten to the core." Nurhaci raised his eyelids, his sharp gaze slowly sweeping over Daišan, Amin, Huang Taiji, and the others standing in the tent, his tone chilling. "There's no need to rush the matter of Puhe. What's urgent is when the Ming will continue to fill Puhe with people. If they don't, let their empty camp rot; if they do..."

The words were abruptly cut off before they could be finished.

The hall fell silent for a moment.

Outside the palace, the north wind howled, its mournful cry sounding like sobs. This long night in the white mountains and black waters was, after all, three times colder than in the Forbidden City.