The Ming Dynasty: Starting with the Carpenter Prince!

Sun Chengzong followed Commander He into the camp, with two trainees close behind. One was taking notes and counting, while the other took out a small scale and a Lu Ban ruler to measure everything he encountered. This was a rule that the training institute had rigorously established: all data to be filed had to be measured first, then recorded, and then signed and acknowledged.

The roster reported a quota of 3,000. 1,200 actually attended.

Sun Chengzong underlined a line in the troop count: "How many of them can draw a bow?"

Commander He's face twitched slightly, and he said in a hoarse voice, "Less than three hundred can draw their bows fully, and about five hundred can barely draw them and shoot less than fifty paces. The rest are either wounded or bloated from hunger, and can't even hold their bows steadily."

Eight hundred men could barely be considered marksmen. Only three hundred were truly lethal.

Sun Chengzong asked, "Where are the armor?"

"Complete sets are less than four hundred," He Qianhu said in a hoarse voice. "And many of the cotton armors aren't even filled with cotton."

Sun Chengzong casually grabbed a pair of cotton armor, weighed it in his hand, and turned out the lining.

Reed catkins.

Clumps of greyish-white reeds, light and cheap, half the weight of cotton. They couldn't stop the heavy arrows of the Jurchens, much less protect against the extreme cold of Liaodong winter nights. Wearing such things while standing guard on the city wall, one would freeze to death even without enemy fire.

"Why not fill it with cotton?"

Commander He gave a bitter laugh: "Sir, in Liaodong, a pound of cotton costs four qian of silver. After accounting for transportation losses, it would cost seven or eight qian. The brothers' monthly salary, at most, is only eight fen of silver. A pound of cotton for keeping warm would require them to save up for ten months' salary."

The trainees scribbled rapidly on the paper with charcoal pencils. Cotton armor filled with reed fluff, monthly salary eight cents, cotton seven or eight mace per pound.

The numbers on paper are cold and unforgiving. But when placed before our eyes, they represent 1,200 lives struggling to survive.

In the western corner of the camp, two large iron pots in the mess hall were simmering a thin porridge. There was very little millet, and the water was so plentiful that you could see the bottom with a simple stir of a wooden ladle. When the strategist and the outsiders entered, the cook was so startled that he almost dropped his ladle into the pot.

"How many meals a day?" Sun Chengzong asked.

"Two meals, one bowl of porridge in the morning and one in the evening," the cook replied, not daring to look at Xiong Tingbi's face.

When will dry rice be provided?

The cook hesitated, speechless. Commander He answered for him: "On the 1st and 5th of each month, we can have one dry meal. The rest of the time it's porridge; there's no rice left."

Sun Chengzong stood silently in the cramped kitchen for a long time. The fire in the stove was dim, and the firewood was carefully measured. The flickering light cast shadows on his weathered face. From the direction of the drill ground came the sparse sounds of drills, weak and feeble, sounding like hoarse shouts, or as if afraid of disturbing death by shouting too loudly.

Stepping out of the kitchen, the night was already deathly still. Torches were few and far between in the camp, disappearing into deep darkness just a few dozen paces away.

Sun Chengzong walked to the base of the north wall, stopped and looked up.

Two soldiers were huddled on the earthen wall, wrapped in tattered cotton clothes of indeterminate color, tightly clutching two long spears. The spearheads glowed dark red in the firelight, their iron tips completely rusted through.

One of the soldiers was barefoot. In the winter months in Liaodong, his breath turned to ice, and his feet, standing on the frozen, hard rammed earth, had turned a necrotic blackish-purple.

"No shoes to wear?" Sun Chengzong asked.

He Qianhu remained silent.

Xiong Tingbi had caught up with them at some point and stood side by side against the wall. Listening to the howling night wind, his voice suddenly became very low, completely devoid of the arrogance and irritability he had displayed in the signing room.

"You saw it?"

Sun Chengzong nodded slightly.

"This is Puhe. Of the three thousand on the roster, twelve thousand actually showed up, and three hundred dared to fight. Some wore reed catkins, some went barefoot, and some were starving and waiting to die."

Xiong Tingbi tilted his head back and took a deep breath of cold air, as if trying to completely suppress the chill of Liaodong into his lungs.

"For two years, I served as the military governor of Liaodong, working tirelessly day after day, sacrificing half the rations and pay to save twice the number of lives! Did I not know we couldn't feed them? But what could I do? If we didn't, Puhe would immediately become an empty camp. If Puhe was empty, then Shenyang would be next; if Shenyang fell, then Liaoyang would be next; and if Liaoyang fell, the Jurchens' hooves would be pointing straight at Shanhaiguan!"

He whirled around, staring intently at Sun Chengzong: "Go back to the capital and tell His Highness the Crown Prince! Once the truth is revealed, the court will kill me, the military commissioner, not those corrupt officials who embezzled military funds. Everyone in the court knows the military figures for the nine border regions are inflated, but who dares to expose this? Once this hole is exposed, a huge number of officials will die! And believe it or not, those who die won't be the ones who embezzled the money, but those who reported the numbers!"

Sun Chengzong wrote.

How could he not believe it?

This bloody and absurd logic was already crystal clear to the fifteen-year-old Crown Prince amidst the chaos of the Eastern Palace. The Ming Dynasty's officialdom had its own absurd ironclad rule—if you can't solve the deficit, solve the person who reported it.

But when it came out of Xiong Tingbi's cracked lips, shouted out in the freezing night wind of the Puhe River, it weighed as heavy as Mount Tai.

The test paper will always be covered in ink stains; what stands here is flesh and blood.

In the warm chambers of the capital, the struggle is for righteousness and status, but those who fill the void of status are all the blood and bones of the lowest-ranking military households.

……

That night, Sun Chengzong and his party stayed overnight in Puhe.

By the dim light of a lamp, the two trainees transcribed the daytime data into three copies. One was kept as a record, one was sealed with wax for presentation, and one was given to Sun Chengzong for review. Each data point was accompanied by a signature and fingerprint. This was an ironclad rule of the training institute: whoever recorded the data was responsible for it.

Sun Chengzong looked through it for a long time.

The roster lists three thousand, but only twelve thousand are actually present. Eight hundred can draw a bow, and three hundred can draw it fully. Four hundred are missing armor, and more than half are covered in reeds. The monthly salary is set at one tael and five mace, but less than three mace are actually paid. Two meals of thin porridge are provided daily, and dry rice is served on the first and fifth days of the month.

The accounts were spotless, without a single cliché of heart-wrenching lament. Yet these cold, hard numbers weighed a hundred times heavier than any impeachment petition Yang Lian had ever written.

……

Thirty miles outside the stronghold.

Deep within the withered grass lay a figure that blended seamlessly with the yellowing vegetation. A rat's tail was coiled behind its head in a fur hat, and its hands, though frozen red, remained motionless like a dead object.

Later Jin spies.

This was the second time he had come to this place. The last time, he counted the smoke from the camp's cooking fires and reported back to the Khan: "Three thousand men in a camp, a thousand wisps of smoke."

Tonight, he sensed something was amiss.

The Ming Dynasty civil official who arrived at the camp at dusk caused this dilapidated outpost to set up two additional sentry posts on the east and north sides overnight, and several more torches were lit. The scouts did not know who the civil official was, but he was well-versed in military tactics. A civil official who could make a deserted camp tighten its discipline again must be someone of great importance.

After lying in wait for two quarters of an hour in the biting cold dew, confirming the distribution of sentry posts, the guerrilla soldier quietly retreated and disappeared into the boundless night of Liaodong.

……

Seven days later, in the capital.

Inside a side hall of the Eastern Palace, Zhu Youxiao was reviewing old files from the Ministry of Revenue when Wang An led someone in quietly.

Sun Chengzong stood at the threshold. In just half a month, this fifty-seven-year-old lecturer had completely changed his appearance. His cheeks were sunburned and peeling, his lips were chapped, and the lines between his brows were as deep as if carved by a knife. His blue official robe was soaked with the indelible smell of mud and sweat.

Zhu Youxiao put down the file and slowly stood up. He did not rush to ask about Puhe's situation.

As for the reason?

No need to ask.

Just by looking at the heavy steps Sun Chengzong took as he crossed the threshold, one could tell how much weight that mission had taken on him. Fifteen hundred miles of wind and snow, bare toes on the city walls of Puhe, and the crystal-clear iron pots in the kitchen—all of these weighed heavily on the lecturer's back.

After performing the grand ceremony, Sun Chengzong took out a thick sheet of oiled paper sealed with wax from his sleeve and presented it to the top of his head with both hands. The signatures of the trainees and the wax seal at the seal were intact.

Zhu Youxiao did not rush to open the book: "Sir, you must have had a long journey."

Sun Chengzong shook his head, forcing out only one sentence from his dry throat: "Your Highness, I have counted the soldiers in Puhe."

The voice was so soft that Wang An, who was standing right next to him, couldn't hear it clearly.

But Zhu Youxiao heard it clearly.

I've counted them.

Count them one by one.

Zhu Youxiao took the list, his fingertips lingering for a moment on the cold wax seal. He knew all too well what he would see when he opened it: 1,200 living people, 300 soft bows, tattered armor stuffed with reeds, and eight cents of silver for military pay. He had estimated, calculated, and reconstructed these messy accounts countless times in the old archives of the side hall.

The numbers that can be estimated can never match the numbers that can be counted.

It's an estimate, and it allows for some error.

There was no room for error.

"Please rest, sir. We'll discuss this further tomorrow."

Sun Chengzong bowed again and withdrew from the main hall.

Zhu Youxiao sat back down at his desk, leaving the official document list untouched for a long time. His gaze swept across the desk and landed on the half-piece of paper lying under the inkstone.

Zhao Laifu.

The name, crossed out with heavy ink, still stands out starkly even when turned over.

The poor soldiers of Puhe waited for silver in the freezing cold, while the lamps in the warm chambers of the palace awaited the death-dealing prescriptions. The fifteen-year-old Crown Prince sat alone in a side hall, his hands reaching out in all directions, yet finding no solid ground in either. He could not feel the biting winds of Liaodong, fifteen hundred li away, nor could he control when the solitary lamp in the warm chamber would go out.

a long time.

Zhu Youxiao unlocked the hidden safe containing the case files, locking the heavy ledger along with the few pieces of broken armor from before deep inside. The safe contained more and more items: armor pieces, ledgers, and notes.

Each one is like a blunt knife that has not yet been sharpened.

It can't be rushed.

There is no vacuum of power. If we don't have enough bargaining chips right now, we'll only break the blade if we rashly draw our swords.

But the bare feet on the city wall of Puhe, frozen purple, could not wait any longer.