Demoness, where are you Fleeing to?
Chapter 879 - 728

Chapter 879: 728

Wang Wen was a gentleman, and now that the resolution had been passed in The Court, he dedicated all his efforts to implementing it without resorting to any kind of trickery.

As for Shang Hong, his position in The Court was awkward. Being rarely entrusted with tasks, he devoted himself fully to the work he did have.

In fact, the "Law of Juntian" had not yet been implemented, but it had already started to show effects.

The military households of the army of Weisuo, hearing the news, started to tend to the Weisuo military fields with much greater care.

In the meantime, several cases of Weisuo military officials encroaching on military land came to light—under the heavy pressure from Shaofu Yu Jie and Li Xuan, they didn’t dare to actually encroach on the land.

These people simply sublet the best fields within the Weisuo, which were supposed to produce four or five shi per mu, and profited from the price difference.

All they needed to do at harvest time was to hand over two shi per mu to The Court according to the "normal" yield of the military fields.

In the past, these fields were The Court’s property and unrelated to the military households, so naturally, the superiors did as they pleased and the local military households didn’t care much.

But now that The Court was about to distribute the land, and it was expected that by the end of May, before the winter wheat ripened, the initial distribution would be complete. This meant that the crops in the field would belong to the military households from then on.

These military households’ interests were at stake, and they naturally could not tolerate any nonsensical behavior from the lower and upper banner officials.

As a result, various corruption cases related to the fields started coming out one after another in north Zhili.

Then, as time entered April, Li Xuan received another piece of news that greatly lifted his spirits.

The potato and sweet potato fields of the Jin Dynasty imperial manor had successively entered the harvest season.

Due to Yu Hongchang’s strict orders for all imperial manors in the north to stop planting winter wheat, the Neiguan Bureau freed up four million mu for potato planting and allocated another five hundred thousand mu in the south for sweet potato cultivation.

Therefore, the output was extremely exaggerated, with nearly 160 million shi of potatoes and 30 million shi of sweet potatoes harvested.

——And this was only from the royal estates, not including the hundreds of thousands of mu belonging to Earl Chengyi’s mansion or the estates of the nobles and scholarly families from both the north and the south.

Li Xuan estimated that this figure would be between 600 million and 800 million shi, enough to sustain the subsistence needs of Jin’s population of 150 million for three months.

Even with those who were not on the household registers, the hidden households, it was more than enough to guarantee food supply across the regions.

At this point, Li Xuan had completely disregarded the military affairs in Shaanxi.

As the saying goes, "When you have food in hand, your heart is at ease."

Since the troops in Shaanxi were well-equipped and sufficiently supplied with rations, what followed would simply be a war of attrition.

Fighting such a stagnant war, reliant on fortifications, Li Xuan’s presence would have been of no use.

The tasks at hand, whether it was training Shenji Camp, the migration to Liaodong, or the Yunzhong warships, or even the implementation of the "Law of Juntian," were all much more important than the ongoing battle in Shaanxi.

※※※※

While The Court was gradually settling down from the upheaval caused by the "Law of Juntian" and the "Ancestral Worship Law," Prince Yi, Yu Jianshen, in his mansion in Xi’an, was in a state of deep worry.

His eyes were filled with confusion, "Can you be certain? Are there really grains in those grain ships and carts? Are they not a decoy or a bluff?"

"Undoubtedly certain,"

The one answering Prince Yi, Yu Jianshen, was the Iron-faced Man seated at the foot of his hall.

He had joined Prince Yi’s army in August of the previous year.

Having previous contact with the military, the Iron-faced Man had access to some of the resources left behind by Prince Ning, and he quickly gained the trust of Prince Yi.

Now, the Iron-faced Man’s voice was hoarse, "In these past few days, I personally snuck into the grain ships one by one. A total of thirty-seven grain ships have arrived at Sanmen Gorge, all fully loaded with various kinds of grains.

Moreover, the morale of the Jin Army remains high, showing no signs of decline. This indicates that the Jin Court has no shortage of fodder and supplies."

It was then they faintly heard in the distance a tumultuous roar of cheers and the thunderous booming sounds of hundreds of cannons.

——Those were sounds coming from sixty li outside the city. Since the beginning of the ’Reform Era,’ two Yunzhong warships had joined the Shaanxi battlefield.

The Court’s advancing armies in both Shanxi and Henan had suddenly accelerated their pace. Just the other day, the Zongbing of Henan, Fang Ying, commanding an army of 370,000, had advanced to within sixty li east of Xi’an, setting up their last line of defense outside the city.

In reality, the prince’s mansion was very far from the battlefield, and ordinary people could not hear the sounds of the cannons from there.

But both Prince Yi, Yu Jianshen, and the Iron-faced Man had cultivation abilities, and their senses were far sharper than those of ordinary people.

Prince Yi, Yu Jianshen could not help but frown, "But where did these grains come from, Mr. Iron? Have you found out for sure?"

This touched upon another issue that was troubling Yu Jianshen, even giving him a sense of panic.

In the past few months, his spy network had suffered severe blows.

The Xiuyiwei and the inner Jishi Institute of The Court suddenly became efficient and well-connected.

In an impressively short amount of time, they completely destroyed the spy network left by Empress Sun.

In addition, many nobles and members of the royal family who had previously signaled their secret agreements with him had also gone silent, cutting off all communication with the Xi’an side.

Yu Jianshen knew that something had changed in the world, something that could potentially shift the grand situation, and he was completely unaware of it.

He was like a blind man and a deaf man, utterly clueless about what was happening in the east.

The occasional messages that did get back to him were a mix of truth and lies, too obscure to be credible.

So much so that Yu Jianshen had to rely on the Iron-faced Man, on the secret agents left by Prince Ning.