Chapter 1217 - 300: Military Budget Calculation

Chapter 1217: Chapter 300: Military Budget Calculation

Ji Chengjue came back very late,

so late that Lord Zheng had already been eating his late meal for quite a while, and the blind man was starting to prepare a midnight snack when he finally returned.

As soon as he came back, he went straight to the courtyard where Zheng Fan was staying; he even broke his iron rule of always going to see his son first thing when he got home.

He flopped his body down onto the cushion,

Ji Laoliu braced his hands on the floor,

and let out a long sigh:

"I’m exhausted."

Lord Zheng was unmoved, continuing to drink his tea. There was no more Daze Fragrant Tea, but Ji Laoliu’s household hardly lacked good stuff. Lord Zheng didn’t like tea, but he liked drinking things that were expensive.

Ji Laoliu waited for a bit; seeing that Lord Zheng didn’t even offer a word of comfort, he couldn’t help feeling a bit aggrieved and said:

"I was already really busy today, still prying bricks from the east wall to patch the west wall. We’d just barely tidied things up, and Father showed up out of nowhere, so, well, everyone kept busy all the way till now."

The Ministry of Revenue, up above, has to feed the other Six Ministries; down below, the local prefectures and counties need disaster relief, and all the military commanders everywhere are crying to be fed. But Yan has spread its stall out insanely wide now, and the Ministry of Revenue has to keep eating tomorrow’s grain today, even going around haggling with all sides.

They may call it a hall full of Nobles and Honored, but when it comes to fighting over budget allotments, they’re rougher than fishwives cursing in a vegetable market.

"Busy with what?" Lord Zheng asked.

"Father wants to ask about war accounting."

"War accounting?"

"War accounting" is the court’s term in the Yan region, born from the characteristics of the early war model. Before a campaign, the emperor and the great noble clans would jointly tally up grain, armaments, manpower, and so on; everyone would calculate a plan together, and only then send out the troops.

Simply put, it’s everyone sitting down and figuring out how much money, grain, and manpower it would take to fight a war.

Ji Laoliu knew what Lord Zheng wanted to ask, so he said: "Father didn’t say where he wants to fight, just told us to do the numbers."

"Oh? And what did you come up with?"

"Of course we couldn’t come up with anything. Just keeping this whole stall running is already extremely difficult; where are we supposed to find spare money and grain to go fight a war? This wouldn’t be some small-scale scuffle."

Things like the Eldest Prince and Zhong Tianlang having small cavalry skirmishes along the border near Nanwang City can only be called kids playing house. Any mobilization that doesn’t use more than twenty thousand troops and doesn’t last over a month doesn’t even qualify to reach the Yan Emperor’s stage.

"Actually, it’s not that we can’t fight." Lord Zheng said as he drank his tea.

Ji Chengjue chuckled and said, "We’re the Yan State, not a Yan bandit stronghold. We can’t keep staking the whole family fortune on a gamble every single time, can we?"

Just as Lord Zheng said, fighting, is possible.

Right now we’re eating tomorrow’s grain today; if we want to fight, we just first collect all kinds of taxes four or five years in advance, conduct direct military requisitions on forts and merchants in various regions, and impose forced labor on commoners in towns and villages that wildly exceeds the legal limit;

in short, we’d be overdrawing the entire future of Yan and forcibly betting it all on one campaign.

This move, in fact, Yan State has already used once before.

On that occasion, the horse-trampling of the noble clans had just ended; the Earl of North Border didn’t even take time for a thorough cleanup, but directly redeployed the troops back to Yinlang County, joined forces with Lord Jingnan, and began the campaigns against Qian and Jin.

On the Qian front, they fought all the way to the walls beneath the imperial capital;

on the Jin front, they basically smashed more than half of the Jin State.

Then, riding on the prestige brought by brilliant victories in external wars, the Yan Emperor, above, suppressed the court and made imperial power peak; below, he comforted the common folk. The victories in external wars let the people temporarily ignore the decline in their living standards.

However, Ji Chengjue, after all, is a "businessman". Businessmen have a basic trait: one is preserving capital—capital is the possibility of making a comeback from East Mountain; another is stability—steady profits and sustainable development.

Those who keep gambling their life and family fortune on a desperate turnaround are, at bottom, still stuck in the barefoot-beggar category.

"I’m just afraid Father really plans to do this."

"If His Majesty wants to do it, he’ll do it; can you stop him?" Lord Zheng teased. "What, is Ji Chengjue going to lead a crowd of ministers to kneel outside the palace gate and petition?

That’s not something Ji Laoliu would ever do."

"My surname is Ji. I am a Yan person." Ji Chengjue said.

Lord Zheng reached out to cover his own chest,

and just as seriously said:

"I am a Yan person too."

"Yan, actually, can afford to sit tight for a bit." Ji Chengjue said.

"That’s your view. You think your abilities are strong, so naturally you hope that once you sit in that seat, the situation will be better than now. You might even have some private selfishness: if His Majesty finishes everything himself, and then when you sit in that seat you find there’s nothing left to do, how boring would that be?

Among billions of living beings, how many get to sit in that position?

Favored by Heaven, since you’ve sat there, you ought to do something that will be recorded in the historical annals; at the very least, you should leave some stories for later generations to read.

But from His Majesty’s standpoint, he doesn’t think like that.

He finally managed to trample the noble clans underhoof and gather power into his own hand. If he doesn’t seize this chance to sweep clean the entire East, to unify Zhuxia, can His Majesty swallow that?

So it turns out that he’s spent half his life painstakingly exhausting his mind,

just to make wedding clothes for someone else?

Even if that someone else is his own son."

Ji Chengjue narrowed his eyes, looking at Zheng Fan.

Zheng Fan continued:

"Granted, most parents in this world are the sort who’re willing to give everything to their children—their wealth, their life’s savings, even their very lives......

But, how should I put it, I’m not that kind of parent."

"You don’t have children yet."

"No, I think even if I have children in the future, I still wouldn’t......."

"Talk about it again when you have kids."

"Are you going to let me finish or not? We only manage to see each other once every two or three years, so to talk to you I have to go back, have a child first, and then come back to continue the conversation, is that it?"