Since arriving in Great Tang, staying alive had been Yun Ye’s greatest goal. As long as those things more important than life itself weren’t touched, living was his greatest consolation to himself. Anyone who had read history knew how tyrannical Li Er was at this time.
It was said that without constant external enemies and internal ministers who could offer admonishment, a state would inevitably perish. Li Er’s understanding of the nation and power far exceeded Yun Ye’s. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand this principle—if an emperor didn’t want to be corrupted by a life of extravagance and indulgence, he must constantly establish enemies for himself. Now the external enemies had been nearly eliminated. Many formidable heroes were preparing performances and dances for him at the guest halls, their fawning words and behavior nauseating.
Only Goguryeo was still struggling bitterly in civil war. Once the civil war determined victory and defeat, it would be time for Great Tang to intervene. At this time, Li Er fixed his eyes on domestic matters.
Ever since Chen Qun of the Three Kingdoms period established the “Nine Rank System,” this hereditary nobility system had deeply penetrated the inner hearts of the nobles. Nobles were naturally born to be officials—as long as they were born, they were superior to others.
Having himself relied on aristocratic clans to rise, how could Li Er not worry that future generations would walk his old path? This time he not only wanted to eliminate the old-established nobles’ arrogance but also made arrangements for the new emerging nobles.
Enfeoffing feudal lords to safeguard the imperial house had always been Li Er’s dream. In the tenth year of Zhenguan, Li Er decided to implement this dream by establishing the “Hereditary Governor” system, granting various princes, imperial relatives, and meritorious ministers hereditary governor titles, stationing them in various places to be passed down generation after generation without replacement. This included twenty-one princes and fourteen meritorious officials. Under Li Er’s arrangement, after they accepted the edict, they had to immediately rush to their posts, henceforth becoming reliable shields for the Li Tang imperial house.
Zhangsun Wuji bore the title of Zhaozhou Governor, Fang Xuanling held Yuzhou Governor, Du Ruhui administered Hezhou, Cheng Yaojin administered Luzhou, Qin Qiong administered Qizhou—even Yun Ye, who was completely unrelated, now held the title of Yuezhou Governor.
This clearly showed a posture of enfeoffing the realm. Originally Li Er wanted to use these methods to control the new nobles’ influence in the localities, keeping their family power far from Chang’an, this center of authority. For this, he placed great hopes on his most loyal ally Zhangsun Wuji, hoping he could take the lead in accepting such rewards.
Who knew Zhangsun Wuji would not act according to the Emperor’s wishes for the first time? Under Zhangsun Wuji’s leadership, the enfeoffed meritorious officials collectively expressed unwillingness to proceed to their hereditary fiefs to take office. This way, the hereditary governor system became a bubble. Even those enfeoffed were resisting—you couldn’t exactly drive them to their posts with sticks, could you? Soon, Zhangsun Wuji again and again petitioned the Emperor through his daughter-in-law Princess Changle, “This old minister and Your Majesty fought together for the realm back then, experiencing nine deaths and one life. With great difficulty we finally achieved peace under heaven—why drive us to take office in foreign lands? Isn’t this almost the same as exile?”
Empress Zhangsun had actually come to the academy against this background. She wanted to dispel her melancholy—caught between her husband and elder brother was difficult. Zhangsun knew her brother had already sacrificed too much for her. Otherwise, in the eighth year of Zhenguan he would have already become a Minister of State—this was the prime minister’s position! But this time, her brother hadn’t cooperated with the Emperor’s policy. Instead, he had led the opposition. This clearly showed unwillingness to relinquish his own power.
After learning of these events from Li Chengqian’s mouth, Yun Ye understood why Zhangsun would climb Yushan on a snowy day. If it were himself, he’d probably go climb snow mountains in Tubo.
Actually, Yun Ye quite liked the position of Yuezhou Governor. Even now that he’d returned to the capital, Yun Ye hadn’t actively resigned from this position. After all, Yuezhou had now entered a period of great development. As long as construction proceeded according to plan, selling houses and land while accelerating construction pace, surely a large city would soon appear beside Dongting Lake.
Yun Ye hadn’t resigned as Yuezhou Governor—this was Li Er’s only fig leaf in the enfeoffment of governors incident. When Zhangsun Wuji led everyone to decline together, Yun Ye was already at his post.
During this period, Yun Ye made no moves, only wholeheartedly managing the academy, encouraging those students from humble origins, raising pandas, occasionally entering the palace to pay respects to the Empress, bringing Sun Simiao to examine Jinyang’s illness—just not going to see Li Er.
The atmosphere at court was extremely strange. The matter of the Emperor going to Mount Tai in Shandong for the Feng and Shan ceremonies had been pushed by those ministers to next year. As for whether he could go next year, that still depended on whether Great Tang had favorable weather.
This was a time to play turtle, shrinking back into one’s shell. Having resolved one crisis for the Emperor, rumors that Yun Ye was a court jester were already circulating publicly. If he meddled again at this time, that would be making trouble for himself. At this moment, Yun Ye wanted to dig a pit and bury himself so everyone couldn’t see him and no one would come looking for trouble.
What the hell—the Great Tang Imperial Yushan Academy welcomed its first audit. The Ministry of Personnel, Ministry of Revenue, Ministry of Rites, and Ministry of Works conducted a joint major inspection. If you added later generations’ Ministry of Health and Ministry of Public Security, this would be a joint major inspection by six ministries.
Originally he thought it wasn’t just Yushan Academy that would undergo audit—the Imperial Academy and Hongwen Hall should also accept audits. Who knew they called it a “spot check”? Thus among Chang’an’s several hundred units, Yushan Academy was the first drawn out.
Leading the inspection was Wei Zheng, with his ice-cold dead person face, conducting official business in a detestable manner. The money and grain allocated annually by the imperial household to the academy, the salaries allocated annually by the Ministry of Revenue to the academy, and investigation of the academy’s own industries were all included.
Xu Jingzong slyly smiled and had people carry out a whole room of account books. He had found everything—the tables recording monthly salary disbursements to teachers, records of student subsidy distributions. In the enormous room, it truly could be called “enough to make oxen sweat from carrying and fill a house to the rafters.”
“Lord Censor, the academy has never been audited by the government in all these years. Since you’ve come, then you can’t just go through the motions. Every account book requires Lord Censor to examine clearly. Forgot to mention—the academy has already graduated three groups of students. Now throughout Great Tang’s territory, those who serve as officials serve as officials, those who work as master craftsmen work as master craftsmen, those who are merchants are merchants. The subsidy disbursements from early years are a confused account, so this official recorded all money that couldn’t be properly accounted for into that ledger. If you want to understand it clearly, you’ll need to verify with those already-graduated students.”
Xu Jingzong had grasped the pulse very precisely. In his view, as long as the academy clung tightly to the Emperor’s thigh, offending other people didn’t matter. So he deliberately put on a detestable appearance of “I have loopholes—come audit me if you dare,” just to show the Emperor. If Wei Zheng could impeach him once at court, that would be even more wonderful.
Due to differences in learning and perspective, Wei Zheng, accustomed to using simple debit and credit accounting, had no possibility of understanding double-entry bookkeeping. For the method of offsetting debits and credits and balancing the two, he needed very strong comprehension ability to manage it. Xu Jingzong had spent a full two years to standardize the accounting method Yun Ye had roughly proposed. Now even Yun Ye himself found their accounting method very difficult to read. As an absolute expert in this area, Xu Jingzong was quite qualified to look down on those accountants at the Ministry of Revenue.
To clarify the academy’s accounts would be impossible without two or three years. To completely calculate the students’ subsidy accounts would require at least ten years. In this era, trying to find several hundred people scattered throughout Great Tang one by one was pipe dream.
Moreover, some secret accounts could only be shown to the Emperor. Who did Wei Zheng think he was?
Wei Zheng proved to be a ruthless person. He burrowed into the room for a full day and night without emerging—who knew how many books he’d understood? When dawn came, red-eyed, he wanted to go to the dining hall to buy food but was told the academy’s meals all had subsidies and weren’t available to outsiders. Of course, wanting to drink a cup of hot tea was also impossible. The academy never used limited funds on outsiders—otherwise the accounts couldn’t be explained clearly.
Great Tang was a society of personal relationships. Without human relationships, being unable to move a single step was putting it lightly. When Wei Zheng saw the academy feeding smooth rice porridge and some cakes to three flower bears so fat they had difficulty walking, he felt extremely angry. What made him most furious was that after the flower bears drank the rice porridge and ate the cakes, the cook pulled eggs from the pocket of his white coat and cracked two eggs into each waiting, open-mouthed flower bear’s mouth. Only after the flower bears finished eating did he take a towel to wipe the flower bears’ mouths, then kick them on their buttocks, chasing them to the bamboo grove to continue feeding.
Since when did flower bears eat better than people? Throughout Great Tang, people without food were everywhere—why such extravagant waste? Wei Zheng paid no attention to his own treatment. He’d done such things many times and had seen countless even uglier faces. But for the academy to so arrogantly ignore his existence made fury rise from the bottom of his heart.
After New Year’s, the weather gradually warmed. The academy was busy clearing the Dongyang River. Last winter’s great avalanche in the heavy snow had piled ice and snow at the foot of Yushan. If it melted in spring, it might cause the Dongyang River to flood catastrophically. Yun Ye and Xu Jingzong were both busy with this matter. Taking advantage of spring when the Dongyang River’s water level was high and water volume abundant, some fields on the dry plateau could also receive irrigation from the flood discharge channels. Lantian County officials brought large numbers of laborers to repair the waterways. To store water, they even built an enormous pond downstream of the Dongyang River. The teachers in the academy who specialized in hydraulic engineering were ceaselessly busy with this.
No one paid attention to this enormous audit group. Due to poor living conditions, the people Wei Zheng brought could only use ox carts to haul away the academy’s account books and return to Chang’an to continue the audit.
Fang Xuanling came once. He came to be a peacemaker, hoping Yun Ye could transfer personnel from the academy to help organize those mountainous piles of account books. Mobilizing academy personnel required at least the agreement of four people—Yun Ye, Li Gang, Yuanzhang, and Xu Jingzong. From his words, Xu Jingzong heard weakness. Academy people auditing themselves? He liked this kind of audit.
The reason Fang Xuanling came was because the flower bear incident had erupted. When all the ministers were impeaching the academy for preferentially treating three flower bears, raising them like ancestors, the furious Li Er finally exploded…