Cao Lie was a remarkable man — though to say his contributions merited a dukedom was perhaps not quite accurate.

Li Chi had granted him an earldom that stood above all other earls, the first among marquises, falling only the slimmest margin short of duke. And yet that slim margin was genuinely difficult to close. Li Chi had it in mind to grant Cao Lie a ducal title, but there had to be accomplishments weighty enough to silence the court.

This too was part of why Li Chi had recalled Cao Lie to the Capital Circuit. If it were merely jianghu business, Master Ye was more than capable of handling it. Even Li Chi himself would readily admit that he had always been squeezing Cao Lie.

But consider: how many families from the old Chu dynasty had Li Chi extinguished? The Cao family had survived intact. And though Cao Lie held no formal court position, he held a First-Rank Earldom. Furthermore, the biggest business ventures had always gone through Cao Lie — calling it “taking money from Cao Lie’s earnings” was really more accurately described as dividend sharing.

So the question of who was exploiting whom depended entirely on one’s perspective.

“How much latitude do I have?” Cao Lie asked, eating as he spoke.

Li Chi did not answer directly. He smiled and said: “I gave Xu Ji no limits when he left the capital.”

Cao Lie nodded. “I understand.”

If Li Chi had set no limits even in the matter of purging the officialdom, then Cao Lie going to pacify the jianghu naturally had no limits either.

Cao Lie held onto one sentence Li Chi had just said: *make them feel some proper fear.*

Li Chi took a sip of tea after finishing his meal and said: “Just yesterday, talking with Lu Chonglou, I mentioned that I could give Xu Ji even greater authority — but I cannot allow him left hands and right hands.”

The meaning was plain enough. Let Xu Ji be the all-powerful Prime Minister — but keep him isolated, without a reliable circle of subordinates.

Men like Guan Mo, who had surfaced earlier, and Mei Xinqu, who had appeared more recently — these were Xu Ji’s left and right hands. The goal was to make Xu Ji a powerful minister, but a solitary one.

With those words, Cao Lie felt considerably more certain in his footing. The phrase “left hands and right hands” was worth deep reflection.

—

Three days later. Capital Circuit. Anshi County.

This was a county lying close to Chang’an. Before Chang’an had been chosen as the capital, the area had been nothing more than a small town of modest scale. As Chang’an grew in prosperity, this place rode the wave — by the time Chang’an was barely finished being built, Anshi County had already grown from a town of barely five thousand to a county of fifty or sixty thousand, and the population kept climbing.

When the Capital Circuit was formally established, Anshi was officially designated a county. In just a few short years, the transformation was staggering.

With Chang’an as the capital — naturally the political center, but also the economic center — southern merchants who rarely ventured north began flooding northward in large numbers, and all the surrounding counties were pulled upward with it.

Yet because growth had come so fast, Anshi County had not yet had time to build city walls, and because its scale kept expanding, the place still felt somewhat chaotic. With no overarching plan, the residential areas were jumbled and haphazard.

The two main streets were the most prosperous. Land prices there had multiplied tenfold from what they had been.

Before Chang’an was designated the capital, a small town like this in the northwestern corner of the Central Plains had land that was essentially worthless — if you’d wanted a mu of ground, three to five silver taels would have covered it. Now, three or five dozen taels wouldn’t buy it.

On the main street stood the Hongbin Tower, built by a wealthy merchant from Jingzhou — a man of considerable foresight. He had spent less than a year constructing the timber-framed building, and before his own business had even truly opened, someone had bought it from him at more than twenty times what it had cost to build. The Jingzhou merchant pocketed the silver and immediately turned around to start building again somewhere slightly less central.

The man who had acquired the Hongbin Tower had deep ties to Xu Ji — his name was Chen Xugong.

When Xu Ji had first traveled from Yuezhou to Chang’an, Chen Xugong was one of the men he had brought with him. But Chen Xugong had one quality that Xu Ji found increasingly intolerable — he would repeatedly remind Xu Ji of how much the Chen family had spent on him back in Yuezhou. Once was forgivable; three or four times made Xu Ji’s patience run out.

Xu Ji had originally planned to bring Chen Xugong into the court in some official capacity — at minimum a fourth-rank post. Now Chen Xugong could only manage certain businesses that could not be seen in the open.

Xu Ji needed large sums of silver to cultivate his network. With so many people flocking to join his fold, a patron could hardly spend nothing on his disciples. But as the Prime Minister of Da Ning, he could hardly appear in the marketplace himself.

Chen Xugong resented Xu Ji for it, but swallowed his resentment. At least Xu Ji hadn’t abandoned him entirely. He knew where he had erred, and was trying to perform well enough to one day re-enter the court. Even handling mountains of silver and managing a vast web of business, it was nowhere near as satisfying as holding an official post.

The Chen family was among the most prominent in Yuezhou, but their status was not particularly high — there were few officials among them. Under the Chu dynasty especially, Yuezhou, for all its later prosperity, was still looked down upon by aristocrats and scholars as a semi-barbaric backwater. In over three hundred years of Chu rule, not a single official above the third rank had come from Yuezhou. Even officials assigned there as Military Governors felt it was beneath their dignity.

The Chen family had latched onto Xu Ji’s coattails in the desperate hope that someone in the clan might bring honor to the family name. Chen Xugong was that hope.

At this moment, inside the Hongbin Tower, Chen Xugong was laughing and chatting with a group of merchants — though his eyes, every now and then, betrayed a flicker of contempt. It vanished as quickly as it appeared; no one noticed.

Merchants were small figures in his mind. Beneath him. And every one of these merchants needed to depend on him.

“Gentlemen,” Chen Xugong said with a smile — a textbook example of a smile that touched only the mouth, not the eyes.

And yet the merchants present all smiled back, with humble, obsequious deference.

“A little while ago, I received a directive from the Prime Minister’s residence.”

Chen Xugong said pleasantly: “You all know that I am the Prime Minister’s disciple. I was already working at his side when the Prime Minister was serving as Military Governor in Yuezhou — which is precisely why he trusts me to handle his business affairs.”

He had said this more than once. Every gathering, he made sure to mention how far back he went with Xu Ji, and how important he was to Xu Ji in Xu Ji’s eyes.

Everyone present had heard it several times, but still managed to wear expressions of profound admiration and respect.

Seeing that look of reverence, Chen Xugong felt satisfied.

“Therefore, there are certain matters I can discuss with you directly on the Prime Minister’s behalf.”

He rose and paced the room as he spoke: “The Prime Minister is presently in Shuzhou — he was in Jingzhou before — and hosts banquets for officials every single day. The expenses are enormous…”

He swept the room with his gaze. “We who are here — we owe our comfortable lives to the Prime Minister. We cannot just watch him go through hardship.”

“Quite right, quite right—”

“Absolutely, absolutely—”

The room offered its ready agreement.

Chen Xugong nodded with satisfaction.

“So the directive from the Prime Minister’s residence is that he hopes we will grow our business even larger.”

He looked around. “You may let your ambitions run bigger — bigger still. When the Prime Minister says bigger, does he mean what we can see? Of course not. He means a target we have to strain our utmost to reach.”

“When the Prime Minister returns from his inspection tour on behalf of His Majesty, we must have something satisfying to show him.”

He pointed toward the door. “Anshi County is the first place we are going to make big. How big? Think about it.”

One man stood. “Mr. Chen, I think we should simply take over all the teahouses and restaurants in Anshi County.”

Another rose. “The largest livestock market in the Chang’an area is here in Anshi County — the business doesn’t sound glamorous, but the returns are substantial. Why not take that over too?”

“Ha ha ha ha—”

Chen Xugong laughed. “I just said it — what you consider ‘big’ and what the Prime Minister means by ‘big’ are worlds apart. You’re all thinking about a cup of tea, a song, or a few coins from donkeys and sheep.”

He drew a deep breath and raised his voice.

“Anshi County is only the beginning, but it is a critical beginning. What I’m thinking is — we need to establish rules for merchants here. Make them understand whose permission they operate under. Give them a proper sense of reverence.”

He rapped the table. “We will form a Merchant Guild in Anshi County. Not just teahouses and restaurants, not just livestock — every business in this county must fall under the Guild’s jurisdiction.”

“If you want to do business in Anshi County, you obey the Guild. Every month, a portion of your earnings goes to the Guild.”

“Those who join and pay on time will receive the Guild’s protection — this is, after all, the Prime Minister’s operation.”

“If Anshi County sets a good precedent, the next step is to push this across every county in the Capital Circuit.”

“Gentlemen!” Chen Xugong smiled, eyes bright with hunger for power. “Everyone present is a founding elder of the Guild. You won’t need to spend a copper, or even run a business yourselves — the monthly cut alone will be more than enough.”

Of course, none of this harebrained scheme had actually come from Xu Ji’s residence. It was entirely Chen Xugong’s own idea, born of his desperate need to prove himself — his hope that if he arrived at Xu Ji’s door with a mountain of silver when Xu Ji returned to the capital, Xu Ji would look at him in a new light.

If Xu Ji had heard of it, he would have given Chen Xugong a thunderous tongue-lashing.

The men in the room, however, were hesitating. Few seemed to have been fully convinced.

—

Directly across from the Hongbin Tower was a tiny lamb-broth shop — so small it could barely fit four small tables.

A young man who appeared to be under twenty sipped from a bowl of broth, then let out a satisfied breath. He shot a couple of glances at the Hongbin Tower across the street and went back to his soup.

Sitting across from him was Cao Lie.

Cao Lie watched the young man, curiosity growing the longer he looked.

“You… your name is actually Xiaomi?”

—