Since the Bamboo House’s first two stores opened in the capital, by mid-seventh-month of this year, the brand’s physical storefronts across the Bianliang area had already grown to five locations. For many merchants doing business in the capital, this was a pace of expansion nearly impossible to match—but by Ning Yi’s own reckoning, this first half-year of growth had actually been fairly steady, nothing extraordinary.
In a certain sense, the true engine Ning Yi was really driving to expand things wasn’t the five physical Bamboo House storefronts at all, but rather the successive waves of “salesmen” continuously dispatched out to prefectures and counties across the realm. Starting from the second month, when Ning Yi had brought five disciples to Muyuan County, through his later trip to Jiangning, and back again to the capital, the entire operation had never once stopped developing and running.
In the first month or so, these salesmen hadn’t produced especially notable results—at most, they’d scouted out the lay of the land in the surrounding areas. During his time in Jiangning, Ning Yi had recruited over a dozen young men connected to the Su family and put them through training before bringing them along to the capital. As far as Su Tan’er could tell, she hadn’t had a terribly clear picture of exactly what her husband was up to—but once they returned to the capital, everything had begun expanding at remarkable speed.
At the research compound outside Bianliang’s city walls, a number of the small consumer products Ning Yi had earlier overseen the development of had by now matured. Perfumes, soaps, mosquito coils, floral waters, and other such items began appearing on the Bamboo House’s shelves one after another, and the salesmen, whose results had initially been merely middling, suddenly began seeing substantial gains within a matter of ten-odd days—the reason being that Ning Yi had begun compiling large volumes of information on goods demand and court policy trends for his people to draw upon.
The Wu dynasty of this era, though its economy was, by most accounts, at its most developed point, remained, on the whole, an agrarian society with quite limited flow of information. Aside from certain great cities and the powerful gentry families who held large stores of information as a resource, beneath them, sensitivity to information among landowners in the many small and mid-sized localities dropped off sharply, tier by tier. A household might harvest grain and simply store it away, and even wishing to sell, be unable to find a reliable buyer. Another might grow cotton, supplying a particular merchant over the long term at a price that essentially never changed—until, one day, that merchant went bankrupt or died, leaving them with no idea whom to sell to next. At times, two parties haggling over prices in some small locale, with one side unaware of the going market rate, would end up either asking too much or too little, only to later discover they’d been swindled or had taken a loss.
The regulatory function of what later ages would call a market economy depends on a large volume of comparative buying and selling activity to function; in this era, such regulation might exist in some form, but it was hardly pronounced. The enormous wealth gap across the whole of society stemmed, in large part, from precisely this. Of course, the era’s official-centric mindset did, in its own way, serve as something of a cushion against this vast disparity in wealth—once money reached a certain level, its further meaning tended to diminish; a landowner in some small locale might, over a lifetime, accumulate no small fortune, yet the enjoyment and sense of psychological superiority he gained from it often amounted to less than what came from raising a single successful scholar in the family.
When Ning Yi had first trained this batch of salesmen, the focus had been on how to make their talk sound impressive and refined; now, he added far richer content besides. What goods were currently in short supply in the capital region, what the local prices were, which households were buying, where best to sell if you had something to offload, how goods should be transported, how tolls were collected at the various checkpoints nearby, how to smooth things over with the right connections, which officials were honest and which expected a bribe, and so on and so forth.
This information Ning Yi distributed with real purpose behind it; his people didn’t need to say much—revealing just a hint or two of insider knowledge was often enough to win over the hearts of a rural landowner. They wouldn’t necessarily believe it all outright, of course, but having heard this sort of thing, picking up a bottle or two of nicely packaged perfume, or having a couple of outfits made from Su family cloth, tended to follow naturally enough.
In the fifth month, the salesmen out in the field finally closed their first brokerage deal—one of them had connected a merchant with a nearby landowner, arranging a transaction between the two. Since it was his first time doing this kind of thing, he hadn’t thought to collect any commission, but the two parties had ended up buying quite a lot of goods from him regardless. Ning Yi gave him a bonus for it all the same.
In large cities like Bianliang and Jiangning, people doing similar brokerage business already existed—usually idle types with a wide circle of friends, helping make connections for a cut, but never in any truly professional way. Ning Yi, from the very start, had partly had this exact niche in mind.
Over the course of these months, several other things had been growing right alongside the Bamboo House, complementing and reinforcing one another, spreading out in every direction like a spider’s web.
First: the elm-wood cannon that had first made its appearance near Siping Ridge back in the second month had, by now, been formally handed over by Ning Yi to Qin Siyuan. Though its safety remained a concern, and its manufacture, operation, and firing all still required considerable experience and training, and its cost-effectiveness wasn’t especially high, it was already, in fairness, a decent enough weapon—capable, at the very least, of serving as a surprise tactical asset on the battlefield. Qin Siyuan passed the firearm on to the military’s Armaments Bureau for further research, and in doing so, Ning Yi also preserved his own legitimate grounds to continue privately refining the elm-wood cannon design.
Second: while managing his network of field teams, the Bamboo House’s business within the capital itself had also continued expanding at a remarkable pace. As far as Ning Yi was concerned, the reason this counted as steady rather than explosive growth was that it owed no small debt to the discreet backing of the Right Chancellor’s residence, Qin Siyuan, Yao Zunian, Ji Kun, and others. In a society where connections determined the outcome of most things, this backing, combined with the appearance of such curious items as coal stoves and perfumes, combined further with the launch of beautifully packaged fruit juices and canned quail eggs on people’s dinner tables, combined further still with Ning Yi’s own gift for packaging, poetry, and reputation-building—if, with all this, the business still somehow failed to thrive, or the name still somehow failed to spread, then there would truly be nothing left for Ning Yi to do at all.
Third: in the course of the Bamboo House’s expansion, the group of surviving Liangshan bandits previously held near Dulong Ridge had by now completed their “training,” and after screening, had been incorporated into the Bamboo House’s system as employees. These people were far from lacking in martial skill and ruthlessness, yet by this point they had become entirely different from the men captured the year before—most of them now quiet, courteous, deferential, sticklers for rules and discipline, some even carrying about them something of the air of ascetic monks.
When Ning Yi had decided to make use of them, he had, in truth, taken a fair number of precautions. During their normal downtime, he still kept them housed together as a group, whether for training or for organized lectures, and also arranged for them to be sent out to help others, doing good deeds, watching over one another.
Of the five Bamboo House locations in and around Bianliang, some of these men were assigned there; others were assigned to the compound outside the city walls. A portion were also assigned to the field teams, and once the practice of hauling Bamboo House goods around by cart began, a typical team would usually consist of one salesman, one clerk from the Su family cloth business, one storyteller, one clerk selling odds and ends to the poor, and two bodyguards.
The salesmen were mainly responsible for calling on wealthy households; the cloth-shop clerk would tag along to take measurements when clothing was being sold. The storyteller would tell stories in the villages, drawing in poor households and children, while the clerk selling odds and ends would offer cheap snacks, or the inexpensive cloth and sewing thread that every household needed. If anyone wanted them, items like floral water and mosquito coils would naturally be available for sale too—poor households couldn’t afford the pricier goods, but if they did buy perfume or soap, it was usually for a wedding or some other celebration. This particular combination of roles soon became the standard configuration.
Fourth: as the flooding and drought disasters in the north and south began to worsen, Ning Yi had, on one hand, kept a hand on reining in the Bamboo House’s expansion, while on the other, taken part in the Secret Investigation Bureau’s disaster-relief planning. Busy as it was, on the whole, neither side of his work had suffered for it.
From a broader perspective, had it not been for Ning Yi’s credit with the elm-wood cannon, and his demonstrated ability to take part in disaster-relief planning and manage personnel deployment in an orderly fashion, Qin Siyuan and the others likely wouldn’t have been so willing to lend their influence to him so readily. As for Ning Yi himself—at least as Su Tan’er saw it—her husband seemed to be perpetually walking a tightrope stretched ever tauter. As a businessman, the sheer speed of the Bamboo House’s expansion was, in its own way, a genuinely delightful thing to behold—but on the other hand, this kind of expansion, pushed straight to its absolute limit, couldn’t help but stir a certain unease as well.
The third, fourth, and fifth Bamboo House locations had, in fact, already been in the planning stages before Ning Yi even returned to Bianliang. As renovation investment began on the third location, and the compound outside the city started rolling out finished products, several specialized small workshops had likewise taken shape in short order. At the same time, Ning Yi was compiling all manner of information, directing his people out in the field, swiftly sending out a second wave of salesmen, while simultaneously running a third and fourth batch through training, all while managing the other projects underway at the compound and answering the Chancellor’s residence’s calls for disaster relief.
Over these months, Ning Yi seemed almost like a tireless machine for processing and organizing information; even Su Tan’er couldn’t quite understand how her own husband still managed to appear so effortlessly in control of it all.
The business, blooming everywhere at once, first devoured an enormous amount of capital. But just as the funds Ning Yi had put in were nearly running dry, the trend of returning capital had also grown steadily larger, and the incoming revenue was rapidly reinvested right back into the expanding business—within a matter of months, everything had turned into a whirlwind of frenzied growth.
With the foundation not entirely stable, and the existing pool of manpower already stretched thin, the recruitment and integration of new members tended to shake the whole system further. Had it been up to Su Tan’er, she likely would have paused things to reassess. But as it stood, at least this month, Ning Yi seemed to grow ever more relaxed, seemingly savoring the thrill of walking this tightrope, with no intention whatsoever of slowing down.
Of the many developments surrounding the Bamboo House’s rapid growth, Li Pin knew relatively little. What he did know came mostly from rumors that trickled out along with the Bamboo House carts, plus whatever gossip he’d picked up circulating within the martial world—the conflict with Liangshan, the ruthless killing of Liangshan’s men, the name Demon of the Heart, and so on. That afternoon, guided by a Bamboo House shopkeeper, he finally met with Ning Yi, and as he walked into the Ning residence’s courtyard, what he saw there left him feeling, if anything, even more uneasy.
Naturally, when catching up with Ning Yi, Li Pin set aside these misgivings for the moment, smiling as he told Ning Yi about his experiences over more than two years in office, and asking after the conflict between the Su family and Liangshan. Ning Yi had always thought fairly highly of Li Pin, and this meeting, too, proved quite pleasant. Before long, though, a name Li Pin mentioned caught his attention.
“…When I first took up my post at Nanhe, I happened to meet Master Zong Ruliao once, and we later kept up a correspondence—I gained a great deal from it… The old master’s learning and breadth of mind, our generation can only aspire to match… A pity, though, he retired and returned home at the end of last year… offended some people too, I gather—must have been rather disheartened at the time…”
“Zong Ruliao… Master Zong Ze?”
“Mm, I imagine Liheng has heard the name as well?”
“I’ve heard it mentioned, though I don’t know the particulars.”
“Probably just as well not to know,” Li Pin said, shaking his head. “Nothing but a tangled mess of trouble, in any case…”
Perhaps feeling this matter had little to do with Ning Yi, Li Pin let it drop. After dinner together, Ning Yi saw Li Pin out, and as they reached the eaves of the house, Li Pin let out a sigh. “Liheng, do you know… life isn’t easy for the common people these days.”
Having served nearly three years as an official by now, his sigh in that moment carried real weight. Ning Yi, hearing this, didn’t dwell on it much; after a moment he smiled and nodded. Before long, the two agreed to meet the following day at the Chancellor’s residence, and Li Pin, leading his servant and secretary, took his leave.
Back at his lodgings at the Bamboo House, the secretary who accompanied him, a man named Chen Pan, stayed on for a while to chat. Curious, he asked, and Li Pin ended up sharing something of how he and Ning Yi had first met back in Jiangning, and after a moment, let out a sigh.
“…At the time, I quite admired Liheng’s learning and insight. Though he tends toward unconventional methods, we scholars must always hold to the center, keep to what is proper… And yet, three years have passed in a flash, and the path he’s walked is far, far from anything I would have expected… Well, perhaps I’ve misjudged the situation—but what I’ve seen today…”
He trailed off there, looking somewhat troubled, unwilling to say more. Secretary Chen said, “By what this humble one has seen today, both this Bamboo House and this Ning residence do indeed carry something of the air of a great noble household… He does, after all, have the Chancellor’s residence backing him, and keeps so very many servants and retainers besides.”
“In truth, commerce is ultimately a minor path. He married in as a live-in son-in-law to a merchant family, and I’d assumed he would want nothing to do with such things himself. And yet, here we are… As for this business with Liangshan, that kind of martial-world dispute—well, he was avenging his family, nothing to be said against that. But that it escalated to this degree, his entanglement with these underworld figures has, I fear, only grown deeper by the day. Brother Chen is right about that. To walk the merchant’s path, chasing empty profit, courting officialdom, consorting with the underworld, keeping private retainers—these, in the end, are the ways of a great noble house. Given Liheng’s abilities, I’m hardly surprised he’s managed all this. But rumor has it the Bamboo House is also secretly hoarding grain… and with this kind of calamity striking now, that he’d take the opportunity to do such a thing—I truly don’t understand it…”
Secretary Chen thought this over, then couldn’t help but speak up. “Master, on a matter like this… it might be best to stay out of it entirely.”
“How could I possibly do that,” Li Pin said, shaking his head with a smile. “Perhaps I’ve misjudged things—these next few days, I really ought to look more carefully. What our generation seeks in friendship is openness, integrity, a clear conscience. If he really has strayed onto the wrong path, I must offer him some counsel—with Liheng’s talent, it would be a genuine shame to see it squandered on matters such as these… Brother Chen, you know my temperament well enough, no need to say more. Even if it means offending someone, this is still something I ought to do.”
Ning Yi’s relationship with Qin Siyuan ran deep, and Ning Yi had, in fact, helped him secure his real post. If this matter truly did offend him, whether it might cause friction in his official career was genuinely hard to say. But as a friend, Li Pin still resolved to do what he could to offer his counsel—though he did leave himself room for the possibility that he’d misjudged the situation, deciding to observe a while longer first.
The next day, Li Pin first went to register with the Ministry of Personnel, then paid a visit to Qin Siyuan at the Chancellor’s residence, still turning this matter over in his mind. But not long after, a piece of news arrived that, to some degree, dispelled the unease this matter had stirred in him. It was shortly after Ning Yi arrived; Li Pin had barely exchanged a few words with Qin Siyuan when an old man named Yao Zunian came bursting in with a laugh, holding a piece of intelligence, exclaiming excitedly: “Good news! Chancellor! Liheng! Tremendous news, ha ha ha ha…”
Not long after, the entire Chancellor’s residence, the whole city of Bianliang, indeed the entire Wu dynasty, came to share in this piece of good news arriving from the north. Everything else, by comparison, suddenly seemed to shrink into insignificance.
In the north, the battle between Guo Yaoshi and Xiao Gan had reached its conclusion. Guo Yaoshi, having planned carefully before acting, had dealt Xiao Gan a crushing defeat at Yaopu, then pressed his advantage all the way through Lulong Ridge, wiping out more than half the Great Xi state’s forces. This pursuit had continued for several days; Xiao Gan, fleeing, was finally intercepted by Guo Yaoshi’s subordinates and beheaded on the spot. Another important star among this era’s generals had fallen, and Guo Yaoshi had finally achieved what could genuinely be called the Wu dynasty’s first real victory in the entire northern campaign.
By the time the news arrived, Xiao Gan’s head was already on its way to the capital as a trophy, while the Ever-Victorious Army continued its pursuit, expanding on its victory.
The whole realm was shaken to its core!