Chapter 94 [VIP]

Yu Chengda and his group tried to slip away but didn't get anything good out of it.

When the group arrived in Jingzhou, they encountered refugees. Their meager savings were robbed, and due to the control exerted by local powerful figures and the government, they were unable to leave Jingzhou.

Having finally managed to borrow some travel expenses by using Mi Yao and Xiao Chuan's names, they were then targeted by bandits. These bandits dared to kidnap Yu Chengda and his companions, but dared not demand ransom from Xiao Chuan and his wife. Instead, they wrote a ransom letter to the Yu family in Jiangnan.

After several rounds of bargaining, when Yu Chengda and his two companions returned to Jiangnan, they hadn't just lost weight; they had become living skeletons, indistinguishable from refugees.

Having suffered such hardship, none of them wanted to leave the Yu family again. However, due to the chaos in Youzhou, several warlords took advantage of the situation, and the Jiangnan region was in complete disarray.

Yu Chengda thought they should move to Chizhou to avoid trouble, but the head of the Yu family wanted to go to Yizhou.

Logically speaking, a family of such stature as the Yu family would not have fared too badly regardless of which warlord was in power.

However, because the Prince of Huainan held a grudge against their family for their previous obstruction, they still failed to gain any advantage even after sending several daughters over. The Prince of Huainan clearly wanted to start by targeting their family, using the blood and flesh of powerful families to expand military supplies.

The Yu family head sent Yu Chengda and the others to Jiannan to act as vanguards and handle the relocation matters, which is why he paid them so generously. Who knew that Yu Chengda would be so useless, causing the loss of two Yu family girls and angering Mi Yao and Xiao Chuan.

"If I had known it would turn out like this, I would have preferred to give Fourth Sister to the Prince of Huainan in the first place."

Yu Chengda was furious, feeling that the Yu family's current predicament was all because of Mi Yao.

The head of the Yu family saw things more clearly than he did: "Does Fourth Sister marrying him mean he'll stop sucking blood from the Yu family? He's had his eye on the Yu family for a long time. On the contrary, Fourth Sister and Shao Yang going to Jiannan gave the Yu family a way out."

Yu Chengda said indignantly, "Fourth Aunt won't give us a good look. She doesn't even treat me like her own father anymore. Big Brother, do you think so highly of Zhao Tianhe?"

"I don't favor Zhao Tianhe, but I favor Xiao Chua."

Knowing that talking to a fool was a waste of breath, the head of the Yu family stopped paying attention to Yu Chengda.

He paid a large ransom because he thought Yu Chengda was the father of Mi Yao and her brother, and that he would be useful to their Yu family. Now that he heard the siblings rejecting him so much, he felt that the ransom had been wasted.

If they can behave themselves, then keep them. If they are superfluous, as long as Mi Yao and Yu Shaoyang are surnamed Yu, they will have a place in Jiannan. It doesn't matter whether the rest of the second branch of the family exists or not.

Mi Yao was unaware that because of her attitude, Yu Chengda and her stepmother and step-siblings had all been placed on the Yu family head's abandonment list.

Since the influx of disaster victims, both she and Xiao Chuan have been very busy.

Xiao Chuan led people to quell the rebellion, while she wrote documents on resettling the disaster victims and took the initiative to accept the task from Zhao Tianhe to take charge of disaster relief.

She brought it up with a hint of testing the waters.

From her several brief meetings with Zhao Tianhe, she could sense that he thought highly of her. Rather than making her a delicate flower in the inner quarters of the Xiao family, he hoped she would be a woman who could help Xiao Chuan and have a certain political status in Jiannan.

If this had happened when she first arrived in Yizhou, she would have thought Zhao Tianhe was just a fool.

She came here for a vacation, not to continue being a beast of burden.

But now, her thoughts are changing with time and the people and things she comes into contact with.

Even knowing that she could have a good life just by lying down and doing nothing, she still wanted to do her part.

It's as if the negative emotions I had before have been healed by this year's experiences.

Mi Yao couldn't help but scrutinize Xiao Chua, wondering if the reason for her high energy was due to the two-person exercise.

As we've already said, exercise is the most beneficial way to intervene in mental health.

Xiao Chuan was reading official documents. He had put a lot of effort into learning to read and write, and would practice calligraphy and study military books whenever he had free time. But that didn’t mean he would feel happy when he saw long passages of text.

As his ambitions grew, so did the amount of work he needed to do.

For example, he assembled his own staff and had an endless stream of official documents to read.

Patiently reading through the documents sent from various places, Xiao Chuan noticed Mi Yao looking at him and turned to kiss her on the cheek.

After kissing, he turned back to continue reading the meticulously worded document.

Mi Yao touched her cheek after being suddenly attacked on the face. Looking at Xiao Chuan's serious profile, she felt that he had just taken a moment out of his busy schedule to coax her.

The problem is, she wasn't looking at him to get him to comfort her.

To make it clear she wasn't just sitting idly by, Mi Yao started with something serious: "Father is even more of a wise ruler than I imagined."

"Um……"

Xiao Chuan responded, his eyes fixed on the document, but he turned his face and kissed Mi Yao again.

The echo of her response lingered on her lips. Mi Yao deliberately stuck out her tongue to try and break Xiao Chua's act of seriousness, but the tip of her tongue only briefly touched Xiao Chua's dry lips.

He left immediately after kissing her, and the fact that his eyes didn't move showed that he was really working hard.

She was thinking about how he might be dishonest and interfere with important matters when she was resettling refugees in the region. She went through the process once, but now she didn't expect that she wouldn't need to use a single word of it.

Mi Yao didn't try to start a new topic. Instead, she rested one hand on the table and stared intently at Xiao Chuan.

Facing her gaze, Xiao Chuan's expression remained unchanged; however, the location of the kiss was entirely a matter of luck.

When Mi Yao realized that she was competing, and competing aimlessly, she finally came to her senses and saw Xiao Chuan's lips, which he was trying his best to suppress.

With a snort, Mi Yao got up and went to find Wen Sima.

Her disaster relief efforts were divided into several parts. The first was to provide porridge and comfort the victims. The second was to divide the areas, register the names, and resettle these refugees.

During the resettlement process, the doctors were the busiest. They could go anywhere, but they still had to be vigilant against infectious diseases such as plagues.

With tens of thousands of refugees, and even more expected to follow, it's unrealistic to accept and disperse them all into the various counties of Jiannan. Jiannan is the granary of the south, but after the military campaigns in various places, coupled with the summer floods, the grain supply wasn't that excessively abundant.

To accommodate so many people, we have to both develop new areas and accept new ones.

"Madam, after registering the household registration, we have begun to organize the teams, and each household has sent out men to start building houses and clearing land."

Mi Yao was eager to get things done, so Zhao Tianhe assigned her several people, including Wen Sima and several officials from the Ministry of Revenue and the Ministry of Works, to assist her in resettling the disaster victims.

As Mi Yao listened to their report, she walked to the place where the disaster victims lived.

Winter hasn't arrived yet, and the fire alone can keep us warm at night, but in another month, we'll need shelter from the wind and rain.

When they arrived at the construction site, the people building houses received better food and a small amount of wages.

Knowing that the sooner the house was built, the sooner they could move in and have a better chance of survival, the vacant lot was not only occupied by men but also by many women. No one was slacking off; everyone was working hard to survive.

"Madam, why rush to build the house? Even if it is built, we can't let these people live outside the city forever."

The official in charge of the Ministry of Revenue was very puzzled by Mi Yao's decision to pay the construction workers. The housing was built for the disaster victims, so why should they be paid?

Seeing that no one else spoke up, he could only write about it in the official document. After waiting for several days without receiving a rejection from the military governor, he couldn't help but speak up when he saw Mi Yao staring at the people building houses.

"This place is just a temporary stop. The number of disaster victims coming to Yizhou is far more than this. Once the houses are built, we can harvest some leafy vegetables from the reclaimed land to get through the winter."

Mi Yao did not intend for these people to live here indefinitely, and the houses they were asked to build were similar to dormitory-style dormitories.

Once the resettlement camps here are nearly complete and can achieve some self-sufficiency, various counties will be arranged to absorb these people.

Those that can't be digested, and those that will be received later, will remain here until winter is over.

Winter has arrived, and although it's not yet the coldest time, the autumn planting season has already passed. Jiannan's granaries cannot provide enough food for so many people. No matter how pitiful these people are, the survival of the local population must be ensured first before feeding them.

“I know we are short of money, but we are short of large sums of money. Paying the construction workers will not cost much. On the contrary, it will reassure the people and let them know that Jiannan has money and will not just deal with them for a few days and then let them fend for themselves.”

Knowing that the person in charge was worried about the money, Mi Yao comforted her for a couple of minutes, and then looked forward to discussing the Robin Hood-style charity with Xiao Chuan.

The reason why the Xiao family had so much silver in savings was due to both the rewards Xiao Chuan received from Zhao Tianhe during his campaign against him and the tributes that wealthy and powerful families offered to Xiao Chuan.

With chaos erupting everywhere, besides warlords, there are also bandits. Knowing that Xiao Chuan had been sent by Zhao Tianhe to quell the unrest around Jiannan, she discussed with him how to gain more benefits, such as pretending to be a bandit and targeting a few powerful families to accumulate capital.

Suppressing the rebellion is certainly not just about suppressing it; it's certain that they'll try to extract money from the wealthy households. But neither Xiao Chuan nor Zhao Tianhe had ever considered targeting them directly and stripping them of their wealth.

Although powerful families are troublesome, their existence also serves a purpose.

Moreover, Zhao Tianhe himself comes from a family with a long history, so he would subconsciously protect the interests of his peers.

However, after dealing with the rebellious branch of the Xie family, the divine authority of aristocratic families in cultivating talent and maintaining order was greatly diminished in his mind.

As for Xiao Chuan, a commoner who wasn't even from a poor family, why would he care about the interests of aristocratic families who hoarded land and continued their servants under the land-ownership system?

Mi Yao believed that Jiannan could accept refugees in the long term because Xiao Chuan promised that he would continuously transport food and money to the disaster relief area.

The person in charge felt that paying the construction workers was a waste, but he didn't realize that it would establish a positive image for Jiannan and make it easier to recruit soldiers in the future.

Thinking of the war, Mi Yao shook her head and didn't dwell on it any further.

She didn't have the power to make the war disappear, but she could help Xiao Chuan and do her best to make Jiannan more stable than other places, allowing more people to survive.

After inspecting the front camp, Mi Yao also went to the fields.

Seeing that quite a few people were using curved plows, Mi Yao asked the head of the Ministry of Works a few questions.

During the previous floods, she thought about the problem of reduced crop yields when she was providing disaster relief. She was not an agricultural science student, but she knew about waterwheels and curved plows.

The precursor to the curved plow already existed in this era. After she described it to Wen Sima, the Ministry of Works produced it.

Besides the tools, officials sent to Lingnan, Champa, and Jiangnan in the summer to find new grain varieties also made some gains.

After wandering around for a while, Mi Yao went to her own room, not intending to have dinner with Xiao Chuan.

But she didn't go to him. After he finished what he was doing, he blocked her doorway, his eyes fixed on her, intending to return the favor by looking at her twice as hard.

Besides looking at him, he also brought him hot water for soaking his feet: "I heard from Wen Sima that you walked quite a distance today."

Mi Yao was somewhat taken aback when she saw Xiao Chuan remove her shoes and socks as he spoke.

Occasionally, in the bathhouse of the mansion, Xiao Chuan would hold her feet and say he would wash them for her, but he had never done anything like this before, where he knelt down on one knee to soak her feet in a basin.

Mi Yao shifted her feet awkwardly, unable to imagine washing someone's feet, even a little girl like Shan'er, so she thought Xiao Chua was exaggerating.

Even if you have a quirk and like my feet, you don't have to go to this extent, do you?