Chapter 309 Sweeping Them All
While the disaster victims may not be as shrewd as the landlords and wealthy merchants who were scheming, they were not so foolish as to be cheated and still regard the other party as a good person.
When they are desperate and have no other choice, even if they know that the other party has bad intentions, they still have no choice but to seek help from the enemy.
Xie Wanniang could understand their helplessness and heartache, so even though her strength was meager, she still wanted to do as much as possible.
However, her way of doing good deeds was clearly different from those of the local gentry and wealthy households who responded to the local government by opening their own warehouses and distributing rice and grain to porridge and medicine at fixed times and locations.
The rice porridge and medicinal soup given to the disaster victims were free. The victims could receive them for free by queuing up with their household registration book. The only drawback was the lack of supervision. Many well-off people who did not lack food and drink would also go to collect the rice porridge in order to take advantage of the situation, and then take it back to feed their dogs, pigs, and chickens.
They didn't care whether their actions would cause many people who couldn't get porridge to starve to death. The local gentry and wealthy families who distributed porridge always kept the same amount each day and didn't cook an extra pot or two or more just because some people hadn't received theirs yet.
As for Xie Wanniang's caravan, they charged money for all the supplies they provided to the disaster victims. Although the prices weren't high, not everyone could take them freely, so it didn't cause any waste.
The people who come to them are those who have no other choice.
They couldn't get free porridge, and they couldn't find anything else to eat in the wild, so they had to find ways to buy it at high prices.
At times like these, Xie Wanniang's caravans, whose goods were the cheapest and who never cheated on weight, naturally became the top choice for the disaster victims.
In particular, unlike some unscrupulous local landlords who not only accepted land as collateral when lending grain to disaster victims, they also deliberately kept the land prices very low.
The people Xie Wanniang sent not only accepted barter, but were also willing to prepare a separate contract for the disaster victims when they could only sell their people or land, allowing them to redeem their people or land at the original price within three years.
Naturally, they wouldn't plant traps in the contracts. Taking advantage of the fact that these disaster victims were mostly illiterate, unable to do complicated calculations, and ignorant of the law, they tricked them into signing usurious loans with compounding interest without their knowledge.
The disaster victims may be less knowledgeable and less shrewd, but they are not fools. They will eventually figure out who is good and who is bad by thinking things through.
Naturally, more and more disaster victims came to find Xie Wanniang's caravan.
In addition, the local government's disaster relief efforts were quite effective. Although the disaster victims were unable to plant crops or dig for wild vegetables and pick elm seeds to supplement their food supply as in previous years, they were still able to make ends meet.
On the contrary, the local wealthy households and out-of-town merchant caravans who originally intended to profit from the disaster received far less profit than expected.
But apart from cursing, they had no other options. After all, the founding emperor of the Great Wei Dynasty was in power. With the disaster area relatively stable and no civil unrest breaking out, they dared not provoke the emperor and kill people casually.
They were unhappy, but Xie Wanniang was very happy.
The caravan frequently brought back good news: the situation in the disaster-stricken area was not only stable, but it had also received two rain showers, one heavy and one light. The disaster victims could take this opportunity to rush to plant a batch of short-cycle crops and vegetables, and their lives were finally looking forward.
With people in the disaster area at peace and farmers guarding their land, surrounding areas are naturally spared from the impact of the disaster.
With no longer needing to worry about the potential internal strife, Xie Wanniang could immediately devote more energy to fishing.
Speaking of this, we must mention the last 10,000 taels of the 70,000 taels bestowed upon her by the Emperor, Empress and Crown Prince.
She didn't distribute the ten thousand taels anymore, but planned to use it as bait—taking advantage of the rare opportunity when the Tatar spies were pouncing on her like sharks smelling fish, she intended to capture as many of them as possible.
As mentioned earlier, Xie Wanniang spent a lot of money and grain to hire people with sharp eyes and keen senses from Tang County and the surrounding towns and villages to help her keep an eye out for suspicious outsiders.
Thanks to the ubiquitous informants she had hired, Xie Wanniang was able to ascertain the whereabouts and plans of the first batch of Tatar spies as soon as they arrived around Tang County.
But she didn't rush to take action. Instead, she planned to wait until more people arrived before asking the local garrison to help her capture them all.
The Tatar spies who arrived one after another and gradually gathered were unaware that the most inconspicuous little people around them were actually spies hired by Xie Wanniang.
Their sheer numbers made them impossible to hide, and Xie Wanniang's good relationship with the Zhenbei Army meant that they would be secretly arrested after being exposed.
Thus, wave after wave of Tatar spies who gathered and headed to Tang County were successively captured and interrogated by the Zhenbei Army without the knowledge of bystanders.
Xie Wanniang, their target on this trip, stayed peacefully in the manor without even getting a scratch.
Moreover, because of her meritorious service in luring and capturing Tatar spies, the emperor rewarded her with the title of a princess after the military report was sent to the court.
Her title remained the same as before, but it changed from Princess Huian County to Princess Huian Prefecture.
Because she did indeed use herself as bait, she lured out many Tatar spies, and some of those Tatar spies could not withstand the torture and confessed to even more spies. They even confessed that someone had deliberately let them pass through the checkpoints during their journey to Tang County.
As the saying goes, "pulling out a radish brings out the mud," these people spill their beans like beans from a bamboo tube, saying whatever comes to mind, only hoping to suffer less. Little do they know that those who put personal interests before public duty will soon be in big trouble because of their outspokenness.
Xie Wanniang's contributions were genuine, not to mention that she also donated a lot of money and grain to the border troops and disaster areas. Even if the emperor gave her the title of princess, let alone just a county princess, not many people would object.
However, Jiang Tong and some of his subordinates were now in a state of unease. They never dreamed that Xie Wanniang possessed such abilities.
In their expectations, Xie Wanniang would either be kidnapped by the Tatar spies or choose to commit suicide to avoid being humiliated. However, the truth was that she had already wiped out the Tatar spies before they even managed to reach her estate.
This skill is something that even the most self-proclaimed superior men wouldn't dare to claim they could achieve as much as Xie Wanniang.
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