Chapter 378 Qin Shi Huang's coffin lid can no longer be held down
"Ah! You're right. If we can't catch one before these shops open, we'll probably get nothing today!" He Zhaojun suddenly stood up and almost bumped into Wen Ziduan's chin.
She took off her cloak and put on a neat outer robe: "Let's go to the rice shop."
Wen Ziduan stood up resignedly and tried to reach out to grab the corner of He Zhaojun's clothes, but his reach was empty. He Zhaojun was no longer the weak girl who couldn't even lift a sword. She left Wen Ziduan behind in a cool manner, leaving him with only her back.
"Ah... It's also a trouble that my wife is too powerful." Wen Ziduan sighed, picked up the cloak, took a few quick steps, covered He Zhaojun with the cloak, bent down to half-hold and half-carry her, and climbed over the eaves and walls. In a few breaths, he arrived at the nearest rice shop.
He Zhaojun poked her head out from under her cloak, lifted the roof tiles, looked down, and soon swung out a clawed hook and grabbed the "sheng" used to estimate rice. She was usually very good with the whip, so she could handle this kind of thing easily.
"Come and take a look, is there any difference?" He Zhaojun was not very clear about the material of the "sheng" used in the Central Plains, but she felt that it was a little heavy. She handed it to Wen Ziduan and thought about her discovery that night.
"If you simply look at the account books, you won't find any problems. But if you compare them with the shops under your control, you'll find that someone once bought a hu of rice, or 100 liters, and later redeemed it for only 80 hu. There was a price difference."
He Zhaojun recalled carefully, "Rice will lose weight when stored for a long time, but the difference won't be this big. I suspect I didn't give it enough weight when I bought it."
Wen Ziduan took it in his hand and examined it carefully, frowning as he did so. "The empty sheng is a bit heavy. If I use this to hold rice, for every sheng I sell, the people will be shortchanged by about a he."
The two exchanged glances, both realizing the gravity of the situation. Qin Shi Huang's greatest achievement was standardizing weights and measures, a fundamental principle for maintaining market order and fairness. If anyone exploited this for profit, the damage to Han commerce would be unimaginable.
The most crucial thing is that the account does not reflect where the "saved" one basket of rice went. If you dig deeper, you will find that the people behind this are probably aiming for something much bigger than He Zhaojun imagined.
At that moment, they heard some movement below. It must be the rice shop owner preparing to open for business. She quickly returned the container to its original place and covered it with tiles. The two of them lay on the roof, carefully observing the movement in the courtyard.
After a while, He Zhaojun tugged at the corner of Wen Ziduan's clothes and said, "Why don't we go and see on the spot what these people are doing?" Wen Ziduan nodded and jumped off the roof with He Zhaojun. The two of them grabbed some clothes that were hung outside a house, smeared some mud on their faces, pretended to be an ordinary couple, and went to buy rice.
As expected, if the two hadn't known ahead of time that there was something wrong with the liter, the difference in weight would be difficult to detect with the naked eye, let alone for ordinary people. They all knew that this was a shop opened by He Zhaojun, and the Dongfeng Shop had always been honest and well-known throughout the world, so who would doubt it?
The two visited several shops that morning and found similar problems in all of them. Even in Wen Ziduan's shops, one in ten also had this problem. He Zhaojun took the rice she had bought and sat down dejectedly at the wonton stall.
"These shops are directly under the jurisdiction of Liu Qingshan."
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