Chapter 141 The Medicine to Save the Nation Does Not Belong to Emperor Hongren^...
Qi Chengming remained silent, instead asking Mr. Huang to sit down in the study and wait a moment. He then calmed himself down and quietly checked the task reward settlement.
Sure enough, the next second my hand felt heavy.
Qi Chengming narrowly escaped catching the enormous hand-cranked generator.
Huang Dong, who had thought His Highness had something to say to him in detail: "..."
Huang Dong: "…………！！！！！"
If the last small cube was a divine object, then this one, which is made no attempt to conceal it, is a miracle that fell from the sky!
I saw it with my own eyes!
It was huge, bigger than a human head, strangely shaped with many connected lines, and its style was exactly the same as the small cube. It had a slightly pungent smell and a hard, neither-metal nor-wood shell!
And just like that... it fell from mid-air into the boy's hands.
Huang Dong's eyes widened, his knees buckled, and he knelt down on the ground with a thud.
He had struck the ground so hard that his knees ached terribly, making a cracking sound, and his vision blurred with pain. Huang Dong's legs were too weak to stand, and he stammered excitedly, "Your Highness... Your Highness...!"
He was stuttering.
Huang Dong's mouth was dry, his mind was blank, and he didn't know what to say. He was just so excited that his face turned red.
"This is for the old MP4 player." Qi Chengming quickly helped Mr. Huang up, and after a quick identification, explained how to charge and use it.
The more excited Huang Dong was, the more calm and composed he needed to appear.
Actually, there was a screen in the study. If the item had been taken out from behind the screen, Mr. Huang wouldn't have reacted this way. Whether to hide it or not was entirely up to him.
But Qi Chengming tried to recall what hand-cranked generators looked like in his memory...
This look can't be hidden anymore. Besides, they've even given Mr. Huang an MP4 player, treating him like their most trusted confidant to handle life-threatening matters.
Since you're not going to hide it, you might as well confirm it.
Qi Chengming searched around one last time, finally managing to lift out his large camphor wood chest containing his books with great effort, before he could barely fit the hand-cranked generator inside.
Mr. Huang will carry this away when we leave. His study is empty here... We can ask Steward Song to open his storeroom and select two large boxes to put in it.
"Your Highness, rest assured." Huang Dong stared intently at the large camphor wood chest, as if looking at a deity. He solemnly swore with reverence, "As long as I live, I will protect this sacred object. My life depends on it..."
His Highness said this thing can generate "electricity". Could it be a magic weapon of the Thunder God?
His Highness is a star deity descended to earth, and he went to great lengths to borrow such a divine object... He absolutely will not allow anything to happen to it!!
"You must live! Mr. Huang, things can be destroyed if necessary, but you can't be harmed." Qi Chengming interrupted Huang Dong in shock, staring at him disapprovingly and correcting him sternly.
"Did you understand? Mr. Huang, which one is more important to me—haven't you figured it out yet?"
If there's an infrastructure system, we can always find a way to address these issues. If not, we'll simply have to find other solutions.
But what if Mr. Huang is gone?!
Qi Chengming already had few confidants and few trusted retainers and ministers.
It's better to destroy these easily exposed items when necessary than to put the cart before the horse and implicate Mr. Huang.
Huang Dong: "…………"
The once-strong man's eyes suddenly reddened, his lips trembled, and he couldn't utter a single word. He broke down in tears in front of his lord.
No one knows how kind and benevolent His Highness the Second Prince truly is...
He cried uncontrollably as he thought about it.
"Waaah, I—I am utterly unworthy of such a title—Your Highness!"
It was precisely because Huang Dong knew that the young prince was speaking from the heart, that he genuinely believed Huang Dong's existence was more worthy than these divine objects, that Huang Dong was so moved that he couldn't hold back his tears.
He will serve His Highness to the death for the rest of his life!!
"Alright, alright." Qi Chengming was at a loss; he wasn't good at handling these kinds of situations.
It took a lot of persuasion to finally convince them to stop.
Qi Chengming had originally intended to say that Yin Island Prefecture and Salt Lake were all thanks to Mr. Huang's efforts, and that he himself had made great contributions, but seeing the situation, he was frightened and dared not say anything more. If he continued, Mr. Huang would lose control again.
Qi Chengming walked to the door and ordered tea from behind a door.
Before long, Xiao Chengzi brought it in. After Mr. Huang calmed down for a while, their private conversation finally turned to the past few months that Qi Chengming had been away.
Huang Dong glossed over their several failures in refining silver ore, emphasizing how timely the silver was when Prefect Mu turned the tide. He also mentioned Governor Yulin and those random people who had suddenly appeared in Liuzhou City recently.
Just thinking about it makes me feel utterly disgusted.
Huang Dong gritted his teeth as he said this.
Qi Chengming felt increasingly reassured as he listened. Song Gu hadn't grown up in the palace eating for free; his reactions to every single matter were remarkably firm, as if he himself were in the city. Meanwhile, several officials in Liuzhou, unable to bear the harassment any longer, wrote letters seeking channels to investigate the background of the governor of Yulin. All they knew so far was that he was from the capital.
No matter how poor a minor official in the capital may be, he can always find a few important relatives or distant relatives in the family.
This diverted suspicion, making it difficult for Prefect Mu and his men to figure out which prince's faction this person belonged to, and why he dared to jump in and test them like this.
Huang Dong was about to report the news he had received from his friend from the same year: "Your Highness, this man has a sworn brother who is the son-in-law of the Seventh Prince's adoptive mother. He is also on good terms with the Third Prince's followers. His relatives are very close to the Sixth Prince's lineage."
"Huh?" Qi Chengming almost had a back injury from all these convoluted relationships.
Moreover, he didn't expect that this matter could be related to the original male lead.
"I think... maybe it doesn't matter whose side he is on." Qi Chengming wasn't discussing it with anyone else, but he was still a little uncertain. However, he had thought about many different possible endings for himself based on the plot of the succession struggle in the original book.
What will happen during this period before he is about to shine?
If he were any other prince, upon realizing that the second prince might have been lying low for so long, and after several failed attempts to suppress him, and understanding that the other party's strength had grown to the point where he had to take him seriously, what would he do next?
—Of course, we should expose it.
We must strike at his power, expose his ambitions, put him in the spotlight, and use every means to prevent him from hiding quietly in the shadows any longer.
A thought began to form in Qi Chengming's mind:
"Mr. Huang, I have imprisoned the Governor of Yulin, an official appointed by the imperial court. What kind of reaction do you think this will cause if word gets out?"
Huang Dong couldn't answer.
He lacked the keen political acumen to handle such situations; he only felt that this was inappropriate and that Chief Eunuch Song's timely response was the best course of action. How to remedy the situation afterwards was up to His Highness's decision. Now, His Highness was asking him…
He couldn't explain it specifically.
"Compared to this, there is something more important right now." Qi Chengming had figured something out, so he abruptly changed the subject, leaving Huang Dong completely confused, unable to understand what could be more urgent than this matter.
Qi Chengming didn't tell Huang Dong that it was an important matter he planned to have Mr. Qin handle, and he needed to start planning immediately.
Once he's in the spotlight in the future...
Open and covert attacks are minor matters; he was already mentally prepared for that.
The most important thing to do is to prevent Emperor Hongren from becoming envious and taking away the ticket system in the future.
That is the remedy for saving the country that Qi Chengming is currently protecting with the utmost care.
Furthermore... what would an old emperor in the feudal era do if he didn't understand finance and was autocratic? He could easily imagine that if Emperor Hongren printed and abused the system of ration coupons indiscriminately, the system would be ruined.
By then, the dynasty would be beyond saving, beyond even divine intervention. Qi Chengming simply couldn't bear to stand by and watch the people suffer, what kind of prince would he be?
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Author's Note: Huang Dong (moved to tears): I will serve Your Highness to the death for the rest of my life!!!
Qin Liusong: Then you haven't shown enough loyalty!
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