After finally persuading the emperor to put his mind at ease, Luo Yangxing wiped the sweat from his brow and slowly withdrew from the hall.
"Sigh, His Majesty is becoming increasingly difficult to please lately."
Luo Yangxing shook his head and smiled bitterly.
“I dare not lie to him, nor can I fool him with empty words, but I can’t just let him come here whenever he wants.”
"What a hassle."
Just as he was speaking, Wang Chengen walked over from a distance.
Seeing Luo Yangxing sighing, he smiled and asked, "Oh my Commander Luo, why do you look like that?"
Luo Yangxing naturally dared not tell the truth, so he directly asked in return:
"Eunuch Wang, where are you going?"
Wang Chengen didn't hide it from him.
"What else could I do? Of course, I went to fetch something for His Majesty."
He lowered his head, gesturing for Luo Yangxing to see for himself.
Luo Yangxing then realized that Wang Chengen was actually holding a pile of books in his arms.
He asked curiously, "What are all these things?"
Wang Chengen said in a low voice:
“These things below are all Master Gao’s usual class notes.”
"As for the above, they are the Four Books and Five Classics."
"The imperial examinations are just around the corner, and this year's questions will be personally written by the Emperor himself."
"His Majesty wants to take this opportunity to promote Master Gao, but he can't just throw the Four Books and Five Classics aside, so he's been studying them these past few days."
"In Master Gao's words, this is called... right, it's called a Frankenstein's monster."
Luo Yangxing smiled and said, "Your Majesty is very thoughtful."
"I imagine Master Gao would be very happy to find out."
He shook his head slightly, walked back to the Embroidered Uniform Guard headquarters, pondered for a moment, and then wrote a secret letter to the Embroidered Uniform Guard in Southern Zhili.
"As for the affairs of Jiangnan, you should just listen to General Li."
After he finished writing it, he ordered the Embroidered Uniform Guard to send it directly to Jiangnan via the 800-li express courier service.
Then he breathed a sigh of relief.
"After this matter is resolved, there will likely be further changes in the court."
A few days later, Luo Yangxing's secret letter was delivered to Jinling.
When the local Imperial Guards saw this, they all wore wry smiles.
"Our commander here really knows how to give us a hard time."
"If we continue to listen to that Lord Li now, Jiangnan will really be in chaos!"
They all shook their heads, arrived at their own government offices, and looked at the bustling streets outside, their eyes filled with helplessness.
"Nanjing right now is like a pile of dry tinder; if even a single spark lands on it, it will ignite instantly!"
It turns out that in the past few days, Li Ruolian has been busy settling tens of thousands of soldiers around Jinling.
Logically speaking, Nanjing was once the capital of the Ming Dynasty, or rather, it is still the capital today.
There were countless camps and training grounds outside the city, let alone a mere tens of thousands of soldiers.
Even if it's tens or hundreds of thousands, it's just a drop in the ocean.
However, the Ming Dynasty had moved its capital more than two hundred years ago, and the population of Nanjing continued to grow.
The training ground of yesteryear has long since changed beyond recognition.
Li Ruolian spent a lot of effort before finally finding a place for the soldiers to set up camp.
After he had arranged everything, he realized that Zhou Yanru had caused him trouble again.
"What? You actually want to investigate the murder from a few days ago?"
Li Ruolian frowned.
"If someone is killed, they're dead. Why investigate this matter further?"
Zhou Yanru chuckled and shook his head, saying, "General Li, you were the one who killed people back then. You didn't seem flustered at all; on the contrary, you seemed to be killing with ease."
"Why are you saying something like that now?"
"To kill someone in Nanjing, you need an excuse, and the dead men at Guazhou Ferry are the perfect excuse."
"As long as we turn them all into Jurchen spies, and then start with them to spread our influence, everything we want to do will be much easier!"
Upon hearing this, Li Ruolian felt a pang of anxiety and thought to herself, "The old saying is indeed true; these scholars who become officials are ruthless to the core."
"If he really does what he says, won't the Jiangnan region become a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood?"
He wouldn't care at all if asked to kill dozens of local gentry and their servants who blocked his way.
But to ask him to kill tens of thousands, or even more, of the gentry at once...
Li Ruolian was still not prepared for this.
Although he was a martial artist, he had never taken lessons from Gao Qingyun and did not have the ruthlessness of Zhou Yanru.
Zhou Yanru kept staring at Li Ruolian's expression. Seeing that there was something wrong with his eyes, he couldn't help but laugh and say, "General Li, you may have misunderstood."
"The main purpose of this operation in Jiangnan is to restore Jiangnan to its former status as part of the Ming Dynasty and to provide tax revenue for the court."
"It doesn't really matter how many people we have to kill."
"After we arrest them, we'll use torture to extract confessions. As long as we can get them to spit out the silver, we don't necessarily have to kill them all."
"According to my calculations, killing a few hundred or a thousand in the end should be enough."
Li Ruolian breathed a sigh of relief, then shook her head and said, "Hey, according to Lord Zhou, doesn't that make us robbers?"
Zhou Yanru smiled nonchalantly:
“If it were for our own selfish interests, then doing this would indeed be robbery.”
"But we are doing this for the sake of the imperial court. We are not robbers, but rather great heroes."
Zheng Chenggong, who had been sitting to the side, rolled his eyes when he heard Zhou Yanru's words.
"That old bastard is really shameless. The idea of torturing and plundering the gentry was clearly my idea, but he stole the credit!"
It turns out that Zhou Yanru's idea was inspired by Zheng Chenggong.
Of course, this was not Zheng Chenggong's original idea, but rather something he heard Gao Qingyu say during class, that Li Zicheng had done something similar in the future.
In addition, not long ago, Zhu Youjian also cracked down on the Donglin Party in the capital, making a fortune.
It's no wonder Zheng Chenggong thought of this.
His little face puffed up, and he was about to confront Zhou Yanru, telling him to stop stealing his credit.
Then Li Ruolian asked again:
"Lord Zhou, those gentry in Jiangnan are not made of clay. If we sharpen our knives at them, how can they not react?"
"What if they incite the people of the city to riot?"
Zhou Yanru sneered and was about to speak when Zheng Chenggong interrupted him.
"Then naturally we should reason with them."
Zhou Yanru was slightly taken aback.
"Reasoning?"
He thought to himself, "This child is indeed a child. Although Zheng Chenggong always has some ingenious ideas, he is still inevitably naive."
"This can't be solved by reasoning!"
Zheng Chenggong saw through his thoughts and smiled nonchalantly:
"Lord Zhou, you seem somewhat dismissive."
Zhou Yanru shook his head.
"No, I'm just curious about one thing: how exactly do you plan to reason with them?"
"Is it going to be that General Li is sending people to find each person one by one and explain everything clearly?"
Zheng Chenggong chuckled.
“I’m not stupid! Jiangnan is thousands of miles away from Liaodong. If I tell the people here that the taxes from Jiangnan can help recover Liaodong, they won’t listen to a word.”
"On the contrary, they will listen to the rumors spread by the local gentry and make trouble for us."
"What I want to tell them is the principle of curbing mergers and acquisitions."
Zhou Yanru's face stiffened: "What?!"
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