Imperial Capital Cannon King

Regarding this proposal for "early accession to power", the Noble Lord Faction, which occupied half of the imperial court, suddenly expressed support, which somewhat surprised Zhou Ming.

Yet upon careful thought, he felt this was entirely reasonable.

You must know that major affairs of this world, and indeed all important matters, could essentially be summarized in a single word: interests.

The essence of all things was interests.

A natural contradiction existed between imperial power and the noble lords, and the reason for this was also interests.

Take land, for instance. The noble lords occupied two-thirds of the land in the empire and enfeoffed countless lords. Over these lands, the emperor could exert almost no influence, and various policies formulated by the empire could not be implemented on the lords' territories.

Even regarding taxes, what the noble lords annually offered to the emperor was merely pocket money in the nature of a gift.

Over 80% of the empire's taxes were collected from the various prefectures and counties within the King Territory.

Of course, the noble lords had the obligation to dispatch troops and generals to defend the country, but these were peaceful times with few internal disturbances; the entire floating island was surrounded by no neighboring countries and faced no external threats, so the noble lords basically had no obligations they needed to fulfill toward this empire... aside from nominally belonging to it.

Yet all things develop forward. Three hundred years of peace had caused the empire's population to multiply several times over, and the land had been thoroughly developed. Accompanying this was an increasing burden; whether emperor or noble, upon limited land they could not find satisfaction and were both craving more resources.

After all, the emperor's power was somewhat greater, since the emperor held one-third of the land and