"Lord Shen is here!"
"So this is Lord Shen?"
"She's so young..."
Whispers rippled through the crowd. Shen Tang kept her eyes straight ahead and walked through the throng, lifting the hem of her robe as she climbed the crude platform. Soldiers held the onlookers back. The platform was simple, with only three steps, but the crowd could easily see what was happening from below.
Shen Tang ignored the din of the crowd.
She sat at the head of the platform and waved a hand to those below.
Soon, soldiers carried up a heavy bundle of bamboo slips.
It hit the ground with a thud.
The heavy load kicked up a thin layer of dust.
Shen Tang casually picked up the top bundle and opened it.
She needed to choose a "lucky one" to go first.
"Oh, what a coincidence. Bring up the Zhang family's steward, Di." Shen Tang casually closed the bundle and set it beside her. Lili dragged a man onto the platform like a chicken. The people below took a good look and immediately recognized him: he was the Zhang family's steward, surnamed Di.
His mother had been the Zhang Clan Head's wet nurse.
He had always considered himself the Zhang Clan Head's milk brother.
On top of that, his entire family served the Zhangs, and several of them were highly valued. Taking advantage of that connection, he had committed all manner of heinous acts: abducting women, seizing farmland, beating tenant farmers to death, and driving widows and orphans to their deaths, to name just a few.
He was the sort who would stop at nothing for profit.
The Zhangs publicly owned over a hundred qing of fertile land, tilled by more than five hundred tenant farmers. Steward Di managed some of them, secretly bullying entire tenant