After Wang Yan took office as Vice Prefect of Shuntian Prefecture, his orders to collect sanitation fees, expand the force to crack down on crime, and survey land and population were all carried out effectively.
At the same time, in the course of handling these affairs, he cleaned out the entire Shuntian Prefecture bureaucracy, including giving Wanping County below it a thorough purge.
Combined with the crime crackdown, whether they were within the government or among the common people, anyone who did inhuman things and harmed the people was arrested. What differed from his time in Great Prosperity was that here, there were case files involving nobles and great households who had committed crimes but had gone unpunished or received only perfunctory punishment for various reasons.
Thus, in his spare time, the main thing he did was reopen old cases. So long as there was a record, so long as the people involved could be found, so long as something looked wrong to him, he would summon the commoners for questioning and bring in the nobles for interrogation. After that, it depended on the attitude of those noble and wealthy households.
If they did nothing, then even in winter there were still construction sites where people could work. No one would be left idle. If they intervened, then they only needed to pay silver—compensation for the people and fines for the government.
Wang Yan had already left them plenty of room. Even in murder cases, a fine alone could settle the matter. He did not seize on every detail and fight them to the bitter end; that was not the most worthwhile choice.
Naturally, the nobles and great households would not let their family members work themselves to death on construction sites. They all paid compensation and fines, each of