"Brother Ali, I still don't quite understand. You said before that Great Ming to the south gave up this Blackwater Forest because it didn't have enough manpower and resources to maintain it, so it abandoned even a repaired, solid mountain stronghold like this! You also said the warriors of Liaodong Garrison are very poor, and that's why they're savage and greedy, and we can't let them discover us bringing too much gold south... But now you're saying that not only can we pay tribute and ask for rewards, we can even make up some title and get good things from Great Ming? Even get them in an endless stream? How does that work...?"
Tall trees were tangled with vines, and the old forest lowered its branches. The wind through white bones sobbed faintly, while crows circled and sang their sandy songs. Three Jurchen chiefs and one Kingdom Priest all sat cross-legged around the corpse-bones of a chief. Just like that, in the old forest of the Jurchens' tree burials, among hundreds and thousands of white bones, they plotted the future of the tribes and the Kingdom in this Blackwater Forest.
Listening to Ali's explanation, Maha Aguda propped his chin on his tiger-like palm, his brows wrinkling into a knot. As the man in charge of force among them, a true Wild Jurchen chief, he really was not very good at these twisting, winding things.
To him, understanding these difficult matters was far harder than hunting fierce tigers or fighting Black Bears. But he was the central figure in the southward plan, so he had to understand "the politics of Liaodong," even if it was only the simplest surface layer. And precisely through these repeated attempts to think hard, and through others' guidance, his horizons and wisdom were constantly improving. He