Under the officials' pressure, the atmosphere went dead silent for a moment, like a dropped needle.
"Isn't that simple?" Zhang Dai asked without the slightest fear, saying coldly, "Rice can only be stored for a year at most."
"Even if you swap it for husked rice and wheat, it can only be kept for six years at most."
"According to the imperial court's statutes, granary grain may not exceed three years. Every year, one-third of the old inventory is sold, and new grain is collected in return—rotation proceeds just like this!"
Grain could not be kept for long, and the so-called grain stored for several decades was simply a joke.
Hearing this, quite a few officials still understood only half of it. Upon hearing this, Xu Zhiming, whose gauze cap had been knocked off and whose official robe had been torn, felt his head ring with a buzz, and his complexion instantly turned pale as paper.
It's over. I am also a veteran grain intendant; how could I fall here?
Amid his dizzying panic, he heard Zhang Dai's cold and clear voice drift over.
"Therefore, according to the regulations, the granary has forty thousand stones of three-year grain, forty thousand stones of two-year grain, and forty thousand stones of this year's newly entered grain."
"Furthermore, the ledgers explicitly record that the grain dispatched for disaster relief was old grain. Thus, ten thousand stones should be three-year grain, and forty thousand stones should be two-year grain. Yet I carefully checked, and even chewed it—the entire official granary actually has no three-year grain, and even the two-year grain amounts to only ten thousand stones, while the rest is all entirely new grain..."
"In other words, there is a shortfall of at least fifty thousand stones."
Zhang Dai lifted his gaze to sweep