Su Ziji spoke these words calmly, yet what he said made it impossible for anyone to remain calm.
Every sentence was like a peal of thunder, crashing one after another upon the man in this room.
There had been no thunder outside, yet as Su Ziji's voice fell, a muffled boom sounded. A gust of wind rose, tossing the leaves into disorder, as though it had also thrown people's hearts into chaos.
Zhang Dai's face went deathly pale, then turned ashen. He seemed to be struggling desperately to control himself. Under the wavering candlelight, his expression was obscure; his slightly drooping eyelids lowered, concealing the look in his eyes.
Yet the trembling of his body and his uncontrollably reddened eyes had already exposed Zhang Dai's feelings.
The room suddenly fell silent.
Su Ziji said nothing more, and neither did Zhang Dai.
Zhang Dai's silence at this moment—whether Su Ziji's words had left him speechless, or whether the divide between sovereign and subject meant that, at this point, he could only bow his head and confess guilt or fiercely argue back—
If he chose neither, then he could not answer at all.
But whichever it was, Su Ziji gazed outside through the gauze window and, in truth, did not care.
He had come, but only because he had wished to come.
Whether Zhang Dai listened was up to Zhang Dai, not him.
Zhang Dai truly was an incorruptible official, but he was not a capable one. Reclaiming wasteland, encouraging farming, planting mulberry trees—he had done all these things, but they had rarely achieved results and had even produced the opposite effect.
For he did not truly understand economics and had no practical plans. Blindly reclaiming land, urging farming, and planting mulberries would only waste public funds, make people's lives harder, and