Night had fallen. It was the Hai Hour.
In the inner hall of the Shangyu County Yamen, Ren Ye drank sobering tea and gazed longingly at the courtyard scenery, his heart full of unease.
After the banquet, all the guests had gone back to rest, while he and Brother Huang alone stayed behind to clean up the "mess" left by their victory.
They had won the battle, but the headache of wrapping things up still left the two of them struggling to breathe.
Inside, candle flames flickered. Sitting beside him, Brother Huang finished sorting through all the account books, household registers, and assorted official case files from the Shangyu Nine Lands before letting out a long sigh. "Sigh, fucking hell... I want to pull out my investment."
Ren Ye gave him a sidelong look. "Comrade second-largest shareholder, why are you backing out again?"
"Am I the one backing out? Here, look at these totals. If we keep this up, we won't pay off these debts in three hundred years." Brother Huang picked up his teacup and said, somewhat agitated, "It's one thing to screw over my generation, but we can't throw our grandsons into the bargain too!"
"Don't panic. Our descendants will go on forever," Ren Ye reassured him. "Take it one thing at a time."
"Phew."
Brother Huang exhaled deeply and said patiently, "Let's leave the minor matters aside and start with the major problems we have to solve right now. First, after combining the household registers for Qingliang Prefecture and the Shangyu Nine Lands, our rough count puts the registered population at around seven hundred and fifty thousand. Of those, two hundred and forty thousand are registered as military households. You really could call this a nation under arms. This situation is dangerous and unhealthy. Military households are