Reading the essay, Wang Yang did not know whether to laugh or cry, but he was also secretly alarmed. It was full of strained connections, yet it got one thing right: he had played an important role in establishing the Ever-Normal Granary. It even deduced that he had used the Xinye Yu Clan as an intermediary to persuade the gentry to cooperate with the authorities. Only, to portray the depth of his scheming, it claimed that he had entered the Commandery Academy in the first place to befriend the Yu Family's second young master.
Fortunately, these arguments remained mere "clashes of spirited opinion" among students and scholars, and outsiders did not take them seriously. Otherwise, Wang Yang really would have worried that Wang Tai might read too much into them. In truth, even if Wang Tai learned that Wang Yang had asked Yu Yi to intervene, it would not be much of a problem. It would, however, easily make Wang Tai pay closer attention to him, which would do his counterattack plan more harm than good.
At first, Wang Yang publicly clarified that the silk and satin affair had nothing to do with the Ever-Normal Granary.
But the more he clarified, the less his supporters believed him. Wearing expressions that said, "We understand," they nodded repeatedly, then plunged back into the debate. Some even imitated the hidden-meaning analysis and annotations of the Treatise on Silk and Grain, dissecting his clarification word by word and line by line. They declared that it contained "three instances of acting under constraint, two causes for lamentation, and one virtue of claiming no credit for accomplished deeds." They made it sound so solemnly convincing!
Wang Yang could neither laugh nor cry. When anyone else asked, he simply shook his head in denial without offering specific