Wei Nisheng grimaced at the slap, but said nothing.
He merely drew the memorial in its yellow silk envelope from his sleeve and handed it over.
Wang Kan took it, eagerly tore open the envelope, and unfolded the memorial.
First he skimmed ten lines at a glance. Then his gaze slowed, and he read it again from the beginning.
He read very slowly, very carefully, sentence by sentence.
Not because he had discovered some extraordinary evidence of guilt, but because he had seen how this memorial was written.
It did not open with impeachment, but grounded itself in the compilation of history.
From its very first words, it placed its author in an unassailable position.
This was not the Feng Faction using the grain case to bring down Shen Duan, but a Hanlin Academy Compiler discovering a problem while compiling a book.
Standing within Feng Yan's shadow was Wei Nisheng himself.
[Between one hundred and twenty thousand and seventy-three thousand lay an unaccounted-for forty-seven thousand, nearly forty percent...
In the twelfth and thirteenth years, the Ministry of Revenue's registers reported annual surpluses, yet Censors Li Han and Zhao Ding successively submitted memorials stating, "Ever-normal in name, ever-empty in truth"...]
The evidence was thorough, the figures precise.
There were no empty assertions, no veiled attacks.
Instead, it laid the Ministry of Revenue's reports alongside the Censor Granary Inspection Record, letting the figures speak for themselves.
This was no memorial. It was an array of blades.
[Jia Yi once said, "Stored reserves are the great lifeblood of the realm." Looking now upon the abuses in granary administration, how can one's heart not turn cold?]
It did not ask for anyone's execution or anyone's dismissal. It was a single, sorrowful sigh.
There was no murderous air of swords drawn and bows bent, yet