"Your Majesty, this should have been done long ago."
Seated in the carriage, Cheng Ji was still talking incessantly about what had just happened.
"Staying in the Imperial Palace, you have no idea how vicious these people are. Those ministers at court and those celebrated scholars-not one of them isn't greedy."
"Take Wang Rong, that celebrated scholar you often summon."
"You even made him a Yellow Gate Gentleman in the Ministry of Personnel."
"Publicly, he's a distinguished scholar who cares nothing for wealth or fame, whose every word concerns the Classics and the great Way. He's also close friends with Ji Kang and the others, a celebrated scholar known throughout the realm, isn't he?"
"But does Your Majesty know what he's like in private?"
Cheng Ji said indignantly, "This man is utterly obsessed with profit!"
"Only before Your Majesty is he an unblemished scholar, and before Ji Kang, a great sage without desires or wants!"
"He owns dozens of residences in Luoyang, and countless gardens, fields, and water-powered mills. He nearly seized even the few plots of good farmland my elder brother received for his military achievements. Every time he sees my elder brother, he brings up that farmland, but my elder brother doesn't answer."
"My elder brother wouldn't even let me tell Your Majesty about this! He said we come from humble families, that we're coarse fighting men, while Your Majesty favors celebrated scholars and holds banquets for them. Saying that Your Majesty's honored guest wanted to seize our farmland would anger Your Majesty. He also said that if Your Majesty punished Wang Rong over this, the scholars of the entire realm would condemn the two of us..."
"I just don't understand. The man stealing someone else's farmland doesn't get condemned, but the victims get cursed instead?"
Cheng Ji