Chapter 277: Chapter 277

On the official roads, teams escorting convicts were everywhere. Zheng Fan rode his horse, accompanied by Siniang and A Ming.

Lord Jingnan indeed treated Zheng Fan as one of his own, even entrusting him with handling his family’s funeral affairs. It took Zheng Fan quite some time to wrap everything up properly.

Siniang and A Ming were accompanying Zheng Fan to the capital this time. However, because Zheng Fan was riding in Lord Jingnan’s carriage at the start of the journey, they had to follow from a distance.

After Zheng Fan experienced an intensely thrilling twelve hours in Yanjing, A Ming and Siniang were summoned by Zheng Fan to help collect the corpses at the Tian Residence.

Although he hadn’t personally participated in the purge of the great clans, watching the endless columns of convicts on the official roads over a mere ten days to a fortnight made the sheer scale of the cleansing terrifyingly clear.

Those being escorted were mostly young, able-bodied men. Even the slightly older ones could be sent to the front lines to serve as conscripted laborers without issue. Content orıginally comes from 𝓷𝓸𝓿𝓮𝓵⟡𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓮⟡𝓷𝓮𝓽

The Yan Emperor intended to sweep away the great clans of Yan but had not ordered a wholesale slaughter. Of course, the most prominent great clans were to be decisively eradicated, physically. However, the sheer number of such families in Yan was immense. These convicts, forcibly branded as "criminals," would advance toward the southern Yinlang County under the Yan Emperor’s will.

There, lay the front line of Yan State’s invasion of the Qian State. War, indeed, consumed vast amounts of supplies, money, and provisions. But its most direct consumable was human life!

Zheng Fan didn’t know if the scene had been similar when the First Emperor of Qin conscripted convicts and laborers, but witnessing it firsthand, he was profoundly shaken by the sights on the official roads.

The army, upholding the monarch’s will, began to wield its blades. Under the Yan Emperor’s command, the entire Yan State commenced the most brutal and direct general mobilization for war.

The vast landed estates owned by the great clans were naturally confiscated. The large, hidden populations of serfs—who had belonged to these clans rather than the state—were re-tallied and registered by the imperial court. Most of them would continue to cultivate their original lands; only their masters had changed, from the former great clans to the state.

In ancient times, the process of centralizing power was fundamentally a tug-of-war between the central authority and local powers over "land" and "population."

In the historical processes Zheng Fan was familiar with, it seemed that every ancient dynasty that had once achieved glory had first centralized power. Only then could they concentrate their strength to accomplish great deeds.

However, as he passed these columns of convicts, Zheng Fan could clearly sense the baleful aura emanating from them. These men were filled with resentment.

The once lofty and privileged scions of the great clans were now reduced to captives.

For hundreds of years, the political system of Yan had been a co-rule between the Ji Family and the hereditary clans. Strictly speaking, the scions of these clans were also masters of the Yan State.

In truth, the balance between imperial power and the great clans had never truly been broken.

Imperial power had been further weakened because the late Emperor had ascended the throne with the support of the House of the Earl of North Border. Coupled with his extravagant indulgences during his reign, this had caused imperial authority to atrophy. The great clans, in fact, had never relaxed their vigilance against any expansion of imperial power.

Yet, no amount of vigilance, no depth of scheming, could stand against a single concept: naivety.

The Yan Emperor naively believed that his childhood companion, with whom he used to squabble over chicken drumsticks, would not rebel even when commanding formidable armies; thus, he accepted everything from the Earl of North Border.

The Earl of North Border naively believed the Yan Emperor was not testing him, entrusting his 300,000 soldiers of the Northern Border Army to His Majesty. He even volunteered to be the plow, willingly shouldering the infamy to uproot the great clans that had existed in the lands of Yan for centuries.

Lord Jingnan naively threw in his lot with the Earl of North Border and the Yan Emperor, not hesitating to first annihilate his own household to demonstrate his break from the past.

Imperial suspicion, the usual boundaries between ruler and minister—none of it seemed to apply to these three. Three naive individuals, working together, had forcefully turned the entire Yan State on its head.

One generation had produced three such titans, and these three titans stood united.

When the cavalry of the Northern Border Army and Lord Jingnan’s forces surged forth like a tide behind the Yan Emperor that day, the hearts of all the officials and the members of the great clans simultaneously gave a sickening LURCH.

They understood: the very sky over Yan had changed!

It was as if overnight, the wealth, status, and dignity that had once been theirs were utterly stripped away. The Yan Emperor had sent them to the southern border’s front lines, to take up arms and atone for the "sins" suddenly thrust upon them, to fight for the "freedom" they had possessed but lost in a single night.

To Zheng Fan, they seemed very much like the barbarian soldiers under his command. His barbarian soldiers hailed from convict tribes; their families were controlled by larger tribes, while they themselves were reduced to expendable cannon fodder in the larger tribes’ wars.

It was the same for these convicts. Their families were detained either in their ancestral homes or in the capital, awaiting the day these men might earn back their freedom through military merit.

It was like going from a chick to a sparrow, then from a sparrow to an eagle, only to suddenly revert to a chick, forced to strive once more just to become a sparrow again.

"Such a vast scale," A Ming remarked with feeling.

Zheng Fan looked at A Ming and nodded.

Although A Ming was a vampire, he wasn’t exceptionally old—at least, not to an exaggerated degree; he couldn’t compare to Liang Cheng in that regard.

Zheng Fan knew even more clearly that the current Yan State had been brought to a rolling boil by three dreamers.

It was as if they had gone all-in, betting everything. If the upcoming invasion of Qian failed to yield significant victories, if the outward expansion did not achieve great success, then this boiling cauldron could very well scald their own people.