I Can See Your Combat Power

Chapter 104: Chapter 100: Strategy (Thanks to Mighty A for the donation and monthly pass)

Translator: 549690339

Three days later

An exhaustive joint report was placed on Tang Luo’s desk, the result of a collaboration between the West City Public Security Bureau and the Tang Clan’s

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With the help of these two reports, Tang Luo was able to understand the ins and outs of the case involving poisoning and slander.

Lou Hongzhi, a native of Xiling. He studied medicine from a young age but was not interested in healing, rather he took pleasure in mastering poisons and harmful plants. At the age of fifteen, he started the Foundation Building, and at twenty-eight, he broke through to an advanced level. His martial arts style was strange; specializing in defensive techniques but without any proficiency in hand-to-hand combat. He was adept in using poison, so his opponents often died from severe poisoning rather than through combat. He was brilliant and proud.

He once said, “The world belongs to the virtuous, not the tyrannical. Then only the son of Pride of Xiling, Shen, can ascend to the throne.”

In other words, he is an irrational fan of Prince Shen, deeply desiring to enter his mansion and show his capabilities.

However, because of his average ability, Prince Shen’s mansion which already has five hundred advanced martial artists, would not value a poison user highly. Therefore, Lou Hongzhi, unwilling to be beneath her, did not recommend himself to join Prince Shen’s mansion.

After the duel with Jiang Lin, Prince Shen’s reputation was greatly damaged. His retainers left one by one, including several advanced martial artists.

Prince Shen became the laughing stock of Xiling overnight. While the Tang Clan’s operation played a role in this, the main reason was that there were too many people watching the duel. They felt that Prince Shen was too cowardly. Martial artists respect bravery and see risking their lives in battle as the highest honour. Prince Shen’s retreating means that he lacks bravery. This disappointed those martial artists who had rallied behind him because of his reputation, leading them to leave.

But this gave Lou Hongzhi a chance to be taken seriously. With Zhang Xinghe dead, there was a vacancy at Prince Shen’s house, and his reputation had taken a significant hit.

As long as he could greatly embarrass Tang Luo and demonstrate his skills, Prince Shen would definitely look at him differently.

This conspiracy was instigated by this simple wish.

If this riot couldn’t be quelled, hundreds, if not thousands of lives could be lost. The reason for these potential deaths is nothing more than to pave the path for Lou Hongzhi to enter Prince Shen’s mansion.

“Why are there such twisted bastards everywhere,” Tang Luo put down the dossier and rubbed his head.

He had initially assumed that this was Prince Shen’s doing, a move to retaliate against him. So, for the past three days, he had prepared several plans to counteract them, but after reading the dossier, he felt sick.

After a few deep breaths, he felt a sense of dullness. He tossed another case file along with the current one into the brazier.

May Fifteenth

For a whole month, the Tang Clan had been implementing a grain collection plan. During this month, the patriarchs of the Tang Clan branches, under Tang Ming’s organization, began a crazy grain purchasing plan.

The so-called collection of grain is the collection of rice.

Rice is generally categorized as new grain, stored grain, and aged-stored grain.

The rice harvested in that same year is called new grain, while rice stored for more than a year is referred to as stored grain. Moreover, when the stored grain seriously ages, its color, taste, and smell deteriorate, making it aged-stored grain.

The Tang Clan only consumes new grain, while the common civilians predominantly eat stored grain. As for places like charity halls, poorhouses, and beggars’ quarters, they can only afford to eat aged-stored grain mixed with stored grain.

Ever since Tang Zhi made a big promise to the branches, Tang Ming had been planning and implementing the collection of large amounts of new grain.

However, in comparison to what Tang Zhi had requested, it was like trying to put out a burning cart with a cup of water.

The rice in Xiling is harvested three times a year, in March for the spring crop, in June for the summer crop, and in September for the autumn crop. The new rice harvested in March, as long as it could be bought on the market, had been completely bought over by the Tang Clan.

Even though Tang Ming had acted covertly, the destination of this new grain was inevitably leaked. When the major clans of Xiling discovered the Tang Clan’s plan, they quickly withdrew their new grain from their rice shops and replaced it with stored grain, which irritated and angered Tang Ming.

Xiling has more than two million acres of farmland, but much of it is controlled by clans. For example, the eight hundred thousand acres of farmland to the north of Xiling, all belong to the Tang Clan. As for the seventy-five thousand acres of good land to the south of Xiling, these are all private property of the Mi Clan.

Excluding these one million five hundred fifty thousand acres of good land, the people of Xiling only control about four hundred fifty thousand acres.

So how could those four hundred fifty thousand acres of farmland support three million people?

A normal person consumes half a kilogram of grain a day, not to mention the large food intake of martial artists.

Three million ordinary people consume at least 54.75 million kilograms of grain a year, equivalent to around 270,000 tons. The food consumption of martial artists is at least five times that of ordinary people.

With hundreds of years of peace in Xiling, it has become the best soil for cultivating martial artists. Even if a commoner family has a child, they would send one or two to learn martial arts.

If one can distinguish himself in the martial arts, he can assist his family in Foundation Building. Therefore, few people in Xiling of the current population of three million people lack skills, most of them being children of commoner families or orphaned street children.

That means the people of Xiling need more than a million tons of grain a year.

To collect sufficient new grain for an entire year for the people of Xiling in two months, Tang Ming felt that Tang Zhi was imposing an impossible task.

Because Tang Mi Clans kept the price of grain extremely low, six or seven gold coins could buy a thousand kilograms of stored grain. Even the new rice sold in the market would cost only two or three more gold coins.

Under the dominance of the two clans’ low prices, most of the farmland controlled by other clans is not used to grow grain but instead to grow fruits and vegetables. Some even choose not to grow grain at all but buy directly from Tang Mi Clans.

Therefore, all the new grain available in Xiling comes from the Tang Clan and Mi Clan. Tang Ming’s plan to collect grain has three aspects.

One is to organize merchant groups to carry out large-scale grain collection in other big cities.

Second is to buy all the new grain released by the Mi Clan.

Third is to send out a fleet on the Lingjiang River to spread the news about the grain collection, in hopes that large boats would bring grain down the river.

Of these three strategies, the most important is undoubtedly the collection of new grain from the Mi Clan. However, this most critical plan fell into a significant bottleneck after a whole month of buying.

The price of all the new grain in Mi Clan’s granaries had soared to thirty gold coins per thousand kilograms in a single day, a clear move against the Tang Clan’s grain collection.

“Mr. representative, should we still buy this grain?” Tang Qi, the leader in charge of organizing branch families to purchase new grain from the Mi Clan, ran to Tang Ming to ask this question reluctantly after seeing the situation.

If they continued to buy new grain at a price of thirty gold coins per thousand kilograms, it would cost sixty gold coins per ton. And they were targeting to purchase over seven hundred thousand tons of new grain from Mi Clan—that would require more than forty million in gold coins.

Some branch families, though they claim to have tens of millions in wealth, hold most of their wealth in shops and spiritual beasts. The actual cash holdings amounting to a few million considered quite impressive. Such a tremendous amount of expenditure of over forty million gold coins is indeed intimidating; they did not dare to take the initiative.

But recalling Tang Zhi’s promise and estimating the value of the land in North City, Tang Ming gritted his teeth and said, “Buy! Tell those branch leaders, if anyone is unwilling to spend money, they should not expect an inch of the land in North City in the future..”

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