Mythical Three Kingdoms

As for not being able to pay it back when the time comes, what’s there to be afraid of? Problems that even Great Landlords can handle, you think they can’t? It’s nothing. As long as they’ve got strength in their arms, drag them in as corvée laborers and it’s fine—already miles better than those landlords’ filthy little tricks.

Once Chen Xi’s mind opened up, he quickly sorted all these things out. After that came all kinds of commercial loans, bad debts, falsified accounts and such. Chen Xi couldn’t be bothered to wrestle with those. With a stroke of his brush, he settled it: this system simply wouldn’t handle those large-scale loans; it would only support small and medium farmers, small vendors, workshops, and the like.

In fact, while writing this thing, Chen Xi suddenly remembered the ”Green Sprouts Law.” Roughly eight hundred years later in the Central Plains, someone would propose something almost the same as what Chen Xi was setting up now. But that one was worse than his—didn’t consider repayment capacity at all.

Once he finished that section, Chen Xi grabbed another document: ”Matters relating to price stabilization.” This one was right up his alley. He picked it up and knocked it out in no time.

He’d played this game far too many times. Balancing prices is easy: first divide goods into elastic and inelastic. Then the state reserves all items that are inelastic in demand, and when market prices rise, you just dump stock to flatten the prices.

As for items with elastic demand, those things have substitutes. If I can’t eat apples, I can eat pears; and even if I don’t eat them, I won’t die. No apples? I’ll eat vegetables; I’ll still get my vitamins.

So Chen Xi finished writing this part very quickly as well. Suppressing prices, subsidies for industries that produce demanded goods, ”move what’s dear to where it’s cheap, use what’s near instead of what’s far”—Chen Xi had run these routines far too many times.

To Chen Xi, political economy was something he was quite familiar with. Even though the era had changed, the essence of economics hadn’t.

He casually tossed that one onto the completed stack, then picked up another. After reading it, Chen Xi frowned repeatedly. ”Jia Wenhe, Jia Wenhe, what the hell is this? How come there’s Ma Zheng in Xun Wenruo’s batch of documents? That doesn’t sound right.”

Hearing this, Jia Xu walked over with a calm expression and glanced at the document in Chen Xi’s hand. His heart instantly sank—this was one of the main memorials he was supposed to handle. But at this point he absolutely could not admit it.

”Oh, that one. Wen Ruo is the lead of our group; anything related to my work landing on his desk is nothing strange.” Jia Xu said this with a placid look, completely free of any nervousness.

Chen Xi felt something was off, but after thinking more deeply, he also found it plausible. Given Xun Yu’s personality, it was normal for him to pick up work from Jia Xu’s side.

”Oh, then this is yours. Take it back and do it.” Without thinking, Chen Xi picked up the document and handed it over to Jia Xu. Jia Xu, displeased, didn’t take it. ”I’m working right now, Zichuan. If it’s not urgent, help me finish it first.”

Chen Xi glanced over the document. It was basically just about expanding the scope of Ma Zheng and increasing horse output. He thought to himself that this wasn’t difficult, shot Jia Xu an annoyed look, then told him to get back to work while he himself started on it right away.

Horse farms, animal husbandry and such—so-so. If you want to scale up and strengthen it, the simplest method is actually to have the common people raise horses. Later you just convert that into tax, or into Silver Coin to pay them. Many a little makes a mickle. Didn’t the Tang Dynasty end up with several hundred thousand horses precisely by doing this?

So very soon, Chen Xi breezed through another full section. Then he picked up yet another: land reclamation and water conservancy projects. That was easy. Chen Xi didn’t even need to think. People in later generations had done this too many times. He just needed to pick a suitable model and copy it.

After that, Chen Xi roughly skimmed the rest of the content and found that they were all common small-folk issues. Solving them individually in this era was very simple, but once the scope extended to the Thirteen Provinces of Great Han, it turned into a huge pit. For the Sage of this age, such things were the kind that needed long, careful thought before making a move.

For Chen Xi, however, as long as these people could identify the problems, he could basically find solutions. After all, standing at the downstream end of history, countless benevolent and righteous people over a thousand years had been tackling these issues; any random search would turn up methods.

At most, some issues had many solutions, some had fewer, and some methods weren’t suitable for this era and needed to be modified—but there would always be a way, aside from a few unsolvable problems. And unsolvable problems wouldn’t appear in this batch anyway.

So, in a single afternoon, Chen Xi finished all several dozen documents by himself, stacked them neatly on Xun Yu’s desk, then sat back with a cup of tea, sipping clear tea and nibbling on snacks, while the people below continued working.

In fact, for people like Chen Qun, what consumed the most time in these government affairs wasn’t writing the content; it was combing through piles of reference material to find methods, thinking up approaches, discussing with others, then exchanging opinions for revision and correction. Being able to complete three or four documents in a day was already considered fast…

In the afternoon, after everyone had eaten and the lamps were lit, Xun Yu arrived. His complexion was much better than before, but his bearing was clearly very different from that morning.

”Ha, Wen Ruo, you really didn’t need to come. You could have rested more.” Chen Xi held his teacup and smiled at Xun Yu. If it were him, he wouldn’t get out of bed for half a year—he’d rest until he literally couldn’t justify resting anymore before coming back to work.

”It’s nothing. Divine Doctor Hua and Doctor Zhang have already confirmed that I’m fine. It’s just that Lord asked me to rest more. But I was idle and bored in the camp, so I came over.” As Xun Yu spoke, he walked over to his spot, casually picked up the top memorial, and saw it was already filled in. Though not particularly detailed, it was executable.

So after scanning it and finding no loopholes, he set it aside. Then he noticed the second one was also completed. After roughly reading through it, he felt there were no errors in the content—just that it was written too simply. It could be executed, but you’d have to find someone capable to handle it.

But that wasn’t a big issue, so Xun Yu put it aside as well and picked up another from the pile. Again, it was finished. This time his expression showed clear surprise. As before, the content was on the simple side, but there were no mistakes.

As he flipped through more and more memorials, Xun Yu’s expression grew increasingly astonished. By the time he had gone through seven or eight, his face was already full of shock. He promptly picked up the whole stack, ran his finger along it, and realized every single one had been processed.

Judging from the standard he’d seen so far, this entire stack of documents could be implemented. At most, they’d just need some capable hands to keep the scale and intensity properly in check.

”Who helped me handle my government affairs this afternoon?” Xun Yu placed the stack of memorials in the upper right corner of his desk and asked.

”Me.” Chen Xi said, teacup in hand.

”You finished all the memorials for my Ten-Day Period?” Xun Yu said, the corner of his mouth twitching. All the Civil Officials there were thunderstruck when they heard this. They could no longer maintain their heads-down, reference-checking state; all turned to stare at Chen Xi in shock.

”Uh, no wonder my wrist hurts from writing.” Chen Xi shook out his right hand. Each memorial was over two hundred characters, and there were more than forty of them—close to ten thousand characters. And that was hardly even thinking; one read-through and he knew what to write. Plus, classical prose is famously concise and efficient…

Xun Yu watched Chen Xi shake his right hand, feeling a bit speechless. That wasn’t the point. The point was that he’d done ten days’ worth of his work in half an afternoon.

”These were all quite simple. Once I read the outline, I more or less knew what to write.” Chen Xi curled his lip. ”If I’d known you were coming in the afternoon, I wouldn’t have worked this hard.”

Everyone’s faces were politely expressionless, but inwardly they were speechless. How could you possibly know what to write just from the outline? All the reference checking and real-world cross-checking in the middle, did you just eat those?

”You actually can finish all of these by yourself?” Seeing his workload done, Xun Yu started chatting idly with Chen Xi.

”Yeah. I said before, roughly a month is enough to handle it all. For me, the biggest problem isn’t how to solve things, it’s that sometimes I see an issue but don’t realize it’s an issue.” Chen Xi spread his hands, and by the way poured a cup of tea for Xun Yu as well. He was a patient, after all, and should be treated kindly—if he collapsed again, that’d be one less person to do the work.