This Master Chen of the Chen clan doesn’t rank too high among the Jianghuai prominent clans, but he was one of the most ruthless and miserly of them all. It was said that the Jianghuai provincial government’s filing rooms were piled high with complaints against the Chen family for bullying competitors and monopolizing businesses. Complaints no one had paid any attention to for years.
The moment the old fellow opened his mouth, the whole room erupted together in a chorus of complaints about how hard their lives were and how poor they all were.
“Your Highness, my business is struggling as well. With the war raging in the south, the roads are blocked, transportation and material costs have skyrocketed. We ended up having to close dozens of our trading houses…when my third daughter got married, her dowry was simply thirty-six sedan loads. Because of that, my daughter was mocked mercilessly by her sister-in-laws….”
“In farming, salt, iron, and fishing…every one of the various offices and government bureaus all want a cut of it. Just the other day I even had to pawn my wife’s jewelry…local taxes are so heavy…”
“….Old Chen says he has meat once every three days. At my house, we only have meat once every seven days!”
“…my household is big, we had to slaughter sixteen fat pigs a day, but that’s only enough to give us a tiny bit of meat! The price of soybeans, pork, rice, and flour has all shot up on the market…we can’t afford to eat anymore….”
Apparently, these big merchants have grown accustomed to pretending to be poor in their everyday lives. Once they got talking, they completely forgot the solemnity of the occasion they should have kept in their heart. One after another, they shook their heads, furrowed their brows, stroked their beards, slapped the tables, and complained loudly of their bitter lives. Listening to them, one would have thought this was a gathering to raise relief for famine-stricken refugees.
Master Chen, the first one to cry of being poor, narrowed his triangular eyes, jiggled his leg, and picked his teeth. There were traces of contempt as he glanced up at Ning Yi and Feng Zhi Wei. They were nothing but two youngsters who were still wet behind their ears! Since you, Wei Zhi, had already investigated us so thoroughly, you should have known that this old man’s tiger head wasn’t something you could touch!
In his calculation, after giving the provincial commissioners a little embarrassment day, it wouldn’t do to push the man too far. They should be able to settle everything with a symbolic small token. Ten thousand taels? Twenty thousand? Surely it couldn’t be more than thirty thousand!
At the head of the table, Ning Yi and Feng Zhi Wei were both slowly sipping their tea. There was something a bit strange about both of them today. Other than the wine they had been obliged to drink when the toasts first began, they had not touched the wine on the table again. Instead, they had switched to drinking tea. (Haha, I guess this is a wink at the drunken night they had together.)
At the moment, Feng Zhi Wei seemed to be concentrating on drinking her tea, but the corner of her eye flicked toward Ning Yi. Ning Yi’s lowered gaze on the tea paused briefly, then almost imperceptibly, he gave a small nod.
Although there are countless entanglements between them, they had always shared an unspoken understanding whenever they faced the outside world. Receiving the look from him, Feng Zhi Wei smiled faintly and turned her gaze away. Suddenly sensing something was amiss—as though a pair of eyes were fixed intently on her back, she turned her head, but everything around her seemed completely normal. Without any change in her expression, Feng Zhi Wei lowered her head and continued to drink her tea. She secretly tilted the cup just a little, using the angle of the tea’s surface as a mirror, she saw that the person watching her was indeed, Qiu Yuluo.
Rather than watching her, it would be more accurate to say that Qiu Yuluo was observing every possible interaction between her and Ning Yi. Feng Zhi Wei stared at the woman’s strange gaze reflected in the tea, and a cold smile appeared at the corner of her lips— what exactly are you hoping to discover?
She had no intention of concerning herself with whatever was going on between those two. She had something more important to do. She then immediately set her cup down with a smile.
The cup was put down with considerable force.
The fine porcelain cup struck the equally fine tray with a clear, crisp sound. That single, emphatic clinking sound cut through the chaotic food market like noisy hall. The shock immediately quieted down the entire room.
The crowd blinked in unison, staring at the provincial commissioner, who had been smiling amiably just moments ago, but the smile had been replaced with a darkened expression the moment the cup was set down.
Only Master Chen remained unmoved as he spat out a splinter of a toothpick he had been chewing.
Resting both of her hands on the table, Feng Zhi Wei stared down at the wealthy merchants below. Her darkened, solemn face slowly broke into a faint smile, but it wasn’t the warm, spring-breeze-like smile from before. Instead, it was faint, cold, and grim. A flash of her snow-white teeth showed slightly at the edge of her lips, bringing to mind a wolf revealing its gleaming fangs toward its prey under the moonlight.
Seeing that faint smile, the initial sense of awe and shock they had felt earlier slowly returned to the crowd. They belatedly remembered the impressive and illustrious past of this young, twenty-year-old provincial commissioner. This wasn’t some courtier who had risen to power through luck or favors. This was Wei Zhi, the foremost official of the imperial court who had fought on battlefields, killed with his own hands, and brought down high ministers of the court. He was the rising star who, at fifteen, had taken the lives of countless high-ranking officials and nobles in just five short years. He even played a hand in the former Crown Prince’s downfall!
Master Chen’s expression changed as well. As Feng Zhi Wei remained silent, the atmosphere instantly grew tense and somber. The commanding aura of someone long accustomed to power and control caused Master Chen’s heart to pound against his chest. Slowly, he uncrossed his legs and sat up straight.
Feng Zhi Wei waited until everyone had straightened their posture and turned their gaze upon her before slowly lowering her own hands, her lips turning into a slow smile, as her hands even more slowly rolled up her sleeves. Glancing over at Master Chen, she said with a smile, “Master Chen, why haven’t you answered the question I asked you earlier?”
“Ah?” Master Chen froze, unable to recall what the Commissioner had asked him previously, no matter how hard he tried. A companion beside him nudged his waist and whispered a reminder, “The rice prices on the grasslands, the rice prices…”
“Ah, uh…” Master Chen’s eyes widened, finally remembering. He had heard those words earlier, but had taken them as a mere warning. After all, everyone knew that heading to the grassland to transport rice was just an excuse. An excuse to embarrass the Commissioner. Why would he ever need to transport rice personally? Besides, how would anyone make a round trip to the grassland in such a short time? But now that the Commissioner was asking it as a serious question, he was clearly intending to make an example of him.
Despite knowing full well the Commissioner’s intent, Master Chen wasn’t particularly afraid. After stammering vague excuses for a bit and seeing Feng Zhi Wei was still staring intently at him, he simply spread his hands, grinned, and said shamelessly, “You are asking about the rice prices? I can’t give you an answer. That’s the task for the servants. There is no need for me to personally oversee it. If you really would like an answer, how about I go ask for you after the banquet?”
“Insolence!”
A low shout like thunder abruptly burst out. A man at the table jumped in fright, his hand went limp, and with a crash, his wine cup fell to the floor and shattered into pieces.
But no one paid him any mind. Everyone shrank back, staring in horror at Feng Zhi Wei, who had suddenly turned furious and was shouting.
“Insolence!” Once Feng Zhi Wei erupted in fury, she was not about to give anyone a chance to react. She slammed her palm onto the table, sending the cups and plates clattering as she roared, “Who do you think you are? A lowly merchant, daring to be evasive and dismissive before His Highness and before me? Daring to fill your mouth with ‘you’ and ‘I’? Jianghuai stands as the premier seat of culture and education in the empire, since when did it produce a disrespectful, lawless scoundrel like you? Guards—-”
With a grim smile, she pointed at Master Chen who had frozen in shock at her sudden outburst. “I have always believed in being kind to people, but I will not tolerate blatant deceit! Didn’t he say he eats meat once every three days? Didn’t he tell me to cut him open and see for myself? Very well then—” She smiled savagely. “Drag him out and cut him open!”
All text copyright @ www.Ninja-Reflection.com
Ps. One thing that might not come through very clearly in the English translation is that whenever people address Ning Yi or Feng Zhi Wei (now that she is a marquis), they usually have to use very respectful terms when saying ‘you’ and ‘I’. For example, I can usually translate the ‘Your Highness” part, but it is often easier and makes more sense to leave out the whole bunch of different ways people use ‘I” when talking to him and simply just translate them all as ‘I’. For example, what you read as ‘I’ in the translations might actually be ‘this lowly servant’, ‘your lowly subordinate ’, ‘this worthless commoner ’, ‘this worthless woman’. I often chose to just translate them all as ‘I’ since translating it as it is would really clutter up the dialogue and more importantly, obscure the meaning. Take ‘this worthless woman’ for example. One would think that anyone referring to herself as ‘this worthless woman’ would have the lowest self-esteem, but the term ‘this worthless woman’ is often used simply as a polite way of referring to oneself. Both the speaker and the listener wouldn’t think too much beyond it being a polite speech. We probably could all write 100+ pages on how wrong it is for a society to expect a woman to refer to herself in that manner, but we won’t get into that right now. Suffice to say, in this scene, Master Chen’s deliberate choice of not using respectful speech when addressing Ning Yi and Feng Zhi Wei was a very daring test of how far he could push our two leads. He probably expected that since our two leads were in need of his donations, they would either ignore the disrespect or, at the very most, simply chastise him a bit for not using the correct speech.