Mid-May, Fuzhou.

The sun is rising from the direction of the port, the fishing fleet has already gone to sea, and with the shouts of the workers on the docks, the crowded crowds in the streets, markets, squares, and construction sites of the city have turned the scene in front of them into a lively scene.

Plainly dressed people have eaten breakfast at roadside stalls and hurry, while children selling newsprint run through the crowd. In these half-new and half-old buildings, literati and merchants gathered here, and vendors from afar began to socialize and negotiate for a day......

The large influx of displaced people and the tentative location of the capital of the new imperial court brought such a prosperous scene to Fuzhou. A similar situation lasted for several years in Lin'an more than ten years ago, but compared with the chaos in Lin'an's prosperity at that time, a large number of displaced people died, and various cases occurred frequently, Fuzhou's seemingly chaotic prosperity was vaguely guided by order.

On the one hand, they encouraged the local aborigines of Fuzhou to participate in business activities related to people's livelihood as much as possible, such as renting out houses and living in early stages, selling early cooking skills, and expanding the cost of shops.

While guiding and encouraging the local people to expand their operations and take responsibility for the people's livelihood, new wharves began to be built in the east of Fuzhou, shipyards were expanded, technical staff were housed, residential and workshop areas were expanded in the north and west of the city, and the imperial court used government decrees as resources to encourage traders who had fled from other places to build new factories and shacks, and to absorb the homeless people who had become homeless to work and work for relief, so as to at least ensure that most of the refugees would not be left on the streets and could find a bite to eat.

At the same time, redundant soldiers participated in patrols, and cooperated with lower-level officials to deal with public order problems strictly and quickly. In this way, although there are many criminals killed, and in many cases it is inevitable that innocents will be wronged, but on the whole, it has the effect of killing chickens and monkeys, so that there is no great conflict between outsiders and locals for a while.

From a macro point of view, the ability of the new monarch to deal with political details in Fuzhou at this time is countless times higher than that of his father, who ruled Lin'an more than ten years ago. On the other hand, Lin'an had half of the original Wu Dynasty and the entire Central Plains as nutrients, but now Fuzhou can attract nourishment, but it is far inferior to Lin'an back then.

By May, a huge tremor was sweeping through the city, which was beginning to flourish.

If you are an ordinary person who is not involved in court politics, what people can see is the shock when the imperial court began to announce the results of the Southwest War on the second day of the first month of May, and the courage and generosity shown by the new monarch behind this shock. During this period, there were certainly those who abused the Wu Dynasty, but with it, a lot of new news and new things filled people's eyes.

Li Pin's newspaper began to interpret the concept of Gewuxue according to the results of the battle of the Southwest Wangyuan Bridge, and every day thereafter, the newsprint looked at the concept of Gewuxue to the ancient Luban and extended to the Mohists, and the storytellers began to talk about Luban's wooden kite that could fly for three days without setting in the restaurant and teahouse, and began to talk about the wooden ox and flowing horse of Zhuge Kongming during the Three Kingdoms...... These are all things that ordinary people like to see.

Along with the study of Gewu was Li Pin's discussion of Neo-Confucianism, and these ideas were a little far away for ordinary people, but among the middle and lower class scholars, there were more discussions about the concentration of power, loyalty to the monarch and patriotism. By mid-May, some stories about Guan Zhong and Zhou Tianzi in "The Legend of the Spring and Autumn Ram" had frequently appeared in the discussions of readers, and the core ideas of these stories were finally summarized in four words:

- Honoring the king.

While the aura of the artifact of Gewuxue continues to expand, most people have not yet been able to see the undercurrent surging underneath it. On the fifth day of the fifth month of May, the Fuzhou court dismissed Li Long, the secretary of the old Ministry of Works, and then reorganized the Ministry of Industry, which seems to be just a consistent continuation of the new emperor's emphasis on craftsman thinking, and at the same time, there are a series of actions such as the attack on Quanzhou by the back army, and at the same time, in private, there are rumors about the new emperor Junwu and the eldest princess Zhou Pei once learned Gewu and arithmetic under the demon head of Nanning.

In the past, Ning Yi killed the monarch and rebelled, but his ability is strong, no one can deny it today, after the death of Emperor Jinghan, Emperor Jingping Zhou Ji was exiled to the north, at that time, a group of magnates in the south of the Yangtze River chose Zhou Yong, who was not outstanding among the many royal families, in fact, it was expected that the two sisters and brothers might turn the tide after inheriting the mantle of Ning Yi......

These half-truths and half-truths have caused a strange atmosphere among the people, but they have also indirectly dissipated the negative emotions of everyone thinking about their own problems because of the war situation in the southwest.

On the ninth day of the first month of May, the Beiwei army was combined with the inside and outside of the city, and in only four days, Quanzhou was captured.

These are the movements of Fuzhou that ordinary people can see, but if you go up, you can find that a huge storm has been roaring in the sky of Fuzhou City for a long time.

In the general direction, it is not surprising that any change of court will have the phenomenon of a son of heaven and a courtier. What is the personality of the new emperor, what is his philosophy, who he favors and who he alienates, these are things that people have to pay attention to and adapt to in the normal process of every king.

With Zhou Yong's departure from Lin'an, the Wu Jianshuo Dynasty was almost equivalent to existing in name only, and the ensuing prince Junwu has been at the center of the war and countless bumps. After he succeeded to the throne, the "revitalization" of the court, in the tragic fight and flight finally stood firm half of the foothold, the Wu Dynasty's national power has declined, but if in terms of righteousness, he can still be said to be the most legitimate new monarch of the Wu Dynasty, once he stands firm and ascends to the heights, at this time half of the wealthy families in the south of the Yangtze River will still choose to support him. This is the power of fame.

The Wu Dynasty is indeed a broken ship on the whole, but the broken ship also has three nails, not to mention that under the premise that the original volume of this broken ship is extremely large, the basic plate of this righteousness is still extremely huge on the stage of competing for the world at this time, at least more than Lin'an's Tie, Wu and others, than Liu Guangshi, Dai Mengwei and others, and even than the bandits in Jindi, on the whole.

Countless clans are waiting for the new emperor to clear his mind and raise his voice to judge in what form he wants to support. Many of the forces gathered in Fuzhou from February to March were actually representatives or envoys of these local forces that still retained their power, and some were even those in power themselves.

In May, the emperor saw the dagger and officially issued a voice, and the sound of this voice was a disaster that caught countless clans off guard.

Respect the king!

Since the second half of last year, the new emperor named Zhou Junwu has been fighting in the most tragic environment, in Jiangning he was besieged by a million soldiers, broke the kettle and went into battle in person, only to kill Zongfu slightly, after the retreat he succeeded to the throne in Jiangning, and soon he was forced to abandon Jiangning, fleeing in Jiangnan, behind his back, countless people were slaughtered. He rectified the army, and once chose to concentrate power and organize a supervision team and a military law team with low-level soldiers whose families were ruined and people died.

People are waiting for him to calm down and look at the whole thing from a higher perspective, in essence, many people are waiting for the official to make a wish, many families are waiting to make meritorious contributions to the dragon under the new political framework, these families have the resources, the strength, the talents—these are the people who were cultivated in the framework of the past system—as long as the new emperor shows his generosity, the entire broken ship of the Wu Dynasty is still one of the largest ships in this ocean.

Since February, there have been countless people in the overall framework of the Fuzhou court to hand one after another sketches and suggestions, Jin people left, the wind and rain stopped, packed up the broken ship and began to repair, in this direction, to achieve perfection is not easy, but if you only want to pass, it is really ordinary political wisdom can do things.

But the people at the top were surprised to find that the stupid emperor seemed to be trying to smash the ship, ready to rebuild a ridiculously little sampan.

After waiting for three months, waiting for this result, the confrontation began almost immediately. Some of the forces of the big clans began to try to outflow, and in the court, all kinds of vague or explicit suggestions and oppositions continued, some people began to frame the tragic possibility of the future to the emperor, and some people began to reveal that a certain big clan was disgruntled, and the Fuzhou court was about to lose the support of a certain place. The new emperor was not angry, he tried hard to persuade and appease, but he never let go of his promise.

At this time, in the Fuzhou court, the emperor's control of the situation was almost absolute, and the officials could only threaten and cry, but they could not make much of a check and balance on his actions in essence. Especially after the old news came out of Jun Wu, Zhou Pei and Ning Yi, the face of the court was lost, and the emperor's face was picked up partially.

The apprehensive officials then joined forces in private, preparing to launch a large-scale protest later, but the news of the capture of Quanzhou by the Beiwei army came immediately, and in cooperation with public opinion in the city, they even stopped the complaints of the hundred officials. On May 15, a long-awaited news quietly came out:

In order to change the phenomenon of the weakness of the army of the Wu Dynasty in the past two hundred years, the emperor will take the lead of Han Shizhong, Yue Fei and others to build the "Jiangnan Military Academy" to train generals and officials in the army, and to do more loyal education in the military academy to replace the past self-emasculating system of civil servants and military supervision.

This news spread in the court, and although it was not implemented for a while, people were more and more sure that the new emperor's belief in respecting the king was almost a foregone conclusion.

When the country is stable, the power of the military must be weakened, and the power of the monarch also needs to be checked; When the country is in peril, power must be concentrated and the army must be revitalized. Such an idea may seem simple, but in essence it is a sharp shift in statecraft over the past 200 years. If you want to "respect the king", it is impossible to "rule the world with scholars", and if you want to "rule the world with scholars", there will be a direct conflict with "respecting the king".

As for the end of May, the emperor's entire will to reform began to become clear, and countless exhortations and persuasions continued to appear in the city of Fuzhou, sometimes these exhortations were handed to Junwu, sometimes to the eldest princess Zhou Pei, and some of the fierce old ministers agreed with the new emperor's innovation, and among the middle and lower class literati, there were also many people who agreed with the courage of the new emperor, but in a larger place, the dilapidated ship began to collapse......

At the end of May, Ning Yi was in the Sword Pavilion, probably knowing a series of information about the Fuzhou Imperial Court's innovation in Lin'an, and this day was also when the Zuo family's envoy team passed by the Sword Pavilion.

After the death of Zuo Duanyou, the current head of the Zuo family is Zuo Jiyun, but Zuo Jiyun's ability stops at Shoucheng, over the years, as a side line of the Zuo family, Zuo Xiuquan has taken charge of most of the things of the Zuo family, and is essentially the successor of Zuo Duanyou's will. This is a traditional scholar in his fifties, handsome in appearance, gentle and elegant, with a line of white hair hanging from his right forehead, and after seeing Ning Yi, he exchanged information about Lin'an with him.

The places are separated by more than 2,000 miles, and although the high-level information channels have begun to be unobstructed after the withdrawal of the Jinren, many of the first-hand information are often fake, and only by cross-comparison can we see a relatively clear outline.

“…… The little emperor's set of eliminations is a bit unexpected. The information at hand was only released by the rumors of the Jiangnan Martial Arts Academy, and after a comparison, Ning Yi said so, but also sighed a little, "Previously, Yue Fei's troops forced Quanzhou and besieged but did not attack, but in private, they should be in tandem with the city, contact the spies, and persuade them to surrender...... Who would have thought that he would attack Quanzhou, but he was preparing for public opinion in Fuzhou, interestingly, he captured it in time......"

Zuo Xiuquan said with a smile: "I heard that Mr. Ning had a master-apprentice friendship with Xinjun in Jiangning in the past, I wonder if I am a little relieved to know this news today?" ”

"Over the years, it has not been easy for him and Zhou Pei." Ning Yi said, "When the Jin people went south, we kidnapped Liu Yu and threw the pot to the Wu Dynasty, and he threw the topic back through Xuzhou, which actually did a very good job. When it came to the destruction of the First World War in Jiangning, he really grew into a man who stood up to the sky...... In fact, his sister's personality was stronger back then, and Junwu's personality was relatively weak, not easy, hard work......"

For a long time, due to Zuo Duanyou's reasons, the Zuo family has maintained a good relationship with the Huaxia Army and the Wu Dynasty at the same time. In many discussions with that old man in the past, Ning Yi also knew that although Zuo Duanyou strongly supported the Huaxia Army's anti-Jin, his essence and bones were still Confucian scholars who cared about the Wu Dynasty and Taoism, and his arrangement of the Zuo family before his death was probably also inclined to the Wu Dynasty. But Ning Yi didn't mind that.

He also knew that what he said here would probably enter the ears of the little emperor thousands of miles away through Zuo Xiuquan's mouth in the near future, and for this reason, he did not hesitate to say a few more words of encouragement to the child back then.

- It's really hard work to get this far.

Zuo Xiuquan nodded.

"What does Mr. Nan Ning think, how did Xinjun's decision go?"

(End of chapter)