I don't know how much time passed, Ma Ziyi stopped asking, judging from the reserved smile on his face, he was quite satisfied with Liu Cheng's answer, he stood up, tidied up his clothes, bowed to Liu Cheng, Liu Cheng hurriedly turned sideways: "Mr. Ma is so polite, how can he afford it!" ”

"Build embankments and build embankments, bequeath to future generations, how can you not afford it!" Ma Ziyi's expression was very serious: "The old man's gift is not for himself, but for the gentry and people of Yanzhou, and Lord Liu just has to accept it." Liu Cheng didn't have a damn, so he had to accept Ma Ziyi's bow, Ma Ziyi got up and asked: "Building an embankment and repairing a bridge is a big deal, if there is a need, please speak up, I can prepare in advance, so as not to be caught off guard." ”

Liu Cheng saw that Ma Ziyi's attitude had changed greatly, and he was also very happy in his heart, and said with a smile: "I have more than 100 familiar elite soldiers under my command, and as soon as the 3,000 people come, I will divide them into 30 teams, select the competent ones from the personal soldiers under me as the team deputy, and then let them choose the simple and capable ones in each team as the team leader, and they can start work after a few days of rest, but food, tea, clothes and shoes, tools, and doctors will have to be tired of being ranked." ”

"Hmmm! The grain was first taken from the righteous warehouse, and then the donation was made according to the amount of land, and my family first pledged 50 taels of silver and 200 stone of coarse grain. As for the tools! Ma Ziyi turned to Lu Boqi and said: "This will bother the old parents, please send a notice to gather the blacksmiths in the state, and repair them within a time limit." ”

Lu Boqi, who has always had no sense of existence, was suddenly asked and was a little caught off guard, and hurriedly nodded again and again: "This is easy to say, tomorrow the official will issue a notice, and the blacksmiths who have been requisitioned have daily food and silver, and the expenditure from the official warehouse will be counted as this year's labor." ”

"The Ming Mansion is really the heart of parents!" Ma Ziyi hurriedly praised that although according to a whip law in the Ming Dynasty, the people's labor has long been converted into taxes and paid to the government, and there is no longer the obligation to bear labor, but in fact, there is still more or less compulsory labor conscription.

"Why do I read the books of the sages? After doing this thing today, I am almost worthy of it. Lu Boqi has been the governor of Juzhou for almost two terms, and I am afraid that it is the first time he has heard praise from Ma Ziyi's mouth, and he can't help but flutter, and he can't help but have a thought in his heart - "After this governor is done, maybe he can go further?" ”

Just when Liu Cheng was secretly happy on the side, Ma Ziyi suddenly turned around and said respectfully: "Lord Liu, there is still one thing to ask for about this matter, please agree!" ”

"Old gentleman, please speak!"

"Please don't make a noise about the construction of the embankment."

"Why is that?"

"My lord doesn't know, your embankment involves many households' farmlands, if it leaks out in advance, I am afraid that many people will sit on the ground and raise the price, and it will be very troublesome to start construction at that time, so it is better to take advantage of the fact that everyone does not know, and the fields involved in these projects will be cleared, and it will not be too late to do it!"

"Feelings also had the problem of demolition in ancient times!" Liu Cheng couldn't help but break out in a layer of cold sweat on his forehead, and secretly congratulated himself that this old man Ma had thought it through, otherwise if the construction started like modern society and dragged on for another year and a half, wouldn't he be going to cry to death, and hurriedly thanked him: "Thank you Mr. for mentioning it, the last general will be tight-lipped!" ”

Standing at the window, Ma Ziyi looked at Liu Cheng's departing back, with an unfathomable smile on his face, Lu Boqi on the side looked at Ma Ziyi on the side with some curiosity, and said with a smile: "Mr. Ma, I thought you were going to quarrel with that Liu Dusi today, but I didn't want to talk about it so speculatively." ”

"Really?" Ma Ziyi sneered, returned to the table and sat down: "If the old man is not mistaken, the three thousand strong men of Yang Zhijun are the ones that Liu Dusi wrote a letter to." ”

"What!" Lu Boqi was taken aback by Ma Ziyi's words, and hurriedly asked, "How is this possible?" If we don't allow him to do his work, what will happen to him? ”

"Humph!" Lu Boqi sneered: "If it wasn't for the early plan, where did this Liu Dusi get such a detailed map?" It's not something that can be tossed in a few days. ”

"Yes, yes!" Lu Boqi nodded again and again, and then reacted again: "No, Mr. Ma, you know that this is all a trick he played, why do you still agree to him in everything?" ”

"Why shouldn't I?" Ma Ziyi sneered: "No matter what tricks he plays, it's always right to build embankments, it's done, my family's land has become a river beach for drought and flood protection, if things don't work out, naturally the court will find him trouble, why should I be this wicked person to stop him?" ”

"Wonderful, wonderful!" Lu Boqi thought about it, and the matter was as Ma Ziyi said, and he couldn't help but praise it repeatedly: "Then Liu Dusi thought that he was a monkey, but he didn't want to be a Buddha, old man!" ”

At this time, Ma Ziyi couldn't hold back the smugness in his heart anymore, and laughed proudly, he knocked on the table, and said to Lu Boqi: "Lord Zhizhou, I will give you another benefit today, isn't this year's summer grain very bad?" You take out 10,000 taels of silver to run some farms on both sides of the canal that will be dug up, and when the canal is completed, you will sell it again, and another 10,000 taels of silver will be in your pocket. “

Listening to Ma Ziyi's suggestion, Lu Boqi's eyes couldn't help but light up, and he smiled with his palms: "What Mr. Ma said is, why didn't I think of this stubble, I'll do it immediately." Speaking of this, Lu Boqi hurriedly arched his hand to Ma Ziyi, and pushed the door out.

Listening to the sound of Lu Boqi's hurried footsteps on the stairs outside the door, Ma Ziyi's face showed a disdainful smile, as an official of the imperial court and a parent of a state, he was confused by a little petty profit, he really read the sage book for so many years in vain, and the kung fu of cultivating qi and self-cultivation was thrown into the dog's stomach; As for that Liu Dusi, although he is a little clever, he has no foundation after all, and in the final analysis, this Ming Dynasty is still the world of our scholars.

"Your Excellency!" Liu Cheng came out of the Yuelou Building, and just walked to the corner of the roadside, so He greeted him and asked in a low voice, "Is it done?" ”

Liu Cheng showed a smug smile on his face: "Naturally, it has been done, such a beneficial thing, how can Ma Juren not agree?" “

"He actually agreed?" Yu He shook his head, his face full of disbelief: "You dug out dozens of dumps of ground from his mouth before, and made him vomit blood with anger, he actually agreed to cooperate with adults?" “

Liu Cheng sneered: "So what? Didn't I say that where the good is, the brothers can be divided, and the enemies can be reconciled. This time, as long as he cooperates with me, he can occupy the water on both sides of the newly built canal, and the first family in Yanzhou will be their Ma family for hundreds of years in the future, who can give him such a big benefit in this world? Don't say vomiting blood, even the revenge of killing your father can be erased! ”

Listening to Liu Cheng's words, why couldn't help but sigh, as Liu Cheng said, in ancient China, land was the foundation for a family to settle down, and the official would be exiled, and the business would lose money, but owning land was different, and there were tenant slaves for you to drive; With land, you can accumulate capital and do business; With land, you can support your children to study and become officials in the imperial examinations. Even if the doctor of this dynasty is an official and a first assistant, in addition to being loyal to the country, he must also take advantage of his position to spend some effort to run his own industry. But even Xu Jie, Xu Zisheng, a smart person like Xu Zisheng, who is a first-class among the courtiers of this court, has a rampant village of 240,000 mu of land, and he has made several cases of the Yushitai full of impeachment, forcing him to hemorrhage and pay 30,000 taels of gold to bribe the Yushi to get it, and he has also made a bad reputation. And Ma Ziyi's head, not to mention that there are more than 100,000 acres of drought and flood watered land in the account, and there is no need to worry about the impeachment of the royal historians, even if Ma Ziyi and his father did not get so many benefits for the family when they entered the cabinet, it is no wonder that he immediately left the old things a few months ago behind.

"My lord, I know you're calculating." Yu He sighed and asked, "But shouldn't you work hard to survive and let those gentlemen benefit in vain?" ”

"Of course not! Ma Ziyi: They regard the Feitian Mansion as a treasure, so let them be Tian Sheweng! As long as they pay for the land near the canal, they will definitely support me to finish the project, otherwise they will only buy a worthless slope. If I want food, they have to give food, and if I want money, they have to give money, and when I finish this project, these thousands of strong people will become one of my elite soldiers, and at that time, I want to see if they are blessed to enjoy these farms. “

Looking at the sneer on Liu Cheng's face, Yu He couldn't help but shudder, the man in front of him seemed to be a newborn tiger cub, showing his sharp claws for the first time. Since Zhu Hongwu expelled the Tartars and swept away the masses to establish the Ming Empire, peace has lasted for nearly three hundred years in this vast land, and some things seem to have existed since ancient times and cannot be changed in the minds of the vast majority of people, but in Liu Cheng's view, this is just a joke. Looking at the man in front of him, Yu He felt a little scared and a little excited.

The city of a thousand households.

Tang Muyao leaned against the corner of the wall, and his right hand pulled the hem of his shirt from time to time, and the reason he did it was very simple - there was a palm-sized hole in his pants, and if the shirt on his body could not maintain the maximum sagging length, a certain part of his ass would be exposed in plain sight, which was not something to be proud of for a nineteen-year-old young man. At this time, Tang Muyao was still in a vague stage between a teenager and an adult, and like most people who were still in this stage, he was extremely sensitive and self-respecting, obviously he was still a child, but he was afraid of being ridiculed by others, and he tried his best to prove that he was an adult everywhere.

As the third boy in the family, Tang Muyao was sent out at the age of eight to learn a trade that could support him, and the family's barren land could no longer fill his mouth, let alone let him marry a wife, have children, and start a family. The profession that his father chose for Tang Muyao was a blacksmith, which was a good choice for a child from a poor peasant family - as long as there was a bellows, a charcoal stove, a flat pole, a hammer, an iron clamp and an anvil, a skilled blacksmith could support himself, marry a wife and feed three or four children, and when he was old, he could still have some meat in the bowl, which was already the lifelong dream of most people at that time.

Like most apprentices, the first few years of his apprenticeship were marked by slaps and chestnuts from his master, but fortunately, he was gifted in iron blacksmithing, and he was allowed to use hammers and clamps when most of his apprentices were still only able to pull bellows and wield sledgehammers (normally, apprentices were tasked with wielding sledgehammers to hit where they were told to hit them with small hammers). It was as if the heavens had poured something special into his body, and with a simple tool such as a hammer, an anvil, a clamp, and a charcoal stove, he could make the hard steel like plasticine into all the shapes he wanted. In addition to the usual hoes, shovels, sickles and other farm tools, Tang Muyao can also make iron kettles, iron barkers, horse chews and many other more delicate and difficult things. The only thing that prevented him from becoming an independent blacksmith was the pact he made as an apprentice to work for him for free for three years, the last year of his unpaid labour.

Just as the promising young blacksmith was contemplating whether he should first ask Tofu Zhang's third daughter next door in a year or go to the town to open his own blacksmith shop first, a notice from the state government yamen disrupted everything. Several servants with chains and sticks came to the front of Master Tang Muyao's shop and asked them to immediately pack up their tools and stoves and go to the city of Qianhu in Juzhou to serve their labor. Despite Tang Muyao's master's pleas, the officials sealed the shop with seals and warned them that blacksmiths throughout the state had been requisitioned, and that if he did not report to the designated place within three days, he would be fed flies in a cage in front of the yamen.

Frustrated, the blacksmith had to pack his tools and rush to the reporting location with his best apprentices. On the way, Tang Muyao heard a lot of bad speculation from his master, and he thought that this was a sign that he was going to invade in a big way after the autumn - the purpose of the last time the government recruited blacksmiths on a large scale was to repair and make weapons. This is also the reason why his master did not abandon the shop and flee - if the captives invaded in large numbers, it would be safer to become a blacksmith in the army.

"Toji-sama has arrived!" With a loud voice, more than a hundred blacksmiths standing in the small school field hurriedly knelt down, Tang Muyao hurriedly knelt down, the young man didn't know how big an official Du Si was, so he secretly raised his head curiously and looked forward, only to see a tall man in a red robe surrounded by six or seven pro-soldiers on the school platform, his eyes were like electricity, Tang Muyao was afraid of being found peeking at, so he hurriedly lowered his head.