"Second brother, where's that guy in your family?" In the countryside of Ningbo Prefecture, two peasants were chatting, and one of them seemed to suddenly remember something and said:

"I haven't seen him in the fields for a few days."

"I didn't have a steward to pick someone before, but I saw that my family was clever and picked up."

The other old farmer had a slight smug smile on his face.

"Strange, I remember that your family didn't join the clan soldiers, how could you be called?"

"Well, how do we know about the things on the head of the family...... Anyway, three taels of silver a month, which is much more profitable than shaving food in the field, and in a few years, you can build a new house! If Sansheng is fortunate enough to give Yue Guogong and his old man a fancy to him, it will be even more prosperous......" The old farmer's face was full of longing.

The farmer who spoke first had a look of envy on his face, and when he saw the smug look of his old friend, he couldn't help poking him with his elbow, and said sourly:

"Blind, Yue Guogong is only in his thirties, what an old man."

"Oh yes, yes, look at my memory, the old prince has died last month, and now he is succeeded by his grandson, the grandfather of the small country."

"If you want to say that the grandfather of the small country and his father are really pitiful, if he stays up for a few more months, maybe this position should belong to him, what is the result? The old man went one step ahead, and he didn't sit in this position until he died......"

"It's a pity, it's a pity......"

Just after the turmoil in the Chen Guogong Mansion came to an end, Nanjing received news from the north, asking the Yue Guogong Mansion to select hundreds of young and strong people from their hometown in Ningbo for backup.

At this time, Yan Ya and his son had passed away one after another, and the current Duke of Yue Guo was Yan Ling's great-grandson.

He naturally knew that Yan Ling existed, after all, he was the ruler of the main family in the south.

However, compared with Yan Yundeng in the north, he is not so unruly, after all, Nanjing is originally a place to "retire", and he does not have so much competitiveness.

He unconditionally carried out the demands of the Chen Guogong Mansion in Beijing.

As a result, about 400 young people in Ningbo Mansion were selected and summoned to a secret place in the family.

After a year-long training, they were sent to various provinces and cities in the Ming Dynasty to act as eyes and ears - of course, due to the limitation of numbers, they are now mainly confined to Beizhili.

Yan Ling personally named them as "Hidden Dragon", and he let his maid Qian'er serve as the leader of this hidden dragon, and after all the news was sorted out by her, she sent the important ones to him.

Qian'er is the most reassuring, because she has nothing, only him can be relied on, and after so many years of getting along day and night, she has long been convinced of Yan Ling's immortal identity, this is one of the few people around Yan Ling who can gain his unconditional trust.

In recent years, he has been bored in the yard, and he often chats with his maid, so that she is no stranger to some affairs, although she has no relevant experience, but she can barely get started, and at the beginning, she will also intervene in it to cultivate her relevant abilities.

For this appointment, Qian'er was even more moved to tears, and vowed to shed her last drop of blood for him.

This intelligence agency is very immature, which is also inevitable, but it is still a long time, and Yan Ling can afford to wait. He knows that it won't take ten years, and when the older generation of young people mature, the "Hidden Dragon" shelf will be completely erected, and when the old man leads the newcomer, everything will go a lot smoother.

As for how to unfold it, it's too simple. Over the years, the Yan family has been sending storytellers and opening bookstores, not just to make money.

Now, it's time to use them.

Every teahouse, every bookstore, can be used to hide intelligence agents.

A prefecture is a "domain", and the county under the jurisdiction of the prefecture is a "point".

A huge intelligence network, relying on teahouses and bookstores, slowly unfolded in the north of the Ming Dynasty.

Not only that, Yan Ling also made full use of the effect of dreaming, and he used the dream once a year to start haunting the dreams of the Yan family's high-level leaders.

Whatever dreams of being punished by the ancestors, constructing a cruel future as a warning, etc., it was all left over from his play.

This also made him even more mysterious in the hearts of the Yan family, and they were in awe of an ancestor from the bottom of their hearts.

In addition to this, he also began to educate himself.

The youngest son of each generation of Yue Guogong will be sent to Chen Guogong's mansion to receive his teachings until he reaches adulthood, and then return to the south, not to mention Chen Guogong's heir, Yan Ling intends to take each generation with him and cultivate it personally.

This also has other advantages, that is, the two nobles in the north and the south, who have been somewhat estranged, are connected together again and strengthen their feelings.

The Yan family was turned upside down, but in the eyes of outsiders, nothing actually happened.

At most, Chen Guogong, who was originally very arrogant, became low-key inexplicably, but everyone was relieved when they thought about it after all, he was severely reprimanded by the emperor.

Above the court, if one goes down, someone must come up.

Chen Guogong fell silent, but the political resources and contacts accumulated by Yan Keng did not disappear.

They were transferred to another Yan clan member in the court, Yan Jingxiu.

As an ordinary farmer's child of the Yan family in Ningbo Prefecture, being able to step by step to enter the cabinet has proved his talent.

Originally, there was no such person in history, most likely because the Yan family did not have a family study at that time, and it was not until Yan Ling vigorously established a family study that he had a chance to get ahead.

This also makes him extremely grateful to his family.

Yan Ling inspected it and nodded, confirming that this was a trustworthy person.

He ordered someone to bring Yan Jingxiu to the Chen Guogong Mansion.

And Yan Jingxiu was naturally shocked when he learned of his existence, he never dreamed that the legends of the immortals in the market were true, and he never imagined that there would be such a great god in the family.

Naturally, he recognized this ancestor.

When he came out of the mansion, he only felt that his waist was much straighter, after all, there was such a cowhide figure standing behind him!

This time, the turmoil came to an end.

As for the Chenghua Emperor Zhu Jianshen, he didn't know about the Yan family's series of actions in secret, and now is not the era when intelligence officers were pervasive during the Hongwu period, and the power of Dongchang and Jinyiwei was greatly restricted.

He only knew that Chen Guogong, after being reprimanded by himself, was much more settled, no longer swaggering on the street as before, bullying men and women, but according to legal means, he married more than a dozen concubines.

It's good to marry a wife, it's good to marry a wife. As an emperor, I really wish that those heroes and nobles with great influence would indulge in these things later.

So soon, Yan Yundeng's name disappeared from the sight of Emperor Chenghua.

(End of chapter)