#218 - Spring Dragon Rebellion
The contents of the cloth bundle were indeed sent by Lu Jingyao.
More accurately, it should be said that they were sent jointly by Lu Jingyao and Qiu Yun.
A white cotton robe that looked very warm, and a letter.
Under normal circumstances, Qiu Yun would definitely have sewn the cotton robe, and Lu Jingyao would have written the letter.
But this time, it was the other way around.
Months had passed, and Lu Jingyao, who had been pampered since childhood, had finally learned how to sew clothes. Qiu Yun, who originally couldn't read, had also learned a few hundred characters, especially the three characters "Wei Changtian," which she wrote best.
【My lord, I hope this letter finds you well. I am in good health as always, please do not worry.】
Very formal, clearly the work of a good student taught by Lu Jingyao.
The letter was very short. Wei Changtian read it repeatedly several times, then held up the white robe and measured it against himself, a hint of wryness mixed with a smile appearing at the corners of his slightly twitching mouth.
This color really does resemble a shroud.
Apart from those like Yan Shuyuan, who considered themselves romantic figures who "held wine in their left hand and danced with a sword in their right," most martial artists rarely wore light-colored clothes.
Especially this kind of white robe, which easily attracted dust, was usually only worn by scholars and literati.
It seems she's still thinking about me abandoning martial arts and taking up literature.
Or rather, the people of this world don't need him to save them at all.
All he needs to do is save himself.
...
The bright moon hung high, and the evening breeze was still.
Unknowingly, Wei Changtian had been sitting in the chair for a long time, and most of the osmanthus cake in the food box beside him was gone.
In this last moment of tranquility before the storm, he suddenly breathed a sigh of relief, and his mood, from some point on, changed from a state of high suppression and tension to one of somewhat carefree abandon.
He had enjoyed the extravagant life of a "rich second generation" and "official second generation".
He had experienced all kinds of divine powers that he had only seen in online novels before.
He had even ridden a true courtesan whose beauty surpassed even those ancient costume internet celebrities with eighteenth-level beauty filters.
No matter what happens in the future, this journey through time has been worth it.
Like Lu Xun's enlightenment, using a pen as a knife, he wrote about his responsibility to the righteous path of the world.
Like an emperor's ambition, using a knife as a pen, he carved his surname on the jade seal of the empire.
Although Wei Changtian did not want to, and it would be very difficult to, change the name of this Great Ning Dynasty.
But since things had reached this point, then he would use the millions of long knives in his hands as blades, blood as ink, and the martial world as paper, to write his own story well.
A story of a transmigrator who was originally mediocre and worked 996 all day for a living, but was forced to set off a historical wave in this world.
"A hearty laugh in the vast sea, the tide surges on both shores~"
"Floating and sinking with the waves, only remember today~"
"Heaven laughs, the world's tides surge~"
"Who loses, who wins, heaven knows."
...
A somewhat out-of-tune song suddenly floated out of the house.
It floated past the hair of Yuan'er, who was dozing off outside the house, past the skirts of Xu Qingwan and the three women who were discussing in the side room how to share Wei Changtian's worries, past Li Suyue's slightly bulging belly and the happy smile on Zhang San's face, and past the cold light of the weapons hidden in the waists of the Common Welfare Society members guarding the entrance of Fulv Lane.
Finally, it floated past the silvery crescent moon that overlooked the mountains, rivers, and living beings of the world, carrying a hint of osmanthus fragrance and an unspeakable boldness, and floated towards the unknown distance.
February 10th, west of Shu Prefecture City, the Li Mansion.
Hundred Flowers Lane, which could accommodate three carriages side by side, was already considered a wide lane, but at this time the lane was empty. Apart from a white-robed man walking casually, there was not a single person to be seen.
Although there was no one in the lane, behind the vermilion gate of the Li Mansion, a large group of servants holding various weapons were densely hidden.
"L-Lord"
A man swallowed tremblingly, trying to lower his voice as much as possible to report to the man beside him: "T-The person who came is indeed Wei Changtian."
"What are you panicking about?!"
The man let out a low shout, but his pale face clearly showed his current state—outwardly stern but inwardly weak.
"Did he come alone?!"
"Y-Yes"
The man holding the knife pushed through the crowd and glanced out through the crack in the door, quickly answering truthfully: "This humble one only saw him alone."
"One person"
The man seemed to breathe a sigh of relief secretly, but he still did not dare to slack off and asked in a deep voice: "How is the matter I just told you to handle?"
"The madam and the young masters have already escaped through the tunnel."
The big man wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and hurriedly advised: "Lord, let's hurry too."
"Dong, dong, dong!"
The sound of a copper ring knocking on the door was close at hand, not loud, but it scared the man into shutting his mouth immediately.
"O-Our mansion is not receiving guests today!"
Under the man's signal, a doorman trembled as he shouted at the door:
"P-Please, honored guest, return first, and c-come again another day!"
...
The stuttering shout was a bit amusing, but no one could laugh at the moment.
Nearly a hundred strong men holding weapons held their breath, waited for a while, and then heard a somewhat lazy voice.
"Lord Li, have your wife and children gone missing?"
"I am Wei Changtian, and I happened to find them. I am here to return them to you."
"Oh, I also want to ask Lord Li by the way."
"Are you all...wanting to live or wanting to die?"
...
"O-Open the door! Open the door quickly!!"
...
An hour later.
Wei Changtian walked out of the Li Mansion with a calm expression, his white robe still spotless.
Zhang San, who was guarding the door, immediately greeted him, opened a small booklet, and circled "Treasure Pavilion, Li Dong" after it.
"My lord, next is the Prefect of Shu Prefecture, Lord Feng Wenshan Feng."
"Mm."
Wei Changtian nodded, stepped onto the carriage, and casually instructed as if he was going to do something very ordinary:
"Let's go."
At the same time that Wei Changtian left the Li Mansion, in the capital city tens of thousands of miles away, Cen Peishan, the Minister of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices and an important figure in the Liu faction, was murdered by his subordinates and died tragically in the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, becoming the first, but certainly not the last, high-ranking official above the third rank to die an unnatural death this year.
That night, the Ministry of Justice and the Censorate led people into the Hanging Mirror Division and forcibly took away two Deputy Commissioners, equivalent to second-in-command, and three Garrison Commanders of the fourth rank.
The Hanging Mirror Division did not violently resist the law, but less than a quarter of an hour later, the Demon Suppression Prison, which held hundreds of demon beasts, suddenly had its gates opened, and all the demon beasts escaped. The entire capital city did not sleep that night.
February 11th.
At the early morning court, Wei Xianzhi angrily denounced that there were demon spies in the Ministry of Justice, who not only arrested people for no reason, but also took advantage of the chaos to secretly release the imprisoned demon beasts, completely shirking the responsibility for this major accident.
The court was immediately in chaos, but then the words of Cai Sheng, the Left Vice Minister of the Ministry of Revenue, made the already chaotic situation even worse.
"Your Majesty! The Xu family is rebelling!"
...
That afternoon, the Flower Plume Guards, which had been incorporated into the Censorate, rushed into the Xu family's mansion, but the huge mansion, which was still bustling with people in the morning, was empty and deserted at some point.
At the same time, all of the Xu family's properties in the capital city closed their doors to guests, and half of the shops on the street were closed for a while, and prices in the city rose by 30% in one day.
February 12th.
At dawn, a freshly baked imperial edict was posted on the streets, confirming the Xu family's crime of treason. The charges were nearly a hundred pages long, covering an entire bulletin board.
In one day, more than a dozen high and low-ranking officials in the capital were stripped of their official hats, and some even lost their heads on the spot.
But more Xu faction officials had long since disappeared.
For the next five days.
The flames of the Liu-Wei dispute had spread from the capital to all parts of the Great Ning Dynasty, and all prefectures and counties also began to purge the Xu family's partisans.
Only Jizhou, the Xu family's base camp, and Shuzhou, far away in the southwest border, remained unmoved.
February 19th.
At noon, more than ten thousand Imperial Guards surged out of the palace and went straight to Jizhou.
At Hai hour, nearly a thousand black-clothed men who appeared out of nowhere broke into the palace. The sounds of fighting did not stop all night, and the bloody smell spread for ten miles.
February 20th.
The early morning court, which was originally scheduled to begin at the fifth watch, was delayed by an hour. It was not until the Chen hour that Ning Yongnian slowly appeared.
Although there was no abnormality on the surface, the pale face of the current emperor showed how serious the assassination last night was.
Open rebellion, assassination of the emperor.
This kind of thing had not happened on the land of the Great Ning Dynasty for nearly a thousand years.
Once the news spread, the world was shaken and people were panicked.
February 21st.
Eight prohibitions flew out of the palace and were sent to the other thirty-five prefectures except Jizhou on the same day.
1. All large cities with more than 100,000 households will implement a curfew from today.
2. All non-border troops will prepare military supplies and be ready to accept dispatch at any time.
3. All Xu family properties will be forcibly confiscated by the royal family. Those who do not comply will be regarded as treason and will be punished with nine generations of relatives.
4. The rights to recommend, appoint, remove, promote, and transfer all officials above the seventh rank will be concentrated in the Ministry of Personnel, and the personnel dispatch authority of local prefectures and counties will be temporarily revoked.
8. All members of the Xu family in the capital, regardless of collateral or direct lineage, will be executed if they can be verified by the genealogy.
There is no doubt that Ning Yongnian wanted to exterminate the Xu family's lineage.
Since then, the Great Ning Dynasty, which had been peaceful for hundreds of years, finally fell into great chaos in the early spring of the fifteenth year of Tianji.
Later historians traced the source of this great chaos to the Spring Dragon Poetry Conference, so they named this chaos—
The Spring Dragon Rebellion.
