novelraw Chapter 218
Chapter 218
Chapter 218: Third Prince’s Cunning Move
After walking away, Wei Yu immediately called Fang Sheng to summon Yi Shisan.
At that time, Yi Shisan was still hunting up on the mountain, and by the time Wei Yu found him, it had already been half an hour.
As soon as Yi Shisan arrived, Wei Yu assigned him a task.
“You head out first to Qianping City, gather some information about the Prefect while you’re there. If you find anything unusual, just take note of it and wait for me to arrive before doing anything else.”
Going out on an adventure again, Yi Shisan was very excited.
Without hesitation, the kid accepted the order, packed his belongings, and set off toward Qianping City with his traveling companions.
As for Wei Yu, knowing the reason behind the corpses strewn across the wilderness, he didn’t linger any longer. Instead, he immediately led his team, picking up people along the way, heading toward the nearby county city.
Being new here, how could he trust hearsay from others without verifying it himself?
Wei Yu wanted to see how the grain prices in Qian City Commandery had actually changed. Because of some unexpected situations in Qian City Commandery, Wei Yu had originally planned to tell his Third Brother about the Merit Stele, but with all the busyness, that was put on hold.
While he was running around all over Qian City Commandery, the Third Prince was truly enjoying the experience of wealth coming to him unsolicited.
Because everyone who had heard about the Merit Stele and had a bit of surplus money at home basically wouldn’t miss the chance to be respected by future generations.
Though clear-eyed people knew that the Merit Stele was essentially a fundraising effort, it was still a monument established under the name of the Imperial Court!
Even erecting a stele within one’s own clan, only for clan descendants to pay respects, was a rare opportunity—let alone one that everyone in the public could see.
Isn’t it just a donation?
Donate!
Even if they had to scrape to gather, they would pool the entire clan’s strength to come up with an impressive amount!
There were so many donors.
In theory, given how proactively this group donated, even if the Imperial Court didn’t allocate funds, the donations alone could support the construction of an entire commandery.
But the Third Prince had his own ideas.
As someone who often thought deeply and was extremely clever and logical, the Third Prince, inspired by Wei Yu’s idea, instinctively implement a cunning strategy.
—To get more people to donate and to have those who already donated give even more, the Third Prince posted public notices in the city listing donors’ names and their donated goods!
If Wei Yu knew about this, he could only exclaim “Good heavens!”
Previously, everyone only knew that the bigger the donation, the bigger and more prominent the name’s engraving on the Merit Stele was, but nobody knew about publicly disclosing the donation details externally.
Normally, all donors gave generously to the Imperial Court—with most donating about a quarter to a third of their family’s wealth.
Without public disclosure, everyone could easily feel secure, just waiting for the Imperial Court to erect the stele and engrave names.
But this governer didn’t follow the usual practice!
He actually published all the donation information openly!
People thought their names would surely appear in the front rows, but when they saw the list?
Good grief! There was someone named Wang Jiu, a sycophant, who donated 10,000 jin of grain plus 100,000 taels?!
They didn’t even blink at the 10,000 jin of grain.
Heavens, 100,000 taels!!!
Everyone else just put in a few thousand taels or a few thousand jin of grain—why did this Wang Jiu donate so much?
If you donate so much and have your name at the front, how would the others who only gave a few thousand or a few hundred taels feel?
The entire city’s population was watching, and so was the Prefect—weren’t they too shameless?!
Huh???
Not only were donors shocked to see a reckless person named Wang Jiu show up and embarrass them, forcing them to grit their teeth and donate more—Wang Jiu himself probably never expected to get so much blame.
As everyone knows, who is Wang Jiu?
That was Wei Yu’s alias when roaming the world.
The grain Wei Yu had pocketed from Innkeeper Shen was half for himself and half sent in Innkeeper Shen’s name to his Third Brother.
And when the Third Prince found out that his Ninth Brother also had the alias Wang Jiu, he immediately decided to exploit that.
First, Shen Dashan’s name was written on the donation list, but buried among many donors his name was not eye-catching at all.
Second, if the Third Prince wanted people to donate more money, he had to set a good example.
This name had to be engraved on the Merit Stele, so randomly making one up wouldn’t do—but Wei Yu already had an alias!
Such a good opportunity not leveraging would be a pity.
So the Third Prince set up the name.
10,000 jin of grain was easy to explain—that was for the Imperial Court’s disaster relief team to use; the 100,000 taels could be easily taken from the Imperial Court’s funds.
Since the money was all for disaster relief, just with a different label, in the end, the funds would be used to help disaster victims, and moving the money around could yield even more—just shifting from left hand to right hand!
So because of the Third Prince’s idea, Wei Yu unknowingly took the blame for a huge pot!
The donors all collectively cursed Wang Jiu, while those who didn’t donate were even worse.
Those who wanted to but couldn’t, for various reasons, saw the donation information disclosed and realized:
Hey!
Someone donated just 100 taels!
People actually donated even that little, and that was enough to get their names engraved on the stele—if they donated 100 taels, wouldn’t that work too?
What had seemed like a grand affair requiring thousands or tens of thousands of taels turned out to be so simple—anyone with some spare money could scrape it together if they bit their teeth a little!
Who could resist such a strong temptation?
Thus, after the donations were publicly announced, the Third Prince once again saw a wave of donations from the masses.
The enthusiasm for donating contrasted with how desolate the gathering of medics on the other side was.
Though Tan Lin had mentally prepared himself, knowing that not many medics would come to help, he didn’t expect there to be only two people!
Moreover, it was an Old Yi and his medicine boy.
The white-haired Old Yi looked even more frail than the Left Court Judge; what use could he be after arriving?
Like the Left Court Judge?
After working hard for two days, completely exhausted, bedridden, needing feeding for every meal?
Nothing but trouble!
Tan Lin thought bitterly, but didn’t say it aloud.
Unfortunately, the sharp-eyed Old Yi instantly saw through Tan Lin’s little thought.