Since the Accounting: A Chronicle of the Roman Khanate

Chapter 697 The Plague War Begins

Guo Kang came to the main road in front of the government office and found many new faces. After asking, he learned that another group of supporters had arrived in Cairo and had started to take over the work.

At the square at the intersection, I saw a group of people lining up from a distance. When I got closer, I found that they were old acquaintances. The leaders were the brothers Yelu Daozhong and Yelu Daofu, with their followers. But next to them, there was also a girl with yellow hair wearing a Central Plains-style robe.

Guo Kang walked up to them and greeted them, then glanced at her curiously.

"Oh, this is my lover, her name is Xiao Mali." Seeing this, Yelu Daofu took the initiative to introduce her.

"Ah?" Guo Kang was stunned for a moment, but quickly reacted: "Oh, I see. Your last name is Yelu, so your lover doesn't care what his last name is, just call him Xiao, right..."

"Our last name is Liu." The Yelu brothers corrected him immediately: "Yelu is not a proper Chinese last name. People are deliberately using it to insult us. Although we have gotten used to it over time, since we speak Chinese, we should still call ourselves by our Chinese names."

"Is that so..." Guo Kang had no choice but to agree, but he still couldn't help asking, "I know this is an old rule, but don't you think it's strange? Why should the woman's surname be Xiao instead of Lu?"

The two looked at each other, as if they had never thought about this question.

"It may be that the Xiao family was of great help to the Han Dynasty, while the Lu family, on the contrary, became a disaster for the Han Dynasty." Yelu Daozhong thought for a while and explained.

"Yes, our surname is derived from our admiration for the Han people. In this case, of course we should take the Han people themselves as the standard." Yelu Daofu also said: "Other things are secondary issues."

Guo Kang and Zhu Wenkui looked at each other, still a little confused, but they didn't know what to say. They exchanged a few more pleasantries and left, while the Yelu brothers continued to lecture their men. But soon, they also finished their speeches, saluted the crowd with their hands, and shouted: "Revitalize Han!" as a conclusion.

"Xing! Han!" A group of followers responded one after another, and then followed the two of them to go to work.

"These two people..." Zhu Wenkui said speechlessly: "They are using the Roman ritual, but why are they still calling Xinghan..."

"It doesn't matter. As long as we can express their meaning, it's fine." Guo Kang said tactfully, "Anyway, the current Roman etiquette is not necessarily the standard etiquette of ancient Rome. This set of things is actually a 'retro' etiquette system that we created after reviving Rome, referring to ancient statues and making some changes..."

"Oh, I see. It's probably similar to the topic of 'the system of the three ancient dynasties' that Confucian scholars talk about today." Zhu Wenkui understood it immediately: "But there is really no problem. Everyone says so anyway."

Guo Kang nodded.

The two continued to move forward and saw Meltem coming out of the government office with two large carts. When he saw Guo Kang, he stretched out his hand to greet him. Guo Kang was very curious and took the initiative to ask, "What are you transporting?"

"The things we dug up in the past two weeks," Meltem told him, "were transported to Nafisa and hidden there before. Now that she's not here, we had no choice but to find Taiji and persuade him to have the newly dug antiques temporarily stored in the backyard of the government office. Now that the contact person has arrived, we can transport them away one by one."

"The government office can even store things?" Zhu Wenkui was shocked: "How much benefit have you given..."

"They said they could help find a suitable trade transit point in the East," Meltem said. "In the Persian region, their sect still has some influence."

"That's worth it. Egypt's biggest source of income is the route to the east." Guo Kang agreed, "But what about the previous ones?"

"Those before were actually quite safe, and we slowly moved away." Meltem answered, "Originally, the elders in the city searched many places but couldn't find her. Some people saw that she hadn't been visiting us for a long time, and she didn't care much about the differences between sects, and had a lot of contact with us, so they suspected that she was helping to hide it. Some people wanted to find an opportunity to go to her house and check it out. She had mentioned this concern to us before."

"Ah? Then why do you say it's safe?" Guo Kang asked in surprise. "Because the Romans really took her away." Meltem said truthfully:
"According to them, it was your Russian soldiers who went to the home of a poor priest over there and deliberately provoked him to bring out the wine. The believers were very angry and had a fight with the Russian soldiers. Afterwards, Nafisa upheld justice and was not afraid of danger. She went to the government office to appeal on behalf of everyone, but she was arrested as well."

"After that, the elders all felt that they had wronged her. After all, she really sacrificed herself to protect the dignity of the sect and the interests of the believers. Now she is in jail, and her home has been sealed off by the legionnaires. Even several hard-line conservative elders who had a bad relationship with her before and suspected her of colluding with heresy feel deeply guilty and are now looking for connections to rescue her. Therefore, no one dares to mention checking her home anymore."

"Okay..." Guo Kang always felt that there were so many speechless things today, and he didn't know what to say for a moment.

"What's going on with you?" Meltem seemed curious about him. "Everyone says you care a lot about rules and order, even to the point of being stubborn. The hard-line priests never thought you would really enforce such strict rules. Do you really want to ban even brothels in the future?"

"I don't really care about this." Guo Kang explained: "Think about it, if we go to a place like that, wouldn't that just mean we're asking for trouble? So, I didn't want to cause trouble."

"Before, Tuohuan asked me how we should explain to everyone and what to do in the future. I also think that there is no need to do anything more. We can just explain our actions according to traditional moral teachings and doctrines. If there are places where the resurgence of evil is going on or places that cannot be cleaned up, we don't actually need to care about them."

"It seems that you are indeed a lot gentler than they thought." Zhu Wenkui nodded.

"It's important for people to have self-awareness. What we can do is often very limited." Guo Kang emphasized: "We should do our best, within a reasonable range, to ban places that violate the law and morality and restore order. That's enough."

"I know that in places like brothels, some people are forced to participate, but there must be many people who take the initiative to do this kind of work in order to more easily obtain benefits or even pleasure. For the former, we can increase their chances of escape through strict management and regular crackdowns. As for the latter, I think they are probably hopeless."

"I'm not a prophet or saint like Brother Tian. I don't know how to educate such a person." He shrugged: "But anyway, the plague will come soon. By then, such a chaotic place will definitely have problems even if we are preventing and controlling it. There is no need for us to clean it up."

"We certainly can't take care of everything, but the Pale Knight will take care of the hard-to-manage areas for us; the Black Death will kill the people we can't kill. In this case, there's no need to waste so much energy and dirty our hands. Anyway, the Black Death has a high mortality rate, so it would be best if we can kill as many as possible."

"Do you think this is gentle?" Meltem thought for a moment and asked Zhu Wenkui.

"Yes. What else?" Zhu Wenkui asked curiously, "Would it be ungentle to kill all nine of their clans?"

"Uh……"

Meltem hesitated for a moment, but in the end he couldn't find a suitable answer.

"I'm not good at speaking, and I don't know how to express myself well." She sighed, "But I heard that Elder Nasreddin will be here soon, and then there will be a lot of meetings in the university. These rules, moral teachings and other things, let's listen to them."

Having said that, she jumped back into the car and prepared to leave. But at this moment, Tuohuan came out from the government office with two followers.

They were about to mount their horses, but when they saw Guo Kang was there, they immediately waved to him. Guo Kang hurried over, but before he could speak, Tuohuan spoke first: "Big things are coming. The Sheikh has assembled a large number of Berber and Arab tribal troops in Upper Egypt. He also brought a group of mercenaries from Persia and the Caucasus via the Red Sea."

"Isn't this what we hoped for?" Guo Kang and Zhu Wenkui didn't find it surprising. "We have prepared a response plan. We can still defeat him this time and eliminate those unstable forces at the same time."

"No. The people he gathered are too many and too diverse." Tuo Huan shook his head: "I don't know which mercenary group brought the Black Death. It started to spread after landing. Now their base has exploded, and the plague has spread from the port to the inland."

"You are too impatient. This is the big thing I want to talk about." He took a breath: "The good news is that the Sheikh's army has currently lost its offensive capability, and the front line may be able to breathe a sigh of relief. The bad news is that we have to prepare for another war."

(End of this chapter)