Wandering the Heavens

"Uncle, can our manor afford to support so many people?" Little Sniffle felt a headache when he looked at the thick list on Yu Xian's desk.

"Don't worry, eunuch. It will be a bit difficult in the first few years, but everything will be fine once they grow up." Yu Xian quickly put down the booklet and comforted the old eunuch.

At his age, the little brat is already eating his father out of money, not to mention setting the food standard so high. Yu Xian naturally knew the difficulty of it, but he didn't want to bring it up with Xiao Bisi.

In fact, this difficulty is not a difficulty at all. In recent years, he has been doing business with Zhu Di and has made a lot of private money by participating in Zheng He's voyages. Now Zheng He is no longer sailing to the West, but the business channels in the Ming Dynasty have been retained, and the annual income is enough to make people jealous. The difficulty is how to launder the money.

As an earl, his salary and estate income were just so much, but he raised thousands of children. Where did he get the money? Although it was standard for nobles to have side jobs, such as encroaching on land and occupying land, monopolizing lawsuits, harming the people, bullying the market, enriching oneself at the expense of the public, using public tools for personal gain, etc., Yu Xian did not do any of these rotten things.

The only one who does business directly is Yu Xian. In the past, he had Zhu Di's protection, but now he is alone. He has no partners in interest and lives in fear.

Yu Xian never thought that one day he would be troubled by having too much money to spend. Before Zhu Di passed away, he had been alert to Yang Rong and others, so he concealed the business with Yu Xian and used it as military pay for Beidou Guard. As an army living in the dark, it is impossible to put such a thing as military pay in the open.

In order to launder money, Yu Xian had to openly run a profitable business.

The three skills of the time traveler are pure glass, crude salt purification and cement burning. Yu Xian can only do pure glass business now. First, the raw materials are cheap. As long as you keep the formula well, how much money you can make depends on your conscience. Second, the products are diversified, corresponding to various application scenarios, and the market is broad. Third, salt and cement burning are businesses related to the national economy and people's livelihood. It is easy to step on the line and fall into it. There are also people and officials who form interest groups, and finally they will die.

As for why he didn't bring Zhu Gaochi along, that guy was too soft-hearted. He had been regent for many years and knew very well how poor the country's finances were. If he gave him a way to make money, he could just throw it to the Ministry of Revenue. The Ministry of Revenue would then know how much money he had earned after another calculation. And then after another calculation... By then, not to mention that the censors would impeach him for competing with the people for profits, even his biggest trump card, the Beidou Guard, would be exposed.

Zhu Zhanji, this guy thinks highly of himself and looks down on himself. Yu Xian has no plan to look for him. In short, before October of the 14th year of Zhengtong, he can only make a fortune and live in silence.

I have to pretend to be a grandson...

On the first day of the first lunar month of the first year of Hongxi, the entire empire changed its reign title, and the national politics also tended to be decentralized and relaxed from the highly centralized and high-intensity operation of the Yongle era. This was closely related to Zhu Gaochi's physical condition and the difficulties in people's livelihood caused by the concentrated implementation of various major national projects during the Yongle period.

That is to say, the foundation laid by Zhu Yuanzhang was very good, which is also related to the current highly centralized monarchy. The previous person was ambitious and even lazy in naming his reign title and directly called it Daye. After a lot of trouble, he died and his country was destroyed. But in summary, his crimes were that he went to Liaodong to fight three times, expanded and repaired a river, and took people everywhere.

As for the sex bed, that kind of thing is just for fun. For men, half-heartedness is always the most exciting...

Zhu Di's approach was even more extreme than this one, including five expeditions to the northern desert, building a new capital, repairing the canal, revising the ceremonies, and a bunch of face-saving projects, etc. But the country did not perish in the end, and the reason was that he had a good son.

No matter how good a son is, or how rich a country's blood is, it cannot withstand such trouble from him. Military households often escape and peasants rebel in various places. Fortunately, they are small in scale and have little impact, so they are nothing new.

The most embarrassing thing was that in the year when the capital was moved to Beiping, a woman named Tang Sai'er from Shandong rebelled. The East Factory and the Embroidered Uniform Guard have not yet figured out the identity of this person, and in the end they could only speculate that she was a member of the White Lotus Sect based on some clues.

Under such circumstances, the country's development has actually reached a bottleneck. If it cannot find a new breakthrough, it will only decline little by little until it collapses and perishes.

At this time, various pure glassware and glass crafts for special scenes appeared in the market of North and South Zhili, and then slowly flowed to various prefectures. The price of the utensils was comparable to that of porcelain, and soon entered the homes of ordinary people. In contrast, the price of crafts was not only expensive, but also customized, and the price was ridiculously expensive. For example, the price of a craft with a longevity character that glows at night can be sky-high, but many wealthy people still paid to register for it.

This kind of thing certainly attracted Zhu Gaochi's attention, because many nobles saw that the glass business was so good to do and wanted to get involved, but the other party was very careful in doing things, and with their connections, they couldn't find out who the boss was. So they instructed Zhu Gaochi's brother-in-law to find his brother-in-law and find a way to do something bad.

Zhu Gaochi asked the East Factory to investigate and found out that it was Yu Xian who had created this business. He had adopted a lot of soldiers' orphans and needed a lot of money.

Is there any ulterior motive behind raising so many children?

Don't be ridiculous. In the first lesson, someone who teaches children to know the territory of the Ming Dynasty and the deeds of Emperor Taizu Gao in resisting the Yuan Dynasty would have a different mind? Someone who teaches children to learn to write their own names first, and then "be loyal to the emperor and the Ming Dynasty" would have a different mind?

His own father was suspicious all the time and didn't even trust himself, the crown prince, but he could trust Xuanwu Bo without reservation. He was just too bored to doubt him, but he still summoned Yu Xian to the palace for questioning as a matter of routine and let it go.

Zhu Gaochi was an honest man. The next day, he issued an imperial decree to praise Yu Xian for adopting the orphans of Ming soldiers and asking teachers to teach them to read and write and cultivate them into talents. He also rewarded him with a lot of cloth and food, saying it was a little gift for the children.

With Zhu Gaochi's endorsement, the nobles who were still hesitating whether to forcefully seize the throne completely stopped thinking. At this time, the Ming Dynasty had only been established for more than 50 years, and the nobles' original blood and blood had almost dissipated. In addition, they were in an awkward situation, so they acted in a way that bullied the weak and feared the strong.

The nobles of the Ming Dynasty were either descendants of the Huaixi loyalists or military commanders who followed Zhu Di in the Second Revolution. Yu Xian was the only special one. He was from the Jinyiwei. Although he only handled one case, hundreds of rebels died in his hands. He even killed people in the Qinhuai River. Tingyuxuan has become a famous haunted house in Nanjing.

When everyone thought that he would continue to be a sharp blade in the hands of the late emperor, he disappeared from the court and appeared again in the distant northern desert. He first led the army as a vanguard to the battlefield of the decisive battle, then rushed into the Wala army on horseback and killed several rounds, making great contributions to the victory of the entire battle. However, he was missing from the list of rewards after the triumph.

At that time, this man was leading his troops to burn, kill and plunder everywhere on the grassland, making the Mongolian tribes suffer terribly. Some officials from Shanxi even wrote to the emperor saying that this action was against the harmony of heaven and asked the late emperor to recall him and punish him. All these memorials were kept without exception. When he appeared in everyone's sight again, he had been conferred the title of Xuanwu Earl by the late emperor, but he did not even attend the grand court meeting and stayed in his own manor to farm...

Given this man's ignoble background and his ability to march and fight, the nobles really didn't dare to make things difficult for him, even if he didn't want to play with them.