Chapter Sixty-Nine: A Hidden Move Set in Place

Even so, Wang An only shook his head. He knew it was a dream, something impossible.

Across such a vast realm, how many could truly study on their own and reach that state?

The Confucian teaching of this world did not abandon cultivation; it simply required comprehension of the Way and not the practice of techniques. Once they became officials, with the authority of the imperial law upon them, they could naturally cast spells without needing to learn them.

Yet office was not so easy to obtain. Even with the imperial mandate’s blessing, one still needed an inner foundation of one’s own, sufficient to stir that authority and unleash the art.

And the boundary of that inner refinement lay in soul tempering.

To study and gain insight in the Confucian path was, in effect, to comprehend the Way and lay the foundation for inner cultivation.

Once appointed to office, one could wield spells.

By contrast, a man who had never studied, who had never touched Confucian learning at all, would be unable to cast any art even if he became an official.

What was called studying until enlightenment, until principle soaked into flesh and blood, could truly be called entering the Way through books.

Such a person would, in time, have a brilliant future. At the very least, he would become a great scholar, if not a sage.

No official would dare fail to recommend him as a man of filial conduct and integrity.

But how difficult that was.

Not to mention a minor county clan like the Wang family of Danning, which had no scholarly tradition at all; even among famed noble houses, how many such talents could emerge in each generation?

The speaker had not meant it deeply, but the listener took it to heart.

“Studying to the point of enlightenment, holy light arising, comprehension of principle... What is hard for others may mean little to me. Perhaps this is a fine move indeed!”

But should he take that step or not?

For now, he would set it aside.

Once that step was taken, everything would become uncontrollable.

Still, if he did this, he would have to delay his breakthrough to the Soul-Departure stage.

More than a month later, the autumn harvest had finished, and the season of agricultural slack had begun.

Wang Zhenling led three hundred sturdy young men, marching within the column.

This was the force dispatched by Danning County, more than three thousand strong, surging along the main road in a mighty stream.

They were heading to Xiaji County, where they would join the troops sent by the surrounding counties and the commandery soldiers, then all march together into the Wuji Mountains to wipe out the bandits of Mist Valley.

Each year after the harvest, it was the season for guarding against bandits and driving out ghosts. Large numbers of men and troops were already being drawn away for training and preparation, to defend against thieves and ghost tides.

Now the prefect of Xiami Commandery issued a direct order for the counties to levy troops and form an army to descend into the Wuji Mountains, killing those cultivators and ghost-creatures.

In the Great Cheng Dynasty, officials wielded enormous authority, and local magistrates all possessed the power to command troops.

At the prefect’s command, the counties swiftly drafted sturdy young men for anti-bandit duty.

Just one Danning County had already assembled three thousand soldiers. By the end, the combined forces of all the counties would exceed twenty thousand.

Chen Bushi, as promised, kept his word. Although Wang Zhenling had resigned his office, he was still summoned for this military campaign, placed in command of two hundred county soldiers, and given the temporary post of acting cavalry captain, allowing him to take part in the operation. It was also an opportunity for him to earn merit.

Though Magistrate Wang Guang had agreed to recommend Wang Zhenling as a man of filial conduct and integrity, the Great Cheng realm had seventy-six commanderies and more than nine hundred counties.

If each county recommended one such man a year, then the Imperial Academy would admit nearly a thousand students annually.

This was indeed the proper road to office. Yet among so many recommended men each year, how many could truly rise above the rest?

This was not Wang Zhenling’s former world. In that world too there had been recommendations of filial and upright men, but that power belonged only to commanderies and states.

Counties had no authority to make such recommendations.

In this world, however, every county had one such place each year.

Though the Great Cheng dynasty’s system drew in more talent and broadened the base of rule, for the individual man it was still not enough. Even if one was recommended as a filial and upright candidate and admitted to the Imperial Academy to study, one still needed achievements and reputation to stand out.

This assault on the Wuji Mountains drew only the armed forces of the local commanderies and counties.

Wang Zhenling himself experienced the entire campaign and could clearly see how formidable the Great Cheng dynasty’s capacity for mobilization was.

Not to mention anything else: Xiami Commandery was only a medium-sized commandery, yet it could casually mobilize twenty thousand men.

Across the whole Great Cheng realm, with seventy-six commanderies under heaven, just how many troops could be mobilized in all?

Moreover, these soldiers were not professional troops, yet their quality was excellent.

Because these sturdy youths trained every year for anti-bandit duty, their formations were practiced and disciplined; they could already be counted as highly competent reserves.

In such a classical age, when warfare was not yet highly specialized, men like these, once gathered and given a little training, became strong soldiers.

And this was not even the limit of mobilization. Take Guangyang Township, where Wang Zhenling lived: by household registration, it had mobilized not even half of its sturdy young men.

In other words, by that proportion, Xiami Commandery could easily raise forty or fifty thousand troops.

“This kind of great empire, still carrying the remains of a classical militarized order, is truly terrifying!”

In his former life, Wang Zhenling had once seen a question on a forum: if the Qin Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty went to war, who would win?

Most people thought it would be the Ming Dynasty...

Because, they reasoned, the Ming had stood for over a thousand years later, and technology had advanced so much.

But Wang Zhenling could only say: if that were truly so, then the Ming armies would not have been beaten into the ground by the Later Jin.

With the military power and mobilization capacity of Qin’s classical imperial age, crushing Ming would have posed no problem at all.

In truth, if what those people claimed were right, and the Ming’s technology, more than a thousand years beyond Qin’s, could effortlessly overwhelm Qin, then Great Ming would not have been beaten so miserably by the wild Jurchen barbarians.

In his former world, both East and West had seen military and mobilization capacity steadily decline once the age of classical autocracy came to an end.

By the time of the later Ming and Qing, when imperial power no longer extended into the villages and the state could not truly control grassroots resources, both war-making ability and mobilization were very limited.

A war involving only one or two hundred thousand troops could exhaust even a great unified dynasty.

Yet in the classical militarized age, such as in this world’s Great Cheng Dynasty, the government’s reach extended deep into the smallest neighborhoods and villages, at least in theory controlling every person in the empire.

In the Han Dynasty of his former world, before almost every tax collection, the population had to be counted anew.

By the Ming and Qing eras, trying to count the population was nearly impossible.

Imperial power did not reach the villages. Except when collecting taxes, the yamen runners never went down into the countryside. At other times, they did not even leave the county seat.

A magistrate’s orders scarcely crossed beyond the city gates, and the broad grassroots were almost entirely controlled by lineage clans.

In truth, one reason a certain later dynasty spoke so much about breaking the “three great mountains,” including clan power, was precisely its resentment of clans controlling the grassroots, and its desire to seize from their hands the control over the base that had been lost for nearly two thousand years.