If You Pick Up Commoners on the Road, You Gotta Raise Them (1)
They call it picking up strays, I think. Or getting chosen as a cat's butler.
You know the thing — you scoop up the abandoned ones, or the ones that follow people around a little too eagerly, and then you scale the whole operation up.
I was more or less in the same boat.
The first problem was that the number had now climbed into the tens of thousands.
The second problem — if you could even call it a problem — was that we weren't talking tens of thousands of cats. We were talking tens of thousands of people.
So in a case like this, would you call it picking up commoners?
Anyway.
Idle thoughts or not, there was work to do.
"Baiyang!!!"
Xiahou Lan's courtesy name tore out of my throat.
"Yes, Commander!!"
"If they try to charge, we punch straight through them!!"
"...Excuse me??"
"I'll open the hole — you just follow!! Qinglin! Let's go!!"
Qinglin screamed a battle-neigh and surged forward. I clenched the reins and set myself to meet their charge with a charge of my own.
Hooves thundered. The ground itself seemed to shake.
At their head, a rider on a white horse came pounding toward me. At ours, I came pounding right back on Qinglin.
Steel screamed against steel.
"...!!!"
"You're... one of those White Horse Followers, yeah? Hah. Nothing special."
I split the charging enemy's spear shaft in two and, in the same motion, cut the vanguard rider clean off his white horse.
The bells at my waist gave a bright, lazy jingle.
Hear that? Let's keep this reasonable. No need for anyone to lose face.
I gave my hip a deliberate shake and let the bells ring out, and the moment the sound reached them, the enemy seemed to realize exactly who I was.
"The enemy commander is Gan Ning!!"
"Their general is Gan Xingba?! What a windfall!!"
Wow. I figured maybe, but they actually know my name?
Well, damn. Starting to feel like a celebrity.
Except... their reaction was a little off, wasn't it?
You heard the bells, you know I'm Gan Ning — so run. That's the normal move. Why are you lining up to charge me again?
...Yeah. You people are a lost cause.
"Brother Ziyi! Get the refugees inside the walls first!!"
"Xingba!! And what about you!!"
"Don't worry about me!! I'm not losing to the likes of them!! Baiyang!! With me!!"
"Yes, Commander!!"
White-horse enthusiast Gongsun Zan's pride and joy or not — these were the same bunch that had wiped the floor with Yuan Shao. There was no way I was going to lose to them.
A whistle of air from the left — one man with a halberd.
Dead ahead — two with spears.
From the right — one with a sword.
I knocked the first aside. Cut the second down. Dropped my body low and let the third spear skim over me — then smashed the fourth man off his horse with the hilt of my great saber.
Hah... something's felt different since last time.
Ever since I'd fought that famously filial friend of mine — the one with three fathers — something in the way I saw a fight had changed.
The enemy's eyes. Their breathing. The distance. The way a shoulder started to turn, the force gathering in the hand on the reins.
I would have missed all of it before. Now I read every last bit of it as if it were written out in front of me.
The ones watching seemed to figure out that coming at me one at a time meant getting taken apart one at a time.
"Surround him!! He's alone!!"
They meant to close on me while I was well out from our own cavalry and put me down. That much was written all over them.
All right. Let's see...
Three more on the left. Four holding distance on the right. Two coming in from the front...
And from behind—
"Where do you think you're going...!!!"
I cut, then launched myself.
"Ghk!!"
"D-damn it!!"
"D-does that bastard have eyes in the back of his head?"
The ones at my rear had been about to fling a grappling hook around Qinglin's hind legs. I put them down without much trouble.
A few seconds slower and I'd have been rolling in the dirt. The thought of that made me genuinely annoyed.
"You lot don't get to die clean. Hey. Stick your heads out. I'll carve them into little stars for you."
"I-is that bastard an actual ghost?"
"It's the Spirit Ghost!! The Spirit Ghost is coming!!!"
Qinglin and I tore straight through their ranks, and I started harvesting the heads of men who had already lost their momentum, one after another.
"This is... Fall back! Fall back!! Do not engage Gan Ning — withdraw!!"
"Retreat! We're retreating!!"
Deeply moved by the performance, apparently, they were trying to pull their troops out.
But...
Not a chance. Where do you think you're running?
I had no intention of letting them leave in one piece. The fact that they'd come all the way to Zhao told me Gongsun Zan was reasonably fond of these men — and if I sent them home, my people would be the ones who paid for it.
And as it happened, Xiahou Lan had just arrived in the perfect position to seal their rear.
"Baiyang!! Cut off their retreat!!"
"By your command!! Hyah!!"
Xiahou Lan led the cavalry around, blocked the escape route, and locked them into a massive wall of lances. Gongsun Zan's riders, galloping in a blind frenzy to find a way out, slammed straight into that spear-line.
The impact was enormous.
"Gyaaah!!"
"Break through!! I said break through!!"
This Xiahou Lan kid... he's pretty damn capable, isn't he?
Watching him shift the troops and seal the retreat that fast left me more than a little satisfied.
Right then. Retreat's plugged. Shall we proceed with a little head-chopping ceremony?
"N-no!! Keep pushing through!!"
"The Spirit Ghost!! The Spirit Ghost is coming!!"
"S-spare me!!"
"Hah... I'm not sparing anybody. Stick 'em out. Anyone who presents a head gets sent off in a single stroke."
"What kind of nonsense is that...!!"
"Ah, ah. No bad language. We only use nice words, so we can be reborn as decent people in the next life."
"He's insane!! Break through already!!"
Excuse me? I just handed you a reincarnation pro-tip distilled from actual experience, and you're cursing at me?
These people really were rotten to the core. Then again, with Gongsun Zan as their master, what exactly were they supposed to have learned?
I cut. I drove the blade home. Blood sprayed.
"Ghhhk!!"
"N-no!!"
"M-my arm!! Grk..."
"Ha, haha... shit..."
"M-mother..."
On that little stretch of field alone I took at least several dozen heads, and in the end I succeeded in wiping them out completely.
Not a military-science "wiped out." Wiped out in the literal sense.
Which is to say: an enemy cavalry force that had numbered in the hundreds was now a force of zero.
Our riders went down the line, putting spears through the corpses to send off anyone who might still have been clinging to life.
That's my boys. Truly excellent character.
Take a wound on a battlefield and your odds of surviving are not generous, no matter how small it looks. That was true even in an age when bullets were flying; how much more so in an age when people carved living flesh with iron?
I wasn't being sarcastic. I meant it.
If you'd been wounded, dying was probably the kinder outcome.
"All right!! Clean this up and let's get inside and eat!!"
"Haha! Yes, Boss!!"
"Ah. Baiyang. I'm leaving the cleanup to you."
"Ah! Yes! Don't worry about it!"
"Haha. Good. Tell the cleanup crews and everyone who fought that there'll be drinks later."
"Understood, Commander!!"
I left Xiahou Lan with the aftermath for the moment and headed over to Brother Ziyi, who was still ushering refugees in.
"Brother Ziyi!"
"Oh! Finished already?"
"Well... as you can see."
"Haha! That's Xingba for you."
"Right? Fighting is one thing I can do."
At any rate.
The refugees, seeing that the Gongsun Zan cavalry which had been hunting them had simply ceased to exist, looked profoundly relieved.
"Come on in! You'll have to sleep in barracks or tents for today, but... beats dying, doesn't it?"
Hahaha.
That's right. When things are hard, you laugh.
They couldn't say it out loud, but a great many people had surely died or been hurt on the way here. So rather than greet them with a solemn face, I figured a little humor might loosen the tension.
Not that I was a particularly solemn person to begin with.
Helping Brother Ziyi and the Zhao officials sort the refugees and bring them inside the walls didn't last long, though.
"Commander!!"
"Oh. Chancellor Xin. And Brother Fengxiao came along too, I see — after sitting on his hands the whole time."
"I mean... how exactly was I supposed to go out there and fight..."
"I'm just kidding. Anyway, what brings you two? We're almost done getting the refugees settled, but..."
Xin Pi and Guo Jia came toward me with serious faces, and I tensed a little. I had the distinct feeling something else had gone wrong.
"We've come about the refugee problem."
"Hm?"
Xin Pi's expression was not a bright one.
"The refugees Your Lordship has taken in number in the tens of thousands."
"...I'm aware of that."
"And last year's harvest was a famine year. As I mentioned earlier."
"Right, well..."
"Which means, in the end, we must choose one of two paths. Either we make those beggars feed themselves — or we keep bleeding our military grain until the next harvest."
"......"
Ahem.
If you're going to call them something, at least use the nice word "refugees" instead of "those beggar bastards."
It wasn't as if they were going to be completely useless. Of course, in a famine year like this, settling them was going to come with no shortage of problems.
"Ah. Come to think of it, I just had a good idea."
"Oh. Is that so."
"Yes. What if we just sent all of them to Qingzhou?"
"Hmm... Qingzhou, you say?"
"Yes."
I floated the idea of shipping them off to Qingzhou, where the harvest had at least been decent and they were short on hands.
"That will not do."
"Why not?"
"First of all — by what means do you intend to move tens of thousands of people as far as Qingzhou?"
"...Uh. Walking?"
"If tens of thousands of them move on foot, the number who peel off along the way will be considerable. And more importantly, if you send them into Qingzhou, which is crawling with bandits, they will become bandits themselves."
"......"
Oh. I hadn't thought of it from that angle.
To be fair, Qingzhou did have a fairly famous franchise of bandit friends, which was a problem. Unless our dear brother-in-law, Inspector Yuan Tan of Qingzhou, turned out to be spectacularly competent — and he seemed less capable than I was — sending them to him would turn tens of thousands of refugees into tens of thousands of bandits in the blink of an eye.
"More than that, Zhao itself is short of people."
"...Come again?"
"Between the wars and the famine, there is no small amount of abandoned farmland."
"Ah."
Right. This was the neighborhood where every power in Hebei bumped into every other power, so fighting was a local pastime. Given that, a labor shortage from people fleeing the wars was only natural.
So there is land, then. In that case...
"Then we just set up tuntian, don't we?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Tuntian. Tuntian. You know — you give land to commoners or refugees and collect tax on it."
"W-wait... tuntian, you said?"
"...? Yes. Tuntian. Tuntian."
Did tuntian mean something else in this era besides the tuntian I knew?
"Then you intend to turn all of them into soldiers?"
"Huh? No? What are you... You just give them the abandoned fields, the government lends them seed and tools, and then you collect a share of the harvest, right? That's what I was thinking..."
"...You mean to run tuntian with commoners?"
"That's the idea?"
"Hahh..."
"Now that is a fresh notion."
What is this.
The two of them seemed to find what I'd said genuinely novel, because they kept making little noises of admiration.
Hold on... wasn't tuntian from this era? Why were they reacting like that?
I looked at them with an expression that clearly said explain, and Guo Jia took over.
To summarize it simply:
"So... originally tuntian is something only frontier soldiers do... and there's no precedent for commoners doing it?"
"That is correct."
"But putting commoners on tuntian is something anyone could think of, isn't it?"
"Hahh. Thinking of a thing and actually doing it are entirely different problems."
"In what way?"
"Soldiers will till a field if you give the order. Commoners are another matter."
"......"
"To whom do you give which land? How much seed do you lend? Where do you find the oxen and the tools? What share of the harvest do you collect? And if the person working a plot flees or dies, to whom do you give that land next?"
Guo Jia folded his fingers one by one as he spoke.
"To have the government manage all of that, you would need entirely new laws, and an office to administer them."
"Ah."
"Furthermore, with military colonies you can simply govern by military law. You cannot do the same thing to tens of thousands of commoners."
"...Fair point."
"So simply thinking, 'why not just give the commoners fields,' and turning that thought into an institution, are entirely different problems. People have conceived of it all along. Putting it into practice is what has failed, every single time."
"......"
Well. That's a little embarrassing.
If I'm being honest, I did want to drop some future knowledge and get a round of What brilliance! All hail the reincarnator! out of it.
The trouble was, even when I did drop future knowledge, most of it ran straight into the limits of the era.
It's not as if the people of this age are drooling idiots. Of course they would have thought of it.
Anyway.
So was he saying it wouldn't work, or that it would...?
"However..."
Guo Jia watched the refugees filing in through the gates, and went on.
"If it were now, it might actually be worth attempting."
"And why is that?"
"We have a surplus of people. We have fields abandoned by war. And we have the military grain to feed them until the harvest, do we not?"
"......"
"Above all — they have nowhere else to go."
Guo Jia smiled, faint and pleasant.
"Which is to say: no matter how harshly we work them, they have nowhere to run, so they will simply accept it."
"...!!"
Hahh. What a terrifying thing to say...
He didn't sound like a man planning to harvest grain from these people. He sounded like a man planning to squeeze salt out of them.
"Haha. We're going to bleed military grain on them either way — we may as well work them properly."
"I-is that so."
I felt a profound terror looking at Guo Jia, who had at some point begun wearing the expression of a salt-flat overseer — or perhaps a slave-plantation owner.
He's not about to start going, "From this day forward, you shall be called Scruffy," is he?
I was genuinely afraid.
I couldn't even begin to imagine what would happen the moment this Guo Jia really let himself off the leash.