Chapter 522 — The Star Beast's Rigorous Interrogation
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 5
"And this time Your Majesty means to lay roads linking the Western Lands with Jingping, and the route passes through the Wasteland, and through Crimson Dragon City besides! The two roads the Grand Libationer has planned both run through Crimson Dragon City! Crimson Dragon City will surely become the Wasteland's foremost town, the richest under heaven! Your servant believes the Grand Libationer harbors private motives, and would use the court's money to pave the roads of his own homeland!
" Yanfeng, helpless, fixed him with a long and meaning-laden look: "The Western Lands he conquered himself.
How much in military pay did that spare us? How many soldiers were saved from death? " The Minister said, "But the cultivators who go to Crimson Dragon City to train are mostly our own people of Jingping, and they spend their coin there. If we do not tax it, that place will become a state within a state, and Jingping's wealth will surely drain away!
In the long run, how is that to be borne? Jingping will be left with no money to spend!
" Yanfeng laughed in exasperation: "Daoist Yuanfeng, you are a master of reckoning out of the Daoist school; how is it you do not understand? " The Minister, perplexed, said, "Your servant is dull. Pray instruct him.
" Yanfeng smiled: "The cultivators who go to Crimson Dragon City spend Jingping's Dafeng coin, and if that coin is to be spent at all, it must buy Jingping goods, and so it must come home to Jingping.
" The Minister frowned: "And if the Dafeng coin circulates in the Wasteland and never comes back to Jingping?
" Yanfeng smiled: "If the Dafeng coin can stand in for gold and silver and circulate through the Wasteland, so much the better! For the coin is minted by the court, and the Wasteland has no right to mint coin of its own.
Would the court not then hold in its hand the coinage of the Wasteland?
However much wealth the Wasteland holds, would it not all be reckoned by the court? Once the Dafeng coin replaces gold and silver, the court can use Dafeng coin to buy up mines and rivers in the Wasteland, and to unify the Wasteland with Dafeng coin; that day is within sight! " The Minister of Revenue was struck dumb. Yanfeng tossed the memorial aside, rose to his feet, and looked out, his gaze far-reaching: "Without spending a single soldier, with only the Dafeng coin, we can win this rich land of the Wasteland; what a bargain is that? You, sir, are too rigid.
You take it for a bad thing that Jingping's wealth flows into the Wasteland, never knowing that to conquer by coin is the highest art of war.