Since that day's argument, Liu Jingting, who goes by the pseudonym Chen Zhongji, has become more and more curious about Prince Xin. As soon as he changed his habit of going to see Wang Shouxu after giving a lecture from Prince Xin's palace, he reported Prince Xin's reaction during class and his habit of filing and discussing the next class.

After returning from the palace in the past few days, Liu Jingting closed himself in the rented house, and kept thinking about a question that Prince Xin asked him. "What exactly is the state tax used for?"

And after that day, when Liu Jingting went to the palace again, he would no longer attack the eunuchs and praise the Donglin party members in front of Prince Xin. There is no need to talk about benevolence, righteousness and morality all day long, but it allows Liu Jingting to have time to reflect on his life experience.

At the age of 15, he began to wander around the south of the Yangtze River, and Liu Jingting can be regarded as having experienced all kinds of life in the world. But when he accepted Zhang Pu's commission and went north to the capital. He realized that compared with the so-called suffering of the people in the south of the Yangtze River, the people of Daming north of the Yellow River were really in dire straits.

With the help of the boat going north, Liu Jingting sailed on the Grand Canal for nearly 2 months and arrived in the capital of the northern Ming Dynasty. In Liu Jingting's imagination, Beijing, as the first good district, should be as prosperous as Nanjing, the capital of the south.

But in the day's schedule from Tongzhou at the end of the canal to Chongwenmen in the capital, what he saw was even more arrogant and lawless than the southern officials, the eunuchs who procured goods in the palace, the caravans under the names of the nobles of the capital, and the domestic slaves who opened the way for the dignitaries.

Those tax collectors and ambassadors guarding the Tongzhou Banknote Pass and Chongwenmen Tax Pass were submissive to the convoy of these powerful people, let alone come forward to inquire, and even if they took a step slow to get out of the way, they would be beaten and scolded.

But these same petty officials, who grovel in front of the powerful, face the petty traders and ordinary people, but one by one they are like vicious wolves with teeth and claws, and if they do not receive satisfactory bribes, they either break the jars and jars in the convoy, or the luggage carried by them is opened indiscriminately and thrown in the mud.

Whenever he saw these ugly phenomena, Liu Jingting, who sympathized with the suffering of the people at the bottom, felt that the task he had undertaken to go north was sacred and great. The rich bullied the poor, and the officials trampled on the small people, all because of the eunuchs like Wei Zhongxian in the imperial court. Only by ousting a powerful eunuch like Wei Zhongxian from power and letting the imperial court enable the Donglin Party members, who are all righteous men and gentlemen, can the Ming Dynasty stir up turbidity and Yangqing, and Haiqing and Heyan.

It is with such a firm belief that Liu Jingting can enter Prince Xin's mansion without fear under the name of Chen Zhongji, and he can righteously reprimand Wei Zhongxian for doing the eunuch in front of Prince Xin.

However, Liu Jingting's belief that he insisted on for more than half a year was shattered by Prince Shin within a week. Zhu Youzhen did not argue with Liu Jingting at all, what is the so-called moral righteousness in the Confucian and Mencius scriptures.

He simply put the cost of farming, the benefits obtained, and the minimum consumption of maintaining the family's survival; And the cost of the businessman, the benefits obtained made a simple comparison. Let Liu Jingting understand why the state imposes heavy taxes on merchants, and how the state can control the types of goods sold by merchants through tax regulation, so as to protect and encourage the production activities of farmers.

This way of quantifying social and economic activities in numbers fascinates Liu Jingting. Most of these numbers were exposed to in his life, and he didn't care at all, and he couldn't think of what they meant behind them.

However, under Zhu Youzhen's explanation, the Jiangnan white rice was 0.8 taels of silver in the time of Shenzong, and the Jiangnan white rice was 1.3 taels of silver in the seventh year of the Apocalypse. During the same period, the output of cloth and raw silk in the south of the Yangtze River was soaring. This shows that in the Susong area, which was originally the granary of the Ming Dynasty, the landlords are changing their grain fields into mulberry fields and cotton fields on a large scale in order to obtain higher profits.

In the face of this changing trend in agriculture in the south of the Yangtze River, if the state does not take effective measures, what will the state do to help the victims of disasters in the south of the Yangtze River? Today's nine-sided military town in the Ming Dynasty is completely dependent on the food and salary of Jiangnan, and if Jiangnan is affected by the disaster, it is equivalent to the disaster of the entire Ming Dynasty.

“… The so-called harvest year accumulation grain, famine year hunger prevention. It is one of the meanings of state taxation..."Zhu Youzhen commented.

Liu Jingting stopped, and when he was in a reverie, he had already walked to the door of Prince Xin's mansion.

Liu Jingting did not walk to the side door and enter the mansion as usual, he looked up at the plaque of Prince Xin's mansion with his hands behind his back, thinking about something.

He hadn't gone to see Wang Shoulu for the past 10 days, and finally Wang Shoulu couldn't bear it anymore and came to the door in person. First, it was to find out what Prince Xin was thinking, after all, the news that the Emperor of the Apocalypse was seriously ill had already spread. What Wang Shoulu wants to know is whether Prince Xin will attack Wei Zhongxian and others if he ascends the throne;

The second is that Wang Shoulu wants Liu Jingting to get out of the capital as soon as possible, after all, when Prince Xin was still a vassal king, no one in the court would pay attention to what he was doing. But if Tianqi is really seriously ill and dies, and Prince Xin ascends the throne as emperor, everyone in the court will definitely notice the people around Prince Xin. If Liu Jingting entered the palace under a false name to make friends with Prince Xin, and he still had something to do with the Donglin Party, then the Donglin Party would really be doomed.

Although the Donglin Party members are supported by the entire Jiangnan gentry and Shilin, the Donglin Party members, who have been destroyed by Wei Zhongxian, are not as strong as before.

The eunuch party composed of the Zhejiang Party, the Chu Party, and the Qi Party, with the support of the Jin merchants, is the momentum of eliminating the other. Since the Donglin Party intends to take advantage of the change of the throne to counterattack the eunuch party, they naturally will not leave a handle for the political opponents to attack.

However, to Wang Shou's surprise, Liu Jingting reversed his previous appearance of obedience to him and did not respond to his proposal at all. Although Wang Shoulu was extremely angry, he also had to be patient, and took a stake in Liu Jingting, and finally reluctantly got an answer that he had thought about for a few days.

Although Wang Shoulu didn't know what had happened to Liu Jingting in the past 10 days, Liu Jingting's hesitant attitude made him shocked and frightened. The Donglin Party members can't afford to purge again, but now in the capital, the dead Donglin Party members who are monitored by the eunuch party can't make a move against Liu Jingting, and he can only leave the place where Liu Jingting lives depressed.

The reason why Liu Jingting would rather risk his life and want to stay in the capital is because in the conversation with Prince Xin in the past few days, he suddenly discovered that he originally thought that he wanted to change the reality that corrupt officials and corrupt officials in the Ming Dynasty were rampant, powerful families were competing for extravagance, and the common people were miserable, that is, to support righteous people and gentlemen like the Donglin Party to uphold the government.

And in this process, all he can do is to wave the flag and shout for the Donglin Party. But in Prince Xin's description, in this change that wants to change the Ming Dynasty, there may not be a place for a flat-headed common man like him.

Although Liu Jingting wandered around because of crime when he was young, he finally became a storyteller by chance. But he has never forgotten that when he was a teenager, he admired General Qi, who swept away the Japanese in the south of the Yangtze River, and he never gave up his dream of helping the world and protecting the people of Li like General Qi.