Volume 5, Chapter 71 – Inertia

Watching Tao Peichi’s departing figure, Tao Muyun reined in his expression and sank into thought with a slight furrow in his brow.

He did not think his own insight into matters like this was especially brilliant. The only reason he had been able to think things through so thoroughly was because he had the example of the immortal dynasties in the Illusory Realms to draw on.

Because of special circumstances, the emperors of the previous dynasty had been unable to cultivate to profound realms. Their lifespans therefore could not break through the natural limit, and at certain intervals power inevitably had to be handed over, bringing new variables into the state of the realm.

Under those circumstances, many people actually had the courage to resist the will of the Imperial Court. Tao Muyun alone had heard of no fewer than dozens upon dozens of such examples, and the one that had left the deepest impression on him was the case of “Yao Ling, Emperor Xuanzong of Yu,” and his rectification of the imperial physicians.

This Yao Ling was precisely the grandfather of the Yao Lie mentioned above. Yao Ling truly did count as a good emperor. All his life, he had genuinely struggled against the local power blocs, and it was also beginning with Yao Ling that the court’s desire to use two kinds of pills to control its officials and the cultivation world reached its peak.

But even with such iron-blooded rule, he still had little way of dealing with human greed. Yao Ling could not turn every official and subordinate into a puppet controlled by saint pills. That meant he was bound to rely on those people to help him govern the country, and even be forced to accept a certain level of corruption from them.

When he was young, Yao Ling had endured it all along. But as he grew older, he could bear it no longer. Backed by the military force of the Suzhen Dao, he began to investigate and purge corruption, especially targeting the imperial physicians in the palace.

At the time, if a physician prescribed the wrong medicine and caused harm, the case was judged in two categories. In the first, if it was unintentional, the punishment was decapitation, and only the individual was pursued. In the second, if it was deliberate, then not only would they be beheaded, their household would be confiscated and their clan exterminated. The associated penalties were exceptionally severe.

Seen from today’s perspective, that would certainly seem unbelievable, but Tao Muyun knew that Yao Ling truly had his reasons.

It was all because the Imperial Medical Office had acted far too arrogantly in its earlier years. Relying on their medical skill, they accepted gold and silver, and even deliberately jacked up drug prices tenfold or a hundredfold in their records. It had already reached a point people could no longer tolerate.

In his later years, Yao Ling’s father, Emperor Qingzong, had tried to rectify this state of affairs, but it had done little good.

After all, they were physicians. And you, meanwhile, were not an immortal dynasty with endless life. That meant you still had to worry about aging, sickness, and death. It meant that at certain moments, you really did have no choice but to rely on those people to save your life.

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Some difficult and complicated illnesses could not be cured even with the Suzhen Immortal Martial Canon. The Suzhen Dao itself could do nothing about that. And so, after Qingzong had arrested and killed a group of imperial physicians in an attempt to impose order, thereby offending the Imperial Medical Office, those people simply joined forces and started playing dirty. They deliberately refused to prescribe medicine with strong effects.

Prescribe the wrong medicine and lose your head, right?

Fine, then we’ll only prescribe tonic medicine for preserving health. Eat as much as you like. No matter what, it won’t cause any accidents.

The properties of those health-preserving medicines were mild, so indeed they could not cause accidents. But neither could they cure serious illness.

Late in Qingzong’s life, he repeatedly sought medicine and failed to obtain it. If the Suzhen Dao had not repeatedly sent people to alter his prescriptions, then by the age of sixty he would have become paralyzed, perhaps even drowned in his own urine.

Yao Ling learned from that lesson. First, he used saint pills and force to bring a group of imperial physicians under control, preventing them from uniting and creating trouble. Then, once he judged the time ripe, he struck ruthlessly. He almost slaughtered the Imperial Medical Office to the last man.

He had thought that by doing this he would solve the problem once and for all. But what he had not expected was that after he acted, the atmosphere of the entire court underwent a subtle change.

His ministers and aides began to disobey.

His chief ministers began looking at him with gloomy, grief-stricken eyes. The other officials no longer even dared meet his gaze. On the surface, everyone still appeared to be carrying out his orders, but very soon Yao Ling discovered that all they were really doing was obeying in appearance while defying in practice.

Worst of all, as time went on, someone spread the rumor that Yao Ling hated physicians, delighted in killing physicians, and took pleasure in abusing them day after day. It stirred panic among the common people for a time, and quite a few clinics and apothecaries closed one after another.

Yao Ling was fierce by nature and unwilling to yield. That tense deadlock lasted right up until the end of his life.

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When he died, only people from the Suzhen Dao were at his side. There were even rumors that at the final critical moment of his life, Lin Mingsu, the Sword Lord of the Suzhen Dao at the time, opened his Innate Origin Orifice for him, causing his essence blood to burn and his power to surge. He supposedly charged straight out of Qianyu Palace and went on a killing spree in the homes of corrupt officials, laughing madly while he slaughtered them and shouting strange things like “same death, same fate.”

But in the end, he still died.

After his death, the new emperor was still young and did not consider the governance of corruption to be any great problem. That directly caused Yao Ling’s policies to collapse.

All those who had been imprisoned were released, the crisis facing the great clans and noble houses was lifted, and everything returned to how it had been before.

The later Emperor Lie had probably learned a lesson from cases like these as well, which was why he turned a blind eye to certain things. In other words: “I don’t care how you fleece people in private, but the money you hand over to me had better be enough.”

If it was enough, everything was negotiable.

If it was not enough, if too much had been skimmed off the top, then I’d have to kill a few people and take some money out of the “piggy bank.”

Completely different styles of rule, and completely different goals. One could say that Emperor Lie was far inferior to Emperor Xuanzong and Emperor Qingzong.

But the ironic thing was that Emperor Lie’s historical reputation was actually far higher than the latter two. Clearly, Emperor Xuanzong and Emperor Qingzong had been the ones making vigorous efforts to stamp out corruption, yet many records merely described the two of them as “fond of killing” and classed them among the tyrants.

Emperor Lie, by contrast, often struck those “piggy banks,” and that behavior somehow became celebrated as discourse on anti-corruption. He even left behind the idiom “the Cleansing of the Hall under Emperor Lie.” It was absurd.

Everything came down to the human heart.

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Everything came down to human nature.

That was the obstacle ordinary secular dynasties could never overcome in governance. With examples like these, anyone would think the same thing: as long as my family can outlast you, everything will return to normal.

And that gave them courage, courage to resist the will of the Imperial Court.

But for an immortal dynasty, that example did not hold.

The Illusory Realms had immortal dynasties, and even where there were no immortal dynasties, there were still smaller kingdoms. The rulers of those kingdoms were in fact nothing but puppets. The ones truly controlling those territories behind the scenes were the various sects and dojos.

Those true rulers did not cultivate qi methods, but their upper echelons still gained longevity through Dao-Void Methods. They could easily live two or three hundred years, and those with profound Dao-age could even govern for a thousand years. Under such circumstances, “waiting for them to die of old age” was certainly not a workable plan.

The current Great Xia was much like such an immortal dynasty.

How to face the ruler of an immortal dynasty, how to find a balance within that order, and how to find a place suitable for oneself within it, this was a wholly new lesson for the old aristocracy, which had never had any relevant experience.

“I just hope there aren’t that many idiots.”

“The times really are different now…”

Tao Muyun shook his head, sat back down, and picked up his phone again.

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The next day, Bai Zhuqing rose early as usual. She did not even have time to wash up. She merely used qi-force to shake the dust and grime from her body, then went straight to the writing desk and began examining the documents the sword attendant had placed there.

Subduing Tian Yaozhong was only the beginning. Those more than one thousand names implicated countless local noble families. How to deal with those people would be a major undertaking, and she could not afford even the slightest slackness.

If I don’t handle this sort of thing myself, am I supposed to let Elder Sister divide her attention?

At any rate, that was how Bai Zhuqing saw it.

She felt those people were utterly unworthy of attracting Bai Xiang’s attention, unworthy of wasting Bai Xiang’s time.

Since Bai Xiang had delegated authority to her, she was determined to handle this matter properly on her own.

It was just that this sort of thing really was troublesome.

Now that Bai Xiang had returned, the old balance had been scrubbed away and shattered. Smart people knew what choice to make, but there was no stopping the fools, the fools who had soaked in peace for too long and lost their sense of awe toward certain forms of power.

…After all, Great Xia’s ten years of war had affected the middle and lower strata of society far more than anyone else.

As for the great clans and noble houses, as long as the defensive lines held firm and were never breached, then for them it had still been little different from an age of peace and prosperity.