Chapter 283 The Truth Revealed

Chapter 283 The Truth Revealed

In addition to assigning an urgent task to the bookstores, the emperor also summoned his trusted ministers and asked them to offer suggestions on how to better disseminate knowledge and technology.

After all, Xie Wanniang was just one person, and in many aspects she was only a layman with a superficial understanding; the knowledge and skills she could contribute were quite limited.

Compared to her, some of the more capable people in the court are the ones who should share their knowledge and skills to cultivate more talent for the country.

Then there are those remarkable individuals who live in seclusion among the common people and are quite famous in various industries. They can also write books and establish their reputations for generations to come.

Besides these lively and energetic people, His Majesty the Emperor also set his sights on various rare books that were being kept as precious treasures by those well-established families.

Of course, he did not immediately target those families, but instead planned to open the libraries of the Imperial Palace, the Hanlin Academy, and the Imperial College.

The three collections of books were extremely rich, and with the help of his loyal ministers who, after understanding what His Majesty was about to do, immediately rushed to respond, the emperor collected more than 70% of the world's most precious books in a very short time.

To encourage more people to follow his example as loyal subjects, he generously gave those subjects many benefits.

Many of the other officials who originally intended to keep their books hidden began to waver when they saw how generous the emperor was to those who presented their books.

They were worried. On the one hand, they worried that if they continued to be stubborn, the benefits given by the emperor would soon be divided up by other people who knew how to adapt. On the other hand, they were also worried that the emperor would openly or secretly exclude and suppress them and all the descendants of their clan because they were too tactless.

As the old saying goes, "Mastering both literary and martial arts skills is for the benefit of the emperor." These people clung to their collections of books so desperately, ultimately hoping to gain an advantage in the imperial examinations and official careers.

In other words, in the end, they still had to depend on the emperor's whims for their future.

If they offended the emperor to death for the sake of that rare book, the future of their entire clan would be completely ruined.

After all, they are different from those corporate slaves working for some company.

Even though office workers may encounter bizarre bosses wherever they go, at least they still have some choice in which bizarre boss they work for.

Unlike the sons of ancient aristocratic families who could only seek their future under the emperor, if they didn't have the ability to overthrow the emperor, change their own boss, or even rise to the top themselves, they could only grit their teeth and silently tolerate the emperor's series of bizarre actions.

Once they understood this, the heads of the aristocratic families who originally wanted to maintain a certain advantage immediately began to scramble to curry favor with the emperor.

They opened their family library and presented all their books to the emperor, hoping that when the emperor divided the spoils, he would also give them and their descendants a share of the good fortune.

As for the matter of the emperor instructing the crown prince to set up a large printing workshop and use advanced printing technology to significantly reduce book prices...

They've already given away their rare and unique copies, and they've given up their greatest advantage. Do they really think they can afford to break ties with the current and future emperors just because they gain more readers from those widely circulated basic books?

Just as Lady Hou had predicted, this group of people were indeed shrewd. They knew very well how to make the right choice quickly when things seemed hopeless, so that they could still snatch chestnuts from the fire in an unfavorable situation and gain an advantage once again.

Of course, this is their own ability. Neither Lady Hou nor Xie Wanniang would feel that the world is unfair because of this.

Moreover, even if this matter does reflect a certain degree of injustice in society, Xie Wanniang would not want to completely erase this injustice.

Having lived two lives, she had long realized that there is no absolute fairness or justice in this world.

The purpose of everything she did was simply to improve the quality of life for the vast majority of people, so that they could live a comfortable and worry-free life, not to drag down the current high and mighty group of people and replace them with herself or someone else.

As the days went by, Xie Wanniang's family never encountered any of the conspiracies, schemes, or assassinations that she and Jiang Yuan had anticipated.

Just as Xie Wanniang was filled with confusion, Jiang Yuan received the latest news about the Nanyang Prince's Mansion from Chang Yao.

It turned out that the Princess Consort of Nanyang had already petitioned the Emperor and Empress, requesting that they allow the Nanyang Prince's Mansion to adopt a son.

As for the Prince of Nanyang, who was poisoned and fell into a coma, he and his mother were both on their last breath, barely clinging to life with expensive medicines.

Princess Nanyang launched into a sob story, essentially saying that as a woman, it was difficult to continue supporting the vast Nanyang Prince's Mansion after her mother-in-law and husband suddenly met with misfortune. She needed an adopted son, a pillar of support that would give her hope for the future.

The emperor and empress could not immediately refuse her request, because from the perspective of etiquette and law, her request was not unreasonable.

However, the sudden collapse of the Prince of Nanyang and his old queen made the emperor and empress remain suspicious of her. Although they could not directly refute her request to adopt a son, they could hint to the clan elders in charge of arranging the matter to delay the time appropriately.

Meanwhile, the emperor's spies scattered throughout Nanyang had already packed up the decisive evidence they had collected, as well as some witnesses who had lied, and sent them all to the government office.

Of course, the government only received the generous gift they sent, but did not meet any of them.

With their covert assistance, the authorities quickly gathered all the crucial evidence.

The truth about the deaths of the two families, including the Tong family, was finally revealed. It turned out that the poisoner in the shocking massacre was actually the Tong family's next-door neighbor.

The other party's only son was a gambler. Because one of the subordinates of the Prince of Nanyang deliberately set a trap for him, the boy lost so much that he wrote a large IOU in an attempt to turn the tables, but in the end he lost all the borrowed money as well.

Unable to repay the debt and unwilling to be tormented to the point of wishing for death, he could only obediently do whatever the creditor asked him to do.

As for why the murderer turned out to be his father, as a pure-blooded playboy who only knew how to gamble, he actually didn't have any real skills, but his father was different; his father was quite skilled in combat.

In order to protect his son and the family fortune, his father, under duress from one of the Prince of Nanyang's subordinates, secretly climbed over the wall and sprinkled poison into the water vat of that family.