The Empress's No.1 Lackey-Chapter 196 - 174, ’Eleven’ secret passage, the Empress awakens

The chilling sensation lasted only for a moment before suddenly dissipating.

When Zhao Douan turned his head to look, he saw that the windows on the second floor of the small building were tightly closed.

"Let’s check the Yellow Registers," said Mo Zhaorong by his side, feeling equally uncomfortable.

"Okay," Zhao Douan nodded, no longer dwelling on it. At that moment, he had never felt safer within the Capital.

…

The storeroom for the Yellow Registers was not on "Huanzhou Island."

According to the old storeroom manager, this was because cooking fires were made on Huanzhou Island, and to avoid fire hazards, the storerooms were established on the other five islands.

In a short while, the three of them took a boat and reached "Yingzhou Island."

As soon as they disembarked, a massive warehouse facing east came into view.

Outside, there was a forest of bamboo poles like clotheslines, on which hung many huge yellow paper registers, with quite a few people going in and out as if airing them out.

"So these are the Yellow Registers?" Zhao Douan asked curiously.

The old storeroom manager chuckled and nodded:

"The summer sun is perfect for airing out the registers; it’s just a pity there are so many backlogged that, despite airing them from dawn till dusk, they still can’t all be dried."

Zhao Douan commented, "These are bigger and the paper quality better than I imagined."

Mo Chou sighed and said:

"The Yellow Registers were not cheap to produce, not to mention they relate to tax collection. For hundreds of years, the Great Yu Dynasty has spawned an interest chain dependent on the ten-year register cycle...

Yes, that’s the word you used, quite vivid.

Every year, the island has to air out these registers to prevent damage from worms. The tangible worms may be taken care of by sunlight, but those countless intangible ’worms’ that profit from the Yellow Registers are growing fatter by the day."

You understand all of this? I thought you were only interested in competing and getting jealous over trivial matters… Zhao Douan looked at her in surprise.

He then remembered that the woman beside him, after all, was the first official in charge of the Six Palaces.

Led by the old storeroom manager, the two entered a warehouse.

What met their eyes were long rows of wooden shelves filled with numerous Yellow Registers.

Zhao Douan felt as if he had entered a distribution warehouse, where the shelves were about ten feet high, requiring ladders to climb with movable wooden boards above.

If the roof leaked, they could be tilted to divert the rainwater into the ground channels, to avoid wetting the Yellow Registers.

Zhao Douan casually picked up one register, brushed off the dust, and flipped it open.

He found records of population increases and decreases of a family in a village within the jurisdiction of a county under the jurisdiction of Jiancheng Road.

The names of this family’s members, their ages, birth years of infants, and death months of the elderly—all meticulously documented.

One register for every ten years; millions of registers here. Placing all the registers recording this family’s history in a line would line up to six hundred years of their family history.

Considering that the Yellow Register Library of Great Yu contained the births, aging, sickness, and deaths of all the common people under heaven...

This magnificent warehouse was like a historical museum.

It made Zhao Douan faintly recall a rather illogical yet romantic anecdote he once heard in his previous life:

From Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s unification to the present was just over two thousand two hundred years—a seemingly long time, but if calculated by seventy years per person, it only spanned thirty generations.

Thinking this way, as a person of modern times, his distance from the Qin Dynasty was just the lifespan of thirty people.

The thousand-year-old camphor tree at the entrance to his ancestral village was planted around the Han and Tang Dynasties.

"What are you thinking about?"

Seeing him silent for a long time, Mo Zhaorong thought he was pondering something and asked softly.

The icy block does have its merits.

Whenever it involves major and serious matters, she can temporarily set aside her biases and refrain from competing and getting jealous with the Zhao thief.

"Nothing, I’m just thinking that this paper is indeed quite good."

Zhao Douan stroked the thick paper of the Yellow Register.

"You’ve said this before," Mo Chou rolled her eyes. Holding a Yellow Register herself, she said:

"What do you care about the paper for? The focus should be on these characters on it, how to solve the problem."

Zhao Douan closed the Yellow Register and took out a handkerchief to wipe the dust from his hands, saying:

"Don’t solve it."

"Huh?" Mo Chou was stunned, like a knowledgeable lady official who didn’t understand.

Zhao Douan looked at her as if she were an idiot, helplessly explaining:

"As you said, these numbers on the Yellow Registers have been concealed and altered by those below over the past centuries, and have long since lost their truth. They are now just a pile of useless waste words. What use could they have?

Or do you think I have some way to restore these extensively contaminated archives to their original truthfulness?"

Zhao Douan’s tone was very calm.

Before seeing the Yellow Register Library, he indeed thought that maybe some mathematical methods could be used to resolve data contamination.

But after seeing the scale of the world’s foremost archive library...

He abandoned that impractical thought.

Six hundred years of Yellow Registers, utterly contaminated beyond recognition.

Of course, the most crucial point was...

It’s meaningless.

"These Yellow Registers have been rendered obsolete, and we don’t need them anymore. Remember the core of my ’Golden Tri-Register’?

Before, the court taxed by population, so it needed to know how many people were in the dynasty, specifically who.

But in the future, we will tax by land, and land doesn’t grow legs and run away. Don’t we still have here the ’Fish Scale Map Registers’ compiled from the original land survey across the realm?

Those have some use, but we still need to re-survey the land...

As for these millions, tens of millions of population archives…"

Zhao Douan turned around, his gaze falling on the massive warehouse, his tone nonchalant:

"The greatest value left is just the paper itself.

I remember, there is a method of crafting armor by pounding many layers of paper into papier-mâché, creating armor that is light and capable of withstanding ordinary arrows. If we use these Yellow Registers to make armor, we could save a substantial sum allocated to the Ministry of War in charge of the Military Weapon Casting Bureau...

Or perhaps simply sell them off. With such good paper, there must be buyers.

Whether it’s reprocessed into pulp or used for other purposes, it should also fetch a handsome sum...

Isn’t the National Treasury in desperate need of money?

Selling off the registers from these islands should alleviate the pressing need."

Beside him, Mo Chou was already listening in astonishment:

"You... you said... sell them off? Turn them into armor? Are you mad?"

She found this hard to accept:

"These are the household registrations of everyone in the world…"

Zhao Douan glanced at her coolly:

"They are worthless, waste paper without any practical use or reference value now."

"But…"

"There are no buts. Or tell me, after the taxation system switches from the capitation to land measuring, what use will these things have?"

Mo Chou fell silent, somewhat bewildered.

On one hand, emotionally, she felt that the archive library, painstakingly created and protected for six hundred years by the Great Yu Dynasty, should be incredibly precious.

On the other hand, her rational mind told her that what Zhao Douan said was correct.

Six hundred years of accumulation, nearly ten million household registers, seemed indeed to have reached the time of their natural death.

And their final value was to turn waste into treasure,

to contribute a possibly sizable amount of silver to the implementation of new policies.

"I know it’s hard for you to accept, but endure it and you’ll come to accept it."

Mr. Zhao habitually patted her shoulder:

"Let’s go."

This trip, Zhao Douan had only browsed through a single Yellow Register, thereby ending the six-hundred-year mission of these five islands.

Mo Chou followed Zhao Douan out of the storage room, still somewhat dazed.

The old custodian at the door piled on a smile:

"Miss Mo, Mr. Zhao, would you like to visit another storage room? The nearest one to us is the Nine Islands, or the Seven Islands aren’t far either."

This old official, trapped on the island, guarding the archive for nearly twenty years, was unaware of the changes that were about to take place.

"No need, just take us back."

Zhao Douan said indifferently.

Although rationally, he believed that the lunatic onshore and the "Lake God" in the lake wouldn’t threaten him,

that feeling of being watched lingered,

making him reluctant to stay in this place any longer.

"By the way, you just mentioned something about Nine Islands, Seven Islands?"

Zhao Douan asked curiously,

This chapt𝓮r is updat𝒆d by ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom.

"Aren’t there only five islands here? Do they each have a name?"

The old custodian explained:

"You are not aware, my lord, which is normal. The names I mentioned are not the official titles, but the old appellations used by us island guardians.

In fact, it was during the reign of the Grand Ancestor Emperor that he set the order for the islands.

Legend has it that when the Grand Ancestor Emperor first entered the Capital and established the Great Yu Dynasty, he rode around the Capital to survey the terrain, numbering the islands and hills he saw.

The five islands in our back lake are respectively Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine... also known as the Five God Mountains.

Though they are called islands, in the eyes of the Grand Ancestor Emperor, anything taller than the city walls was considered a mountain.

Hehe, but centuries have passed, and to facilitate river navigation, many of those islands are gone, and not many people remember this saying anymore..."

However, Zhao Douan was suddenly stunned.

He covertly looked at Mo Chou, who was still staring blankly, foolishly gazing behind her at the storage room, and asked seemingly casually:

"Oh? There is such a story? I’ve never heard of it before. What are these other islands you mentioned?"

The old custodian, suspecting nothing, smiled and introduced them one by one.

When he mentioned the "eleven" island that was located within the Capital,

flattened hundreds of years ago to facilitate boat travel,

Zhao Douan’s heart quietly quickened, and a thought was on the verge of emerging:

"Primordial Ancestor Temple, secret passage, eleven!"

These were the keywords given to him that day by Great Yu Grand Ancestor Old Xu.

These past days, Zhao Douan had been attentive in many ways, but without any clue.

"Is it possible, the ’eleven’ that Old Xu mentioned, is the eleventh mountaintop he named during his terrain survey?"

Suppressing his excitement, Zhao Douan bid farewell to Mo Chou with feigned calm and took a boat back to the back lake pier.

Not until the two disembarked, did that faint sense of being spied upon suddenly disappear.

...

A man and a woman, each preoccupied with their own thoughts, had no mind to bicker and rode back to the city immediately.

Mo Chou went to the Xiuwen Pavilion, preparing to discuss the sale of the Yellow Book Library and the fundraising of silver with people like Grandmaster Dong.

Zhao Douan then excused himself, saying it was nearly noon and time for lunch, parting ways with her.

When he was alone, Zhao Douan, under the guise of dining, came to the river section near where "eleven" island used to be six hundred years ago.

He enjoyed a full meal at a renowned restaurant.

After confirming he wasn’t followed, Zhao Douan quietly went to a secluded spot on the riverbank and hid under a bridge.

He took off his clothes and socks, stuffing them all into the Space Magic Artifact.

Then, Zhao Douan bit the storage scroll between his teeth and quietly dived into the water, heading toward the old site of "eleven" island.

In the height of summer, the sun was scorching.

It allowed him to use the sunlight to see the scenery beneath the water.

After swimming for a while, he finally found the remnants of where islands had been excavated.

Hundreds of years of erosion had almost leveled it to flat ground.

The deeper he dived, the dimmer the light became.

Luckily, the Hun River wasn’t too deep, and after advancing to a high rank in martial arts as a mortal, his enhanced vision and powerful ability to hold breath underwater allowed him to search for longer periods.

However, after circling twice at the bottom of the lake, Zhao Douan found nothing.

"This won’t do, the area is too large..."

After pondering for a moment, Zhao Douan suddenly had an idea.

He silently channeled the Royal Family’s martial arts cultivation technique, covering his body in a rosy glow.

Then his hand, faintly shining with gold, fiercely pushed against the bottom of the river.

Stars inverted!

Silt from the lake bed was displaced by an overwhelming force laden with vitality in a spreading whirlpool under the water.

Zhao Douan concentrated his senses.

Just as he was about to give up, he suddenly detected a slight disturbance in the qi released by his hands when passing a specific spot.

His spirits lifted, he narrowed down the area and eventually pinpointed a fluctuation next to a rock at the bottom of the lake.

"Gurgle gurgle."

Zhao Douan released a string of bubbles, swimming over joyfully, and started to clear the silt at the bottom of the lake.

Gradually, a strange "Array" pattern which was engraved in the rock, after centuries, came into view before him.

"There really is something here!"

Zhao Douan was delighted and immediately tried various methods to probe, but all were ineffective.

Only when he pressed his hand against the array and poured his inner Qi into it, could he faintly feel the underwater circular array light up with a faint glow before quickly dimming.

While Zhao Douan repeatedly attempted to "knock on the door,"

In the Imperial Palace.

Deep within the military armory.

In that desolate room, furnished with the stone inscription of the Grand Ancestor Emperor on the fifth floor of the old building,

the Emperor of Great Yu, Xu Zhenguan, sat cross-legged on a cushion, deep in closed-door cultivation.

Suddenly, the empress, immersed in her meditative state, opened her beautiful eyes abruptly. Her stunning face changed slightly:

"Dragon Essence?"

Once more, she felt the presence of the Dragon Essence,

incredibly intense.