Chapter 368: The storm is rising again

On the day of the grand ceremony, the decree of the Queen Mother Cui Xiaofu was announced, and Zhang Huan was appointed King Yong and supervised the Tang Dynasty. All military and national affairs were decided by him. In other words, this edict meant that the Queen Mother Cui Xiaofu officially retreated to the deep palace and no longer interfered in military and national affairs.

As the sky was dawn, a group of soldiers rushed into the Daming Palace. They controlled the palace and guarded the important places, ordered the eunuchs and palace maids to pack up and move all to Tai Chi Palace.

Cui Xiaofu's bedroom, Cui Xiaofu sat there motionlessly since the morning. Last night, a guard came to report, "From tomorrow, she will officially move to Tai Chi Palace. There was an order, and there was no room for negotiation. Cui Xiaofu knew that the day she was afraid of finally came. During this period, she didn't know anything that happened outside. No one told her that Zhang Huan returned to the sect during the Taimiao sacrifice, nor did anyone tell her that Zhang Huan is now the king of the country. She is like an isolated person, one after another, and one high palace wall after another, imprisoned her forever.

If it was always imprisonment, Cui Xiaofu might not be afraid. She had been in imprisonment for decades. What she was afraid of was the arrival of death. At this moment, this woman, who was only over 40 years old, was washed away from her and quietly waited for the arrival of the god of death. There was no palace maid or eunuch by her side, only her most loyal old slave Feng Endao served her.

After Lu Taiyi's death, Feng Endao returned to Cui Xiaofu from the East Palace. He had no complaints about his master's former ruthlessness, just as if his parents treated the children who had made mistakes. Not only that, he comforted Cui Xiaofu. Without the trouble of power, she could slowly raise her body and restore her former gorgeous light. He was like an old man who saw through the glory of a family, comforting his daughter in despair.

"Please rest assured that Empress Dowager Zhang Huan will not hurt the Empress Dowager easily. Only when the Empress Dowager is alive can he suppress the party members who oppose him in the name of Empress Dowager. At most, he will live in seclusion. That's fine. Don't you care about those little things in the world. Isn't the Empress Dowager believe in Taoism? He simply devotes himself to practicing Taoism, and perhaps the Empress Dowager will achieve something."

Feng Endao's speech was neither fast nor slow, and he said it slowly, slowly relaxing Cui Xiaofu's nervous heart. Before she could speak, a burst of rapid footsteps suddenly came from outside, and the heart that had just calmed down suddenly hung in the air.

"Wait until the old slave to see." Feng Endao quickly walked out of the room, and a moment later he heard his angry shout, "You can't be so rude. She is the queen mother of the current dynasty. Even if she wants to leave, she will walk decently. How can she be taken by you, the big and thick men?"

Cui Xiaofu's nervousness quietly dropped, but her face turned red again. She stood up with a 'live' and strode outside.

Outside, dozens of soldiers wearing armored armor stood in a row with knives. An officer who looked like a captain was explaining to Feng Endao, "We are not taking the Empress Dowager to go to Tai Chi Palace, but we are worried that the Empress Dowager's road will be unsafe. We are ordered to come to protect it, and there is no other intention."

"What if the Ai family neither goes to Tai Chi Palace nor accepts your protection?" Cui Xiaofu suddenly asked coldly.

"Why should the Empress Dowager make a humble position? Besides, the Daming Palace is about to be closed, and all the palace maids and eunuchs have been moved away. What's the point of staying alone in the Daming Palace?" The captain bowed and said neither humble nor arrogantly.

Cui Xiaofu stared at his eyes and gritted her teeth for a long time and said, "What a Zhang Huan, the Ai family has seen it."

As Cui Xiaofu's carriage gradually disappeared at the end of the palaces of the Tai Chi Palace, there was a loud "boom!", and the gate of Xuanwu Gate slowly closed.

The Zichen Pavilion in the Daming Palace has always been the office of the Emperor of the Tang Dynasty. It means the monarchy. However, from the past two days, the Zichen Pavilion has been renovated again, all the glazed tiles have been removed, the rotten wood has been pulled out, and the huge pillars and beams have to be replaced with new ones. From morning to night, hundreds of craftsmen are always busy in Dingding Dongdong.

Since Zichen Pavilion is being renovated, it is naturally impossible to work there. Therefore, in the Secretariat of the Ming Palace, the court room of the former right prime minister Pei Jun has been replaced with a new owner. Zhang Huan temporarily moved here from the Ministry of War to wait for the restoration of Zichen Pavilion.

But if we look at this from another perspective, although there has not been a formal decree to remove Li Mian from acting as the right prime minister, in fact, Zhang Huan's move is equivalent to announcing to the government and the opposition that there is no longer a seat for Li Mian here.

The Tang Dynasty's positioning of a prime minister was to "assist the emperor and govern all officials, govern all matters, and his responsibilities were heavy." Because it was important, it was never dedicated to one person, so that since the founding of the country, there was no full-time prime minister, but a group of prime ministers, such as the Zhongshu Ling and the Zhongshu Ling Zhangshi, the Minister of Personnel and the Zhongshu Ling Zhangshi, etc. The key here is to obtain the position of Ping Zhangshi, and obtain this qualification, which can be called a prime minister. Until the late period of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, the power of the prime minister in the Tang Dynasty was a process of collective rule.

The office of the prime minister is in the Zhengshi Hall. The Zhengshi Hall is a mobile place, sometimes in the Menxia Province, and sometimes in the Secretariat. The ruling pen in the Zhengshi Hall is the symbol of prime minister's power. Each prime minister takes turns to work in the Zhengshi Hall and takes turns to master the ruling pen to exercise prime minister's power. The reason why Li Linfu, Yang Guozhong and others were able to monopolize the power of the ruling pen in the late Emperor Xuanzong of Tang Dynasty was that they had long been stolen.

After the government affairs of aristocratic families, the cabinet system was implemented, and the cabinet minister was the former Tongzhongshu Menxia Pingzhangshi. This was to adapt to the demands of major families for power. Everyone ranked in the position and made collective decisions, but the ruling affairs were in the hands of the right prime minister, and they just took turns to be the right prime minister.

In the late period of Pei Jun's reign, the aristocratic family began to decline, and the cabinet system evolved into a balance of power among the three major forces, but the fundamental point of the right prime minister's mastery of the ruling affairs was still unchanged.

Now, with the demise of the Prime Minister and the Queen Mother Party, the original power structure obviously cannot adapt to the new situation, but no matter what, before the new power structure was introduced, the right minister still held the power of the world.

Zhang Huan did not ascend the throne in one step at this time. Instead, he adopted a gentler transition method to exercise military and national power as a state supervisor. In this way, another question arises: whether Zhang Huan is a monarch or a minister. If he is a monarch, then his office should not be in the Secretariat, but it should be in Zichen Pavilion, or directly in the Linde Hall of the Daming Palace. Then his whole family should also move into the Daming Palace, but things seem to have not yet developed to that point.

But if he was a minister, how should the power of the governor and the right prime minister be divided? So in this embarrassing situation where the monarch is not a monarch and the minister is not a minister, Zhang Huan adopted a clever technical method. He first closed the harem of the Daming Palace and drove away the nominal monarch. This was to tell the court that he was the real monarch of the Tang Dynasty. Secondly, he renovated the Zichen Pavilion, which not only avoided the adverse effects of his immediate ascension to the throne, but also took the opportunity to move into the office of the Secretariat and seize the power of the right prime minister, so that the governor and the right prime minister can be combined into one.

It can be said that he killed two birds with one stone. Therefore, he is now both a king and a minister, who monopolized the power of the monarch and prime minister. As for the acting right prime minister, Li Mian had to return to the Ministry of Rites and be his Minister of Rites.

At this moment, in the court room of Zhang Huan in the Secretariat, six people, Zhang Huan, Pei You, Cui Yu, Lu Qi, Han Huan and Yuan Zai, were secretly conducting an emergency consultation. The content of the consultation was that Chu Xingshui, the Minister of Justice, refused to return to Beijing for a long time. The reason why he refused to return to Beijing was very simple. According to him, it was because the Huaixi Jiedushi Li Xilie wanted to attack Huainan and he had to stay in Guangling for defense. However, Zhang Huan received information. It was that Li Xilie's troops were in conflict. His generals Liang Chongyi and Liu Qia each occupied a county and did not buy Li Xilie's account. They had a tendency to be independent. Li Xilie's troops actually had only 20,000 troops.

Li Xilie was already too busy to take care of himself and did not have the energy to attack Huainan again. Then the excuse of Chu Xingshui being prepared for Huainan is fake. What he really wanted to be prepared for might be Lin Jiuhan's troops stationed in Yuhang County.

Zhang Huan never expected that Chu Xingshui would become the last fortress of aristocratic families. The Pei family gave up military power, and the Cui family also gave up private soldiers. The Chu family, which was originally the easiest to solve, became a thorn. Indeed, on the one hand, Zhang Huan could not give the Chu family greater power, and he had given the left and right prime ministers to the Cui family and the Pei family respectively. For Chu Xingshui, he originally planned to give him the Minister of Personnel, but the condition was that the Chu family abandoned the troops, but Chu Xingshui was obviously not satisfied with this condition; but on the other hand, Chu Xingshui was unwilling to give up the Chu family's control over Huainan, and he hoped to maintain the original state.

But Zhang Huan was not only worried that Chu Xingshui would not abandon his troops, but also that Li Shidao, who was privately accepted by Chu Xingshui, was a wolf, and Cui Qinggong was the second. If the Chu family was careless, they would be swallowed up by him. Jianghuai, especially Huainan, was already the granary and economic center of the Tang Dynasty, and was the hope for the revival of the Tang Dynasty. Once a war turmoil occurred there, it would be an extremely heavy blow to the Tang Dynasty.

"As far as I know, Chu Xingshui was also guarding against Li Shidao, and he broke up his Puyang army into the Huainan army. Li Shidao is currently the Baoying military envoy, with only 5,000 soldiers under his command, and only 2,000 of his confidant soldiers. He can't make any troubles for the time being. However, Chu Xingshui has a 100,000 army in his hands. In order to support this 100,000 army, he needs at least one million yuan in grain every year. In this way, he will inevitably invade the interests of the court and greatly reduce the court's grain transportation income. This will be a long-term and serious consequence."

The person who spoke was Han Huan, the Minister of Works, who was finally Wang Ang's confidant and later became a backbone of the Empress Dowager Party. After clarifying Zhang Huan's identity as a royal family, he saw the general trend clearly, resolutely surrendered to Zhang Huan, and took the initiative to hand over the tens of thousands of training troops in his hands to the Ministry of War. Therefore, he was highly valued by Zhang Huan. He had made a clear statement that if Chu Xingshui was obsessed with it, Han Huan would take over as Minister of Justice and directly take charge of the Ministry of Justice.

At the same time, because Han Huan was a long-term observer of Zhejiang and the governor of Yuhang County, he knew the situation of the Chu family well, so when he got up to speak, everyone listened very attentively.

"Since the rise of Kaiyuan, the Chu family has been working hard in Huainan. Although they have not interfered in the tax revenue of the Salt and Iron Supervision, they have almost monopolized the most profitable life in Guangling and do not pay a single cent tax burden. Not only that, the Chu family has occupied 200,000 hectares of upper fields in the most abundant places such as Guangling County, Jinling County, Danyang County, Wu County for decades, and obtained millions of stones of grain every year, all of which are stocked in the warehouses of Danyang County. I have seen it with my own eyes that the food stored there is at least tens of millions of stones, so Cui Qinggong was determined to attack Huainan, which is also the reason."

When Han Huan talked about stocking up tens of millions of stones of grain, everyone shouted in a low voice. No one expected that the Chu family, which had always been low-key, would be so rich that it could rival the country. At this moment, everyone looked at Zhang Huan together. The key was that Chu Xingshui was his uncle. First of all, his attitude could determine everyone's thinking.

Zhang Huan did not immediately answer. His original intention of summoning everyone to a meeting was to remove the Chu family's military power, but Han Huan's words made him realize that the reason why the Chu family refused to give up military power was far from being as simple as the power was difficult to subside, but that they needed to safeguard the Chu family's huge economic interests, and things became complicated.

He needs to think carefully about this matter before he can decide. Zhang Huan pondered for a while and said, "I have summoned everyone to discuss it in a hurry, and I did not give you a chance to think deeply. Now I will give you one night to consider it. I hope you will think about it again when you go back. I want to solve the matter of the Chu family together with Li Xilie's problem. Tomorrow, we will reunite here. Now that the next court time has passed, everyone will go back directly!"

When everyone saw this, they stood up and said goodbye to Zhang Huan. However, Zhang Huan called Han Huan to leave in the end, "I want to learn more about the situation of the Chu family. Please ask Han to come to my mansion to have a meal, would you like to appreciate your face?"

Han Huan quickly gave a deep bow, "Han Huan is honored to be the one who supervises the country, how dare he not follow!"
Chapter completed!