CHAPTER 296: CHAPTER 213 DIVINE ARTIFACT!_2

Yeah, once you round the tip of the Ise Peninsula and head further west, you’ll enter the Seto Inland Sea. That place is an absolute goldmine—merchant ships come and go, there are countless island fortresses, water thieves everywhere, fleets of navies galore. With just the Chita and a few customs ships and kobaya boats, it’d be suicide to go poking our nose in there right now—that’s not a place New Wanjin can afford to mess with.

Long road ahead, seriously. Wanjin is still pretty weak, still stuck down as a small Daimyo.

......

Harano himself was personally driving the Wanjin Navy to train like maniacs, darting all over the sea, firing cannons and guns all over the place, sparing no expense just to get their combat skills up to scratch as fast as possible. Meanwhile, New Wanjin City was absolutely buzzing with activity.

It was mainly thanks to Yoshiziro Hirajima and that bunch of ironware masters.

Their whole group had basically come back from the dead. After landing a massive loan from the bank and placing orders for ships, they were cranking out ironware at full steam, hoping to pack the cargo ships to the brim—again and again!—and make as much profit as possible from this rare chance to ship goods on a long voyage.

I mean, if Lord Yehua went through all the trouble to escort them and they just hauled back a measly few thousand pounds of ironware, wouldn’t that be totally stupid?

So they weren’t even considering failure anymore. Secretly, they were scrambling to borrow more money; in this economic downturn, they were weirdly hiring more people and offering over-the-top pay, all just to stock up on as much product as they could.

Doesn’t matter anymore—the Lord of Wanjin already went above and beyond for them. If they failed, like if a storm sank the ship or they got beaten back en route or whatever, there’d be nothing to complain about. They’d just blame their luck, not add to Harano’s troubles, and just lock arms and jump into the sea together.

Life or death—all riding on this one roll of the dice!

If we make it through, we’ll hit it big. If not—just die and be done with it!

Yoshiziro Hirajima and the others’ drastic behavior caused a huge stir. Wanjin people already thought Harano was kind of ridiculously altruistic, so softhearted it was almost supernatural—like a Bodhisattva reborn. No one expected he’d go even further: just to save a dozen or twenty of the territory’s little workshop owners from bankruptcy, he was willing to spend a fortune to build a copper-plated ship and personally escort them on a trip.

Never heard of anything like this in all of Japan—you’re lucky if the usual merchant riffraff don’t get straight-up chewed up by their Lord, let alone getting help from the people at the top?

The "parliament" Harano created was suddenly the talk of the town. Even though New Wanjin City didn’t even have newspapers yet and information barely spread, people quickly locked onto this strange new thing, trying to figure out how this pack of losers—Yoshiziro Hirajima and company—managed a comeback using it.

When it comes to their own interests, nearly everyone in the world gets real smart. It didn’t take long for these clever types to notice the parliament could "direct" the likes of Endo Chiyoda and other top civil officials.

Or maybe "direct" isn’t the right word—more like, if you cried your eyes out at the meetings, you could wring some support from Endo Chiyoda and the rest. Like this time, they even managed to drag Lord Yehua into it, making him personally step in.

Something that could summon the Lord of Wanjin—if this were some Western fantasy, that would be a divine artifact!

After all, in terms of destructive power, Harano outclasses a giant octopus!

As more and more people heard about all this, the number eyeing this "divine artifact"—and getting jealous—shot through the roof. They were all old subordinates of Lord Yehua, so why did only Yoshiziro Hirajima and his crew get special treatment?

If it were Ah Man, sure—Ah Man supposedly saved Lord Yehua dozens of times, took over three hundred arrows for him, so a bit of privilege is understandable. But who is this Yoshiziro Hirajima guy anyway? He’s not the only one who dug canals and sifted iron sand for Wanjin—a ton of folks have seniority over him, and even more have done bigger things.

This isn’t fair. Lord Yehua’s favor should include me, too!

In the past few years, with Harano’s interest-free loans, plenty of independent workshop owners had popped up in Wanjin. These folks tended to have bigger guts and quicker wits. Emboldened, they pestered anyone they could, and studied the "parliamentary rules" carefully. Pretty soon, they figured out who their own "delegate" was and started tearing into them—Damn, you’re useless! Look at Yoshiziro Hirajima: dared to eat the first crab, pushed through a proposal, and rescued the whole industry!

And you—you just know how to vote ’yes’? That’s it?

What the hell’s going to happen to our industry?

What, you say that was just the first time, you didn’t know how things worked, so you weren’t ready?

Then how come Yoshiziro Hirajima was ready? Why could he submit a proposal, and even stand up there sobbing in public?

You’re useless! Get to the parliament and cry! If Lord Yehua is going to protect those guys and escort them almost halfway across Japan to North Land to sell goods, he’s gotta take us, too!

The "delegates" personally handpicked by Harano were mostly people with a good reputation in their respective trades—steady, honest types. But now they’d been totally set up by Harano; a lot of them had suddenly become synonymous with "useless," with colleagues all over them. Some people were even saying in private that, even though Harano usually had an eye for talent, this time he’d made a bad pick—the delegates for their sector just weren’t up to scratch.

The implication being: I should be the delegate. If you swapped me in, I’d cry so hard in parliament I’d have snot bubbles, and Harano would feel so bad he’d take all of us along.

The new delegates, getting roasted both openly and behind their backs, had no choice but to swallow their frustration and submit parliament meeting requests with all sorts of reasons.

Some started copying Yoshiziro Hirajima’s playbook with the whole "pitiful wretch" act. For example, loads of Wanjin taverns took a huge hit in the past two years from grain controls—their delegate bawled his eyes out right in front of Speaker Izumi Hichiji, sobbing that since Yoshiziro Hirajima and co. were getting taken, if the liquor industry wasn’t included too, he’d have no face left and might as well just hang himself from the parliament doors.

Others played the "good little helper." Like the Wanjin dyers and saltmakers—who mostly hadn’t suffered much, and many of whom were "state-run" anyway—they all jumped in declaring their support for Lord Yehua’s "selling expedition" and begged to be taken along, or at least be allowed to speak at the meeting.

Izumi Hichiji was over the moon. The old guy had obsessed his whole life about communal self-governance in villages, and totally admired Harano’s parliament experiment. He’d actually been worried it’d fizzle out, and never expected it to get so popular so fast.

After contacting Harano urgently, he immediately organized the "Second Meeting of the New Wanjin City Parliament" and easily passed a fat stack of proposals to bring a huge crowd along with the fleet for the expedition.

All at once, after those years of famine, New Wanjin boomed. Raw materials prices shot up, and even the Wanjin Shipyard, which had just been built, was flooded with so many orders that they had to urgently hire more workers—the place was changing by the day.