CHAPTER 324: CHAPTER 231: LET’S TALK ABOUT WHETHER TO BE HUMAN!_2

Then it would just be making wedding clothes for someone else—not quite proper.

By rights, it would be best to wait a little longer, let Wanjin develop more, deepen its foundation, prepare greater reserves of soldiers, and run a few more draft cycles for the army—but given the current circumstances, it’s getting hard to wait any longer.

If I wait another two or three years, Japan’s Warring States will have no place for me, and none of my plans will be possible.

So, the best is to throw the whole Ise Peninsula into chaos—by the time I get there, the Hokitate Family will be too feeble to resist, and the Daimyo like Hosokawa, Miyoshi, Rokkaku, and the rest won’t be in the mood to meddle with me.

There are ways—whether they’ll succeed or not, who knows; and even if they do, it’s not exactly heaven-approved...

Harano didn’t care that the Wanjin Army was having sporadic scraps with Minoh folks outside; he just holed up in the city, ruining the water. After being a "Lord of a Place" for all these years, he was no longer the average college student he used to be. His morality score slid ever lower; after stewing for two days, he felt he’d still have to play dirty. After all, if the Ise people don’t die, then the Wanjin people would—better to have a few more Ise dead, frankly!

It’s an age of chaos: either you swallow me or I swallow you—there isn’t much morality left to talk about.

With his mind made up, he mulled over it for a few more days and began summoning Wanjin’s civil officials and core members of the Life-saving Group to Matsukura Castle for a meeting—time to strike a blow.

Wanjin had always produced salt, and its production methods are much more advanced than regular salt-households. It had group-based labor, meaning costs were lower than most. Now that they’d found a stable coarse salt supplier with an endless stream of raw materials, Wanjin could easily leverage its cost advantage—selling without profit or even at a loss—and directly crush salt prices along the coastal stretches of the Ise Peninsula.

This move is mainly to set up the purchasing channels; uses cheap salt to buy off local Samurai, rich families, and national conscripts along the coast, enticing them to voluntarily resell refined salt to Ise Peninsula’s interior while conveniently bringing back whatever Wanjin needed.

But what does Wanjin need?

Wanjin needs intact beehives, frog legs, long owl feathers, swallow beaks, butterfly wings...

This was to hit the grain yields across the Ise Peninsula. Granted, rice can self-pollinate by wind, but if you kill off a massive amount of pollinating insects like bees and butterflies, then wipe out loads of beneficial birds and insects like frogs, owls, swallows, rice yields will dip thirty percent or so—no big deal.

Meanwhile, buckwheat—the main staple of commoners in this era—relies on cross-pollination. A targeted reduction in pollinator insects will be catastrophic for buckwheat harvests; cutting yields in half would be getting off light.

And in these times, there’s already not enough grain; commoners have to supplement with wild vegetables and fruits to barely survive. If half their staple food gets disappeared and rice takes a hit too, they’ll have to use their grains to pay annual tribute—there’s no way people won’t rebel...

Of course, the Daimyo, rich families, and Samurai on the Ise Peninsula could theoretically massively reduce tribute, launch disaster relief, and hand out grain to keep commoners alive. But in all Harano’s years of experience, that just doesn’t happen. The Samurai only press harder for tribute during famine, terrified of becoming weak and getting wiped out by enemies. Unlike him, they’d never hand out food to the starving just to see them through hard times.

And hungry people are the scariest. When that time comes, eighty percent of Ise Peninsula will be a mess. There’ll be wave after wave of small uprisings to dodge and defy tribute. When Wanjin lands on the Ise Peninsula again, there’ll be a lot less resistance and casualties.

Yes, I can even stockpile some cheap grain from the Kantou and Northeast regions ahead of time—when the time comes, I’ll be able to win hearts with food.

Harano’s "procurement list" ran absurdly long. If not for the limitations of the era—thrips, midge flies, rice borers and such were too tiny to catch—he’d have listed all those bugs too, to wipe out every pollinator outright. But even without the little ones, this list was so bizarre that Wanjin’s civil officials and Life-saving Group backbone sat collectively bewildered, exchanging glances, clueless as to what Harano was up to.

Collecting all these things...kind of sounded like some sort of witchcraft. Was Lord Yehua planning to start alchemy and chase immortality?

Harano couldn’t be bothered to explain. When you’re doing evil, better to keep it to yourself—no need to shout it to the world. He just laid down a death order: everyone was to collect these odd bugs and feathers with all their might, regardless of cost, even pay sky-high prices. Next year, their Wanjin assessments would be based on how many insects and feathers they’d secured.

As Wanjin’s first generation leader, his prestige was so high that even if he demanded every household hand over a young girl, it wouldn’t be a problem—let alone spending his own money. There’d be no civil unrest inside Wanjin over this. From now on, all the output from Wanjin’s state-run saltworks would be reserved for this scheme; the aim was to ensure that after next autumn’s harvest, thirty percent of the Ise Peninsula population would go hungry.

These Wanjin civil officials and Life-saving Group operatives obeyed orders and went back to prepare. But before they could link up with the small water thieves (fishing villages moonlighting as half-thieves, half-civilians) and rich Samurai on Ise’s east coast, Harano sent another directive—this time to Wanjin’s emerging merchants, ordering them to buy up Ise Peninsula’s speciality: white ramie cloth, at high prices this year.

Ramie originated in China, later spread to Japan, also known as "Nanjing grass." The plant loves warmth and moisture, thriving in Japan’s climate. In the Japan Warring States Period, its cultivation is already widespread. The linen woven from it is a popular mainstream fabric, while the white ramie cloth from Ise Peninsula is considered the finest—top shelf among commoners’ fabrics, especially prized for making furoshiki.

But the fabric has a drawback: only the long, tough fibers from handpicked stalks can be repeatedly pounded into pure white thread. Not only is the process time-consuming, but producing a single bolt of high-grade fabric leaves heaps of inferior ramie as waste—a bit extravagant, really.

Now, Harano set his sights on this time-intensive luxury. He ordered merchants, alongside regular trade, to buy up the cloth at little profit or even subsidize it. The Life-saving Group was to spread rumors across Ise Peninsula that this fabric was a hot commodity in Kantou and the Northeast—an expensive luxury—and that Wanjin would buy even more next year, encouraging Ise’s commoners to devote more labor to spinning linen and pushing local Samurai to conscript more labor and expand ramie cultivation.

This was yet another safeguard for next year’s grain crisis among Ise’s commoners. When the time comes, Samurai with money can buy grain from far away, but commoners with cash may not find any grain at all—or only the kind sold at sky-high prices.

Even now, Harano wasn’t finished. Still uneasy, he continued plotting behind closed doors in Matsukura Castle, poring over all intelligence from Ise Peninsula, churning out poison schemes one after another, all to weaken its Daimyo further.

This was, in a way, taking a page from Oda Nobunaga’s book. To seize Saito Ryuko and Oda Nobuaki with the least struggle, Oda Nobunaga shed all pretense—marrying off sisters, daughters, hunting down uncles, offering up his own sons—short of selling his ass, he’d done it all.

So I can’t fall too far behind, can I? Whether or not I’m still a human being, well, we’ll talk about that later!