Uncle from a poor family

Chapter 721 Attack Point

A teahouse somewhere in the south of the city.

The place was booked by Pang Qing early in the morning. After waiting for a long time, Zhang Yanling finally arrived.

Pang Qing put away his contempt and came out to greet the guest in person. He took the guest to a secluded place in the teahouse and quickly explained to Zhang Yanling what he had found out that day.

"...Not only Wanhe Temple, but also many temples and Taoist temples in the city have had their stone coffins opened. Everything inside has disappeared. I think they were taken away by people from the Censorate."

Pang Qing seemed very worried. "If they really make a big fuss about the reconstruction of Wanhe Temple, it will definitely affect your father's reputation."

Zhang Yanling asked, "Shouldn't Mr. Pang be more worried about Minister Li at this time?"

Pang Qing said helplessly: "There are too many things that people criticize my master for, so I am not afraid of this one more thing. Only if Zhang Guozhang's reputation is intact can my master's future be protected.

"Second Young Master, what can we do to make up for it now?"

Zhang Yanling smiled and said, "Mr. Pang, you said that Ma Wensheng wanted to make a big fuss about these so-called nightmare-suppressing items. In order to achieve the effect of surprise, he should not make it public... The officials you went to visit should not have received the news in advance, right?"

"This……"

Pang Qing thought about it carefully and nodded, "This matter is very confidential, and indeed no news has leaked out at all."

Zhang Yanling asked, "Why is it that when Minister Li has made military achievements and has leverage over many of them, or has some connections with them, everyone is trying to avoid him?"

Pang Qing couldn't figure it out for a moment and fell into deep thought.

"Is everyone just waiting and watching?"

Zhang Yanling tentatively expressed his views.

Pang Qing said: "Wait and see? That's possible. But... these officials in the court have all started to exclude my Taoist master, and even made enemies... It's really hard to justify. But so far, I haven't heard of anything targeting my Taoist master...

"Could it be that some people think that my Taoist master will never be able to gain a foothold in the court in the future?"

Zhang Yanling smiled and asked, "Why do they think so? Even with my father's support, Minister Li couldn't escape the disaster?"

Pang Qing understood instantly and had a sudden realization: "The root of the problem lies with the Minister of Personnel Wang Shu? Only the head of the Ministry of Personnel is qualified to decide such a major matter and make a group of people stand in unison... The problem is that Wang Shu has not made any moves recently!"

Zhang Yanling sighed, "In the final analysis, this time everyone in the court has united to target my father and Minister Li. They also took advantage of the fact that my father was ill, Minister Li was in the northwest, and there was no one in the court to manage the affairs. They wanted to take this opportunity to completely prevent them from participating in the decision-making of the Ming Dynasty court affairs."

Pang Qing said: "What Ma Wensheng did was never something that could be tolerated. But if it was really Wang Shu who was behind it, then the trouble we will face will be even greater."

"Mr. Pang, what do you think should be the starting point if someone wants to attack my father?" Zhang Yanling asked, "Is it the evil spirit in the stone coffin of Wanhe Temple, or the mistakes my father made in the past, or maybe..."

"The flaw must be in the late emperor!"

Pang Qing thought for a moment and said with certainty, "Your father's treatment of the late emperor was an act of presumption that bypassed the Imperial Hospital. Using this as a reason to attack your father may be the most effective way to shake your father's position in the court."

"Makes sense."

Zhang Yanling nodded and said, "But if we want to use the matter of the late emperor as a starting point, someone must put pressure on Your Majesty. This person must be someone who can make Your Majesty submit and have no choice but to do so..."

"The Empress Dowager? ...Will she do that? Why don't I think so?"

As Li Zisheng's aide, Pang Qing was familiar with court affairs and was always able to find the key points of the problem based on Zhang Yanling's words.

If Zhu Youtang wanted to cause trouble for Zhang Luan, the emperor's father-in-law, by using the matter of Emperor Chenghua's dying illness, someone had to put pressure on him, otherwise Zhu Youtang would simply not bother to pay attention.

If it was Empress Dowager Zhou who took the initiative to raise the matter, the emperor would have to reconsider it.

After all, the emperor needs to ensure the orthodoxy of the succession to the throne, and the one who can decide all this at the moment is obviously not the Queen Mother Wang who lives deep in the harem and doesn't care about anything, but Zhu Youtang's grandmother who lives in Qingning Palace.

But Empress Dowager Zhou had a very good relationship with Zhang Luan... In this case, if the ministers in the court wanted to find trouble with Zhang Luan on the grounds that Emperor Chenghua had made a mistake in treating his illness, it would be difficult for this approach to work.

Pang Qing then continued, "Will they make a fuss about the medical records kept in the Imperial Hospital? When your father was in charge of the Imperial Hospital, he surpassed many people in the hospital. At that time, my Taoist master also made a lot of efforts behind the scenes, causing many people to lose the trust of the late emperor. If everyone in the Imperial Hospital stood together to attack..."

If applying pressure from top to bottom does not work, they will have to find "professionals" to prove that Zhang Luan was just a charlatan who did not have the ability to cure diseases and save lives, but insisted on treating Emperor Chenghua, which ultimately led to his death.

This is actually very easy to prove, because Zhang Luan is really a charlatan. If he needs to prove himself in front of others... then he will basically be exposed on the spot. But the problem is that with Zhang Luan's current identity and status, it is also very difficult to make him expose his shortcomings.

If Zhang Luan doesn't cooperate, it will be difficult for others to attack him.

Therefore, it would be most effective if it was Queen Mother Zhou who took action.

Forcing you, Zhang Luan, to prove yourself!
But the late emperor is dead, what do you have to prove it?

Find another patient to treat?
How to prove that the conditions of these two patients are in common?
Once Zhang Luan falls into the stage of self-proving, it actually means that he has lost.

Therefore, the self-certification phase cannot be started from the very beginning, or in other words... there is no need for self-certification at all!

Now that things have come to this, you can believe it or not.

Anyway, I have the emperor's support, so I can completely refuse to cooperate and ignore your attacks on me... I, Zhang, am not a person who likes to save face, so I don't have to argue with you to prove myself... Because I am just a phony, and I won't dig a hole for myself to jump into.

On this point, Zhang Luan has a very good attitude.

Zhang Yanling said: "It is actually very difficult to make the world think that it was my father's inability to cure diseases that led to the death of the late emperor. Because curing diseases and saving lives... cannot be deduced after the fact. However... if someone uses himself as proof that my father is indeed incapable of curing diseases..."

When Pang Qing heard this, he almost jumped up from the table and asked in a lost voice: "Huai En...?"

Zhang Luan didn't treat many people, or he was the kind of person who wouldn't treat others easily.

Therefore, it is extremely difficult to prove that Zhang Luan is a charlatan.

You don't want to treat the patient, and because he is the emperor's father-in-law, you can't force him to do it. How can you prove it?
After Emperor Chenghua passed away, the only person Zhang Luan treated was Huai En. Because Huai En was seriously ill, Tan Chang introduced him to Zhang Luan and asked him to treat him...

If Huai En's illness could prove that Zhang Luan had "misdiagnosed" him, or that it was Zhang Luan's action that caused Huai En's condition to rapidly deteriorate, or even cause his death...

Then we can infer that Zhang Luan really had no ability in treating illnesses, and we can even push the current emperor to re-investigate whether it was reasonable for Zhang Luan to treat Emperor Chenghua, and whether it led to Emperor Chenghua's early death.

Pang Qing said nervously, "Second Young Master, your reminder is correct. If it really comes to this, and Eunuch Huai insists on using the excuse that he has only a few days left to live to attack your father, things will indeed be difficult to handle.

"Perhaps Your Majesty will not take it to heart, but once Eunuch Huai dies, there will be a lot of criticism against your father. And because your father treated the late emperor, he indirectly helped Your Majesty, who was the crown prince at the time. In order to calm public opinion, Your Majesty can only..."

Zhang Yanling said, "Although my father treated Eunuch Huai, he was also ill, so I was the one who basically treated him. Moreover, Eunuch Huai was already terminally ill, and this was known to almost everyone in the court. Logically speaking, it would be difficult for him to blackmail my father with this."

Pang Qing was surprised and said, "Could it be that he wants to... Oh, Second Young Master, what should we do? He is still using the medicine given by your father, right? If he intends to harm me, then... it will be very difficult to deal with."

Because Huai En had an incurable disease and went to Zhang Luan for treatment, so on the surface, he couldn't cause trouble for the doctor just because his disease couldn't be cured.

People of this era are also reasonable. Generally speaking, they would never think that Zhang Luan killed Huai En.

But this doesn't mean that Wynn has no way out.

The most important point is that Huai En’s current situation is actually very similar to that of the late period of Emperor Chenghua.

It was also an incurable disease, and other doctors were helpless to treat it. It was also a desperate situation that led to the discovery of Zhang Luan.

In this way, the background is extremely similar.

If Huai En died suddenly, his survival time would be even shorter than what other doctors thought, and he would appear to be in great pain when he died. He might even have died of "poisoning". The prescription used some medicines that were unique to Zhang Luan but not available to others...

This inevitably makes people associate Huai'en's death with Zhang Luan.

In order to kill Huai En as soon as possible so as not to interfere with his promotion to a higher position, Zhang Luan took the opportunity of curing his illness to "get rid of" Huai En.

From this, we can infer that certain conflicting medicinal herbs may appear in the medicine prescribed by Zhang Luan, and then be taken away for inspection, or used for experiments on cats, dogs, or even humans. As long as the animals or humans who take the medicine are poisoned, many things will not be explained clearly.

Others would say, could it be that Huai En would deliberately frame Zhang Luan and poison himself to death?
is it possible?
And because of your different political views with Huai En, you, Zhang Luan, deliberately harmed and killed Huai En. This is only natural...

In this way, it seemed that Huai En, who had no chance of winning, suddenly found an opportunity to make a comeback with the help of his illness.

But what he had to pay with was his own life.

Simply creating a dying state would not be so effective, as it would not allow the court officials to force the emperor to launch an investigation. Only if Huai En sacrificed himself, his death would have a greater impact, allowing the court officials to use this as an opportunity to reopen the investigation into the cause of death of the previous emperor.

When Pang Qing thought of this, he panicked and said tremblingly: "Eunuch Huai is not an ordinary person. He has repeatedly plotted to frame your father and my father to step down. Now it is the critical time for him to leave the court. If he kills himself to show his loyalty to the Ming Dynasty, it is very likely..."

Zhang Yanling nodded and said, "Yes, in his eyes, his life is nothing. Helping the Ming Dynasty return to the right track is a just act and his contribution to the Ming Dynasty. At the same time, he would think that using harm as a means is a necessary condition for completing his plan to help the Ming Dynasty, and he would not think that he is being mean."

Pang Qing said: "Second Master, I shouldn't have taken on the job of treating Eunuch Huai so easily. Now you're in trouble. You need to think of a solution quickly!

"Otherwise... stop supplying the medicine over there immediately and stop providing it."

Zhang Yanling smiled and said, "The innocent are innocent. If the medicine is suddenly cut off now, what will others think? When Huai En was an official in the Imperial Household Department, my father provided him with medicine to treat his illness. After he left office, he stopped giving it to him? Or if we change to ordinary prescriptions and herbs and let Huai En's family get the medicine themselves, people will think that my father did not help him."

Pang Qing said: "Why would I care about that? Being wrongly accused and not helping someone is better than being framed, right?"

"Having said that."

Zhang Yanling nodded and said, "But any change may cause the opponent to be more vigilant. The best way to deal with it is to follow the procedures and make emergency plans privately. This is more important than anything else.

"Besides, the opponent has many means at his disposal. Wouldn't the new emperor and a relative who is not very successful seem immature in the eyes of those experienced and far-sighted officials in the court?"

"what?"

Pang Qing suddenly felt that the young man in front of him had great ambitions and was an extraordinary person.

Headed by Huai En, there was a group of veteran officials in the court, including Wang Shu, Ma Wensheng, and Hanlin officials such as Xu Pu and Liu Jian. Although they did not come to power through conspiracy and deception, their qualifications and abilities were enough to crush the new emperor and Zhang Luan.

In this situation, are they really only going to resort to despicable means of framing and slandering others?

Or are they making a big fuss about something like exorcising evil spirits or nightmares?
There must be various means to make the emperor think that he should not listen to Zhang Luan blindly, create various troubles for Zhang Luan, and make it impossible for him to gain a foothold in the court!
Pang Qing said: "No wonder your father has been so evasive since he entered the court, and has to keep finding excuses to avoid going to court and going to the government office. It turns out that he had expected this day to come, and he has prepared all the countermeasures.

"No wonder the Taoist, who is so noble and proud, always expresses his sincere admiration for your father. It's not because of his ability, but because of his overall consideration. He is truly an otherworldly expert."

"..."

Zhang Yanling was speechless after hearing this.

What.

I am analyzing the situation with you, but you have to praise the old man in my family who is doing nothing? Do you think he is a hermit?
He can describe a real bear as a pretending bear, over-interpret that old guy, and describe the inability to evade as a great recluse in the court... You and your Taoist master have never seen what a real bear looks like!

"Yes, my father has always known his situation, so he tried his best to avoid becoming the target of criticism in the court too early." As a son, what else can I say? Since you understand so well, then continue to brag!

Pang Qing said: "Second Master, you must hurry back to discuss with your father and come up with a plan. My father has resigned from his post as the governor of Shanxi and is heading to the inner three passes. He cannot return to the court to discuss a plan with you two. It can be said that the situation is very critical, and your father..."

Zhang Yanling nodded and said, "In the current situation, we naturally need to have some sense of urgency. My father is also considering and weighing the pros and cons, so we may have to trouble Mr. Pang to mediate."

"Just tell me who you want to contact, no matter how much money it costs or what the price is. It's all up to you to say a word."

Pang Qing now understood everything.

Seeing that Li Zisheng could not be relied upon, Zhang Luan gave up all hope. Only the wise boy in front of him could show him a clear way out... and as the "strongest aide", he could only change his ways according to the situation, turn the boat around, and follow the boy in front of him.

(End of this chapter)