Hirado Castle was Dongying’s largest city for foreign trade and also the biggest asset of the Matsuura clan in their battle for supremacy during the Warring States period.
Among its male residents, nearly half were samurai directly loyal to the Matsuura clan, as well as pirates secretly controlled by them… also known as wako pirates.
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At that time, the age of great geographical discoveries and maritime adventures had just begun. The seas were still dominated by the law of the jungle; merchant ships spotting weaker prey would change their flags and temporarily become pirates to make a fortune—an ancient art practiced by all seasoned sailors of the era.
As one of the most active seafaring families in Dongying at the time, the Matsuura clan had mastered the skill of switching between merchant and pirate flags.
Their end… was naturally particularly tragic.
Nearly half of the male population of Hirado Castle were executed by Yang Ge using his dog-eat-dog tactics, with heads piled into five mounds over a meter high outside the city port, and bodies pushed into the sea cart by cart, turning a ten-mile stretch of sea red...
This not only made the entire Hirado Castle tremble under the shadow of the seventy-two demon-braving warriors but also caused the foreign merchant ships docked at Hirado Port to flee within a very short time.
It was foreseeable that news of the barbaric and brutally ferocious nature of the eastern nations would quickly spread in the West, and that Westerner robbers, upon setting foot in that ancient eastern land again, would be much more polite than before.
Next year, the fish caught at Hirado would definitely be particularly plump.
Ultimately, not only did Yang Ge’s group obtain several ships’ worth of valuable goods in Hirado Castle, but they also acquired a thousand servile soldiers…
The goods had already been sent back to Wei by Wang Cheng’s men, and Yang Ge believed Cheng would handle them at a price that would satisfy everyone.
As for the servile soldiers, he crafted a complete nine-tier samurai advancement system overnight.
He designed this system based on filthy mechanisms used in trashy online games from another era aimed at tempting players to spend money, ranging from the lowest ninth-level samurai who could only lead five slaves to the highest first-level samurai who could receive a fief, five hundred slaves, and participate in sharing the plundered goods, creating countless appealing and lucrative privileges within the system.
He had reason to believe that these impoverished Dongying denizens, once they got a taste of this system, would definitely risk their lives and brave death to ascend to higher privilege levels and protect the overall benefits of the system.
Even if they exhausted their ancestors eighteen generations back, they would never reach the threshold of a first-level samurai.
But what did that have to do with Yang Ge and those who stood at the top of this system?
The requirements for levels and upgrades were explicitly laid out; if they couldn’t meet them, they could only blame their own lack of capabilities, and they should introspect whether they had fought hard enough or whether the number of their kin’s heads they had chopped off had increased…
Using such dirty mechanisms, finely tuned with big data to exploit human weaknesses, to bully these uncivilized Dongying natives made Yang Ge’s conscience ache slightly.
Fortunately, the pain wasn’t too severe…
On the morning after capturing Hirado Castle, Yang Ge and his men led a thousand servile soldiers carrying limited provisions to advance to the northeast, heading straight for Fukuoka in Western Sea Road. After breaking through Fukuoka, they planned to cross the Maguan Strait and land on the main island of Dongying to confront the true powerhouses ruling Dongying.
The servile soldiers rampaged through Hirado Castle (now Nagasaki) all night, and in the silent blaze, it wept.
...
"Zhou!"
Finally having a break from the march, Yang Ge called Zhou Fu, who was busy working as a pirate interpreter, over, "How do you find these servile soldiers?"
Zhou Fu replied without hesitation, "A mess, unable to withstand a single blow. Give me two hundred recruitment camp soldiers, and I can easily defeat this rabble!"
Yang Ge knew Zhou Fu’s capabilities and was not surprised by the response, "Exactly because they are a mess and can’t withstand a single blow, I’m handing them over to you for training. You don’t need to hold back; if they don’t listen, beat them. If beating doesn’t work, kill them, to establish your authority through severe punishment!"
Zhou Fu nodded, "Boss, I understand what to do."
Yang Ge patted his shoulder and motioned for him to be calm, "No, you still don’t quite understand. What I mean is… I only want them to obey and be handy to use. The real combat skills, you mustn’t teach them carelessly. This includes how you train soldiers or strategize. Don’t tell these servile soldiers too much. We can consider them fools internally, but we shouldn’t treat them like fools outright. Do you get my point?"
Zhou Fu frowned slightly, worried. He understood what Yang Ge meant, but he was unsure about how to balance it correctly.
Yang Ge: "Think of it as if you’re teaching a bunch of stubborn, ungrateful apprentices. You are training them so they can die for us, do the dirty work, not so they can turn against you, their master."
"If you’re uncertain, just keep an eye on which Dongying leaders in the servile army stand out. When the time is right, send them to the most dangerous places and write them off. Then promote a few Dongying paupers who are just as smart but more obedient to take their places as leaders."
"Of course, you should sound more pleasant, like you are testing them, offering them a chance to prove themselves. This is the best opportunity to be promoted to a higher-level samurai, etc. It’s best to discuss this privately. Believe me, as long as you sound sure and phrase things nicely, they will definitely compete to be the first to die!"