Necessary Corruption 2: Seeds of Hate ... and a Plan (Patreon)

Necessary Corruption

Chapter 2: Seeds of Hate … and a Plan

-VB-

Jin sat in front of his father. Instead of his father, however, there was only a rough portrait drawn both hastily and studiously by the Takanori family’s own artist.

The funeral for his father, Lord Takanori Sano, came a month after the assassination, and today was the last of those funeral rites.

Within the hour, the monks would come and take his father’s casket and carry it up to the only mountain in the area, Mount Hitonora, and begin the funeral pyre.

This was the last time he would kneel before his father.

Thankfully, it was private this time.

His tears did not stop. He sat there silently, but his eyes refused to make less tears. He sat there with his white knuckled hands on top of his knees, and waited for his own heart to stop hurting, except it did not stop hurting.

… Tears dried up a little, and he felt the desire to talk. So he talked.

“Father, what should I do?” Jin asked quietly and wetly. “I am … afraid,” he added honestly. “By the rights of inheritance afforded to me by the Land of Rivers’ ancient laws, I am now Lord Takanori Sato, but I have learned too little to know the scope and weight of my burden. I fear that I have actually failed you already.

“The Southern Coalition has broken apart, father. Without you there to lead them, the other head of noble houses have pulled back on their promise of brotherhood with you and become once more isolationists. Even now, our neighbor, the lord of Gamonishi, looks for ways to hurt me, our people, and our land.

“Our people are afraid. You have been the central figure to our people, but without you, they have lost trust in our family. The tax collectors have not reported since two weeks ago. I fear that they have been bribed, killed, or fled. Reports from the few samurai still loyal to us paint a picture of farmers on the edge of our territory fleeing, abandoning the farms and crops you have lent them.

“And I think that I have become mad in your death. I see and feel things that weren’t there before. I have a desire to bring people into my fold, whatever it may be, and to make them mine… somehow. I could feel this feeling shimmering underneath the veil of my mind, and know that I cannot hold onto it for long.

“Mother killed herself three days ago, father. She couldn’t bear to be separate from you, not even for my sake. I thwarted an assassination attempt on my body, but it cost me the only advisor, Steward Do Go, you have left me. I am without allies, I am without authority, and I am without strength.”

Tears began anew and they fell in torrents.

“I’m scared, father,” he wept as he curled up. “I don’t know what to do.”

He wept until the monks came.

When the monks knocked on the door, he quickly wiped his tears. Father’s lessons were still with him, and he would not show weakness in public.

“Lord Takanori, we are here for the final part of the ceremony.”

Jin nodded as he stood up. “Let us take our father to his last resting place, then.”

The monks came and carried his father’s casket. He too took part in the carriage, and they all moved up towards the mountain. Behind them, many of the affluent and peasantry came to pay their final respects. They followed the monks and him, hiking up the mountain. They passed by pine oaks and shrubs, walked up the mountain roads, and then came to their final destination.

Jin’s men came forward with the dry logs they carried up the entire hike and set it down. The monks chanted as they placed father’s casket over the fire, and then they lit the dry wood beneath.

Fire started off small before roaring into a conflagration almost as big as a peasant hut.

He watched the fire roar as his father’s body surely burned away within the casket. His puffy eyes beheld the fire… and his mind likened it to his father’s burning desire for betterment of all.

Jin smiled.

‘If father was killed by an assassination, then what better way to spit on the face of whomever ordered the assassination by doing exactly what father tried to do?’

With that cheerful thought, he went back home with his retinue.

-VB-

It was impossible.

Jin sat in the same hall where his father died, and stared at the full report of the finances of his house and his province.

The report made one fact clear: his province functioned well. With the rise in people’s standard of living, they also paid more tax from their income, as dictated by the law of his family’s lands.

The next fact was more ambiguous: his family’s finances were not well. There was just so much money being spent to manage the land as best as his family could that there was so little to spend on anything else! The amount of money harvested for tax more or less went back to securing his family’s rule over the province.

There wasn’t anything he could do at all to strike out against anyone.

…

However, Jin knew better than most about money. More than his father, in fact. He knew that there was something he could do, but the very act of introducing this to his part of the world was … heinous.

But he would have to if he wanted to increase his influence, change this Land of Rivers into something better, and make sure that the damn nobles north of him won’t screw him over, because he was sure that it had been one of them who’d killed father over political disagreement.

No, he wouldn’t introduce drugs into this part of the Land of Rivers… yet. Before he did that, he needed to fulfill both his new urge and the need for personnel, advisorial and combatant.

He took in a deep breath, ready to call in one of his servants to test out the sensation when something caught his eyes. He stopped and looked towards his left where a piece of paper had been tucked underneath a furniture haphazardly. He frowned and stood up, walked over, and then picked it up.

It was a piece of folded paper. He hadn’t seen this before…

Actually, he had. He had been too focused to care, but when he had struck at that ninja, something fell out of the ninja’s sleeve.

He unfolded the paper, and there were words on it. He read it.

His eyes widened. He read it again.

His hands trembled. He read it again.

He calmly yet walking with shaky legs sat back down on his dais in the meeting room.

And then he broke out into hysterical laughter before he screamed in rage as white unadulterated rage took over.

“THOSE FUCKERS KILLED FATHER OVER MONEY?!”

The paper was a contract between the assassin and one of the nobles in the north. They’d seen how “wealthy” his family’s lands had been and had been hoping to kill him and his father to take over the land. Too bad he was actually a trained man in the art of the sword that his strike managed to get the ninja to back off.

But money? That’s what this was about?

This wasn’t about reformists versus conservatives.

This was about money?

Rage shook him.

They would kill him just like they killed father. Over money.

He almost saw red.

He slammed his hand down onto the table in front of him, and watched it snap in half.

He was going to make them pay.

But … even with this contract as evidence, he could not take on the north. They would dismiss it. They would ignore him. They would use their numerical advantage in court to punish him for “bringing false charges against an upstanding noble.”

…

Drugs.

Drugs could make them pay. Whether it was through directly selling it to idiot nobles who wanted to “relax” or by ruining their fiefdoms so utterly that they would have nothing to use, drugs and crime could end them.

Just as crime had killed his father, he could use it to end them.

Yes, he could see it! He would destroy all opposing nobility, and then use the vacuum of power to establish himself as the dominant power with the money earned from the death of his rivals! With that, he would be able to finally take the Land of Rivers into a direction his father would have been proud of!

It… it would just be until he took his revenge. He would swear off in the business afterwards.

Yes…. he could see it.

His survival - his people’s survival - was dependent on it.