Chapter 66: Shocking! Prince Crawls Forward on the Ground… (2 / 2)
[“Did Buddha pass through here? Are they scraping gold dust off the statues for him?”] The Ministry of Works’ Auditor General felt the urge to turn around and kneel before Xu Yanmiao in reverence.
The Left Vice Minister of Revenue knew he shouldn’t laugh. He knew that Xu Yanmiao’s cutting remark about “begging on their knees” was cruel. Yet, seeing his fellow victim, the Auditor General, drenched in cold sweat from Xu Yanmiao’s relentless revelations, he couldn’t hold back and burst out laughing:
“Pfft—”
Apologies, but witnessing someone worse off than himself, his heart suddenly felt a strange sense of balance.
[“What were the eighteen censors dispatched to Henan for famine relief doing two years ago? The warehouse officials there were adding water to the grains and soybeans to increase weight. When the weather heated up, all that grain got ruined from the damp heat!”]
[“Seven million bushels of grain went bad! The local officials, afraid of being discovered, buried it all underground!”]
[“Seven million bushels wasted!”]
Immediately, the eighteen censors in charge of inspecting and overseeing famine relief broke into a sweat and knelt on the ground.
[“Ah! That Xue Yuanji! The emperor sent him to comfort disaster victims, and this criminal officer from the Ministry of Justice let death row prisoners do his work for him while he lazed around!”]