The Great Qin Empire---Qin Li

Is Cheng Miao still alive? When Heifu arrived at Yunyang County at noon the next day with his subordinate Dong Yi and several guards, he received a positive reply from the prison official Cao Ju: not only is he alive, but he is also living well.

Cao Ju was the brother-in-law of Sima Xin, a prison official in the South Market of Xianyang. He knew Dong Yi. When he heard that Heifu was here to inspect on the orders of the emperor, he immediately invited him into the county prison with great respect.

"The minister Cheng Miao is working outside. Let the clerk send someone to bring him back..."

Heifu looked at this small county prison. The layout was somewhat similar to that of Anlu, which gave him a sense of familiarity. He turned around and asked, "How long will it take?"

"It will take half an hour to go back and forth. I hope the clerk will wait for a while..."

Someone served soup to Heifu to quench his thirst, and the county magistrate chatted with Heifu. Cao Ju retreated to the outside of the hall and whispered to his acquaintance Dong Yi, "Your Majesty wants to see Cheng Miao?"

Dong Yi shook his head.

Cao Ju's face changed: "Your Majesty wants to kill Cheng Miao?"

Dong Yi still shook his head: "The Zhonglang Huling said that Your Majesty ordered him to come and see Cheng Miao and see what this person is doing. As for whether to see or kill him, the Zhonglang Huling did not say, and I dare not speculate on the emperor's mind."

Cao Ju just breathed a sigh of relief, but Heifu called him to the hall again and asked about Cheng Miao's deeds.

"When was Cheng Miao imprisoned, and what crime did he commit?"

Cao Ju hurriedly said: "Reporting to the officials, Cheng Miao has been in prison for ten years. The crime was Fan Yuqi's rebellion. Cheng Miao was recommended by him to be a prison guard, and then entered the palace as a guard. When Fan Yuqi defected, Cheng Miao not only did not confess his crime, but defended Fan Yuqi. Your Majesty was furious and sentenced him to be a slave and sent to Yunyang to serve his sentence..."

"So that's it."

Hei Fu suddenly realized that Qin allowed officials to recommend others as officials, but once the recommendation was successful, the recommender and the recommended person were tied together. If the recommended person committed a crime, the recommender would be implicated for improper recommendation, and vice versa. More than ten years ago, when Lu Buwei and Lao Ai fell from power, their retainers who served as officials in the court were almost swept away.

What Qin Shi Huang hated most was betrayal. Fan Yuqi had served as a general of the imperial court and had made many expeditions to capture cities and territories, making great contributions to Qin. However, after being defeated by Li Mu, he chose to defect. The emperor was of course extremely angry and offered a reward of 1,000 kilograms of gold and 10,000 households to capture Fan Yuqi.

Cheng Miao not only failed to draw a clear line in time, but also defended him. It was good enough that he was not executed.

However, the person who could make Qin Shi Huang miss him for ten years would never be so simple.

Hei Fu asked again: "What kind of labor has he done in Yunyang in the past ten years?"

Qin did not support idle people. For criminals sentenced to imprisonment, all those who were able to work were forced to work. Even if the prisoner was sentenced to death, he had to work for food as long as he was alive.

So in Qin, prisoners and slaves can be regarded as synonyms.

Cao Ju glanced at the county magistrate and answered honestly: "Although Cheng Miao is a subordinate official, it is said in the "Sikong Law" that subordinate officials who are skilled in labor should not be used as servants, or as dependents, or as city laborers. Cheng Miao is familiar with the laws and can write well, so the government did not send him to do hard labor, but to work under the clerk to help arrest criminals. Except that he has no salary and has to stay in jail every night after returning home, he is no different from an ordinary clerk. After deducting food and clothing, he can get four coins for each official business..."

Hei Fu laughed: "So, what you said about Cheng Miao working outside is actually following the clerk to handle cases?"

The county magistrate looked unhappy and glared at Cao Ju. Cao Ju wiped his sweat and replied: "Yes, that's right."

It was his idea to let Cheng Miao serve a light sentence to the county magistrate. Although it made sense in law, if His Majesty vented his anger, they would also be affected.

"It's good to have special skills."

Heifu secretly thought that Cheng Miao was lucky. The treatment he enjoyed now was probably similar to that of Song Jiang, who was exiled to Jiangzhou in the Water Margin. As long as he didn't write anti-poems to commit suicide, he could live in a muddle-headed way.

But why was this person remembered by Qin Shihuang? Before Heifu came, he asked some old ministers around Qin Shihuang. They said that when Cheng Miao was a counselor, he was ordered by the emperor to revise the Qin characters. Unfortunately, he committed a crime later and the matter was left unresolved...

The emperor sent Heifu to visit the prison this time, which might be related to this matter.

At this time, Cao Ju also said that the little money Cheng Miao earned from each business trip was used to buy pens, ink and bamboo slips. Whenever he had free time, he always wrote in prison...

Heifu became interested and didn't want to wait for Cheng Miao to come back, so he asked Cao Ju to take him to see Cheng Miao's residence in prison.

After entering Yunyang Prison, Hei Fu discovered that the prisons here were also divided into different levels.

The lowest level was where the Chengdan prisoners lived. There were no bedding, no windows, but some moldy straw on the ground. Ten people were squeezed into a small area, and there was an unpleasant smell inside.

The middle level was the rooms for prisoners such as Guixin, Baican, Sikou, and Chong. Although the food was poor and the bedding was damp, it was at least a place to stay, with five people in a room. An interesting thing is that pounding rice used to be a heavy punishment on par with Chengdan. In recent years, pounding rice with a pestle and a water pestle has become popular, and pounding rice is not so tiring, so it has become a medium punishment.

The best place is located on the second floor of the prison. Except that the door is locked from the outside and the windows are equipped with railings, it is not much different from ordinary houses. Cao Ju led Hei Fu to open the door and enter. It was afternoon at this moment. The sun shone through the window, illuminating the whole room...

"Sir, this is Cheng Miao's residence."

Hei Fu opened his mouth slightly. This is not a cell, but a calligraphy exhibition room! However, he saw that the three mottled walls were covered with bamboo slips with dense black characters, and there were hundreds of them.

"These are..."

Cao Ju smiled and said, "It was written by Cheng Miao in the past ten years. He used the money he was given every time he handled official cases to buy pens, ink and books. There is nothing wrong with what he wrote, so we did not interfere."

After carefully bypassing the bamboo slips scattered on the ground, Hei Fu approached the wall and took a closer look. It was not written on it. It was "The Way of Being an Official" that every Qin official had to recite.

"The way to be an official is to be clean, upright, prudent, firm, impartial, meticulous, quiet, and fair in reward and punishment..."

After just one glance, he immediately found that the characters on these bamboo slips were quite different from what he saw in daily life!

It was not the most common Qin seal script. Although Qin seal script was improved from the complex large seal script of the Zhou Dynasty, it still retained some habits of bronze inscriptions, with round strokes, horizontal and vertical strokes, and basically the same thickness, and it must be written slowly.

It was not the six kingdoms' characters with different shapes such as Wei and Chu that Hei Fu had seen before.

"Some of it looks like the shorthand style used by Nanjun officials when recording cases..."

The Qin bamboo slips unearthed in later generations were basically this shorthand style. For the sake of speed, officials often subconsciously simplified the seal script, reduced the strokes, and turned the characters into square and flat.

No, the font in front of him was more thoroughly changed than the shorthand style of the small seal script. Almost every character was simplified, the round was squared, and the arc was straight.

That's right.

Hei Fu was a little excited because he saw a type of font that has been passed down to later generations, rather than the ancient seal characters that seemed unfamiliar no matter how hard he tried to learn them.

"This is..."

"Lishu!"

"Thank you for the name, sir!"

Just as Heifu blurted out these two words, a middle-aged man with gray hair and wearing a prisoner's ochre clothes appeared at the door. He looked at the room full of ten years of hard work and sighed:

"Lishu, Lishu, written by Li people; Lishu, Lishu, also helps the seal script! What a good name!"

After that, he bowed heavily to Heifu: "Cheng Miao's ten years of writing are all here. Even if Your Majesty wants to sentence me to death, Cheng Miao can die with a smile!"

"Mr. Cheng, you are too kind."

Heifu walked over to support Cheng Miao, and at the same time looked at the other two walls, which were some comparison tables of seal characters and Lishu. Almost all of the four thousand seal characters had corresponding Lishu characters, and he seemed to be thinking about something.

He understood why Qin Shihuang was obsessed with Cheng Mao. This might be related to a national policy that the emperor was planning to implement recently!

"The wheels are of the same gauge, the writing is of the same script!"

This time the emperor moved to the Lingguang Palace, but brought along the three great calligraphers Li Si, Zhao Gao, and Hu Wujing, and also sent him to see Cheng Miao, the purpose was very obvious.

"Why don't I take advantage of this opportunity and do that thing?"

An idea that had been hidden in Heifu's mind for a long time, under the temptation of the official script in the room, he could no longer hold back at this moment...