The General Staff, after careful deliberation, concluded that the major courts' actions actually worked in Longcheng's own favor.
Accordingly, Jinyi summoned Li Xuanji, Wen Jingran, and Lin Zhenghui and issued his orders.
You lot — this little southwestern court of yours — get out there and grab some territory too!
We'll give you support!
He then produced a world map and began drawing on it. Afterward, he sent copies of the annotated map to both the Southwestern Court and the Central Ming Imperial Court.
Here's a good spot — rich in mineral deposits!
Here's another — exceptional farmland!
And here — an essential passage for maritime traffic. Take it and you can collect tolls!
Prioritize seizing the high-value locations!
What could the two courts say? The man was giving them his wholehearted assistance; all they could do was accept it in silence.
Longcheng then reached out by telegraph to Mingxin up in the northern capital.
Brother, what in the world have you been doing up there? Have you been sleeping with so many women lately that your legs have gone weak and your head's spinning? How could something this important slip past you for so long?
Mingxin replied that it truly wasn't his fault — the two regent princes in the northern capital had been behaving themselves perfectly well! It was those two characters from the steppe who had orchestrated the whole thing, quietly ordering men to gather ships along the eastern coast, organizing training, ready to set sail at a moment's notice.
Perhaps when they had first entered the passes they had grown soft in the lap of luxury — but then the red-haired foreigners arrived, and they'd gone back to roughing it on the steppe for a few years, and apparently some of their old steel had returned.
Mingxin wrote to the pair of them: I know about your little schemes, but I'm not opposed to them — come back and let's talk this through together.
In the end, neither man dared return. They were probably afraid Mingxin would have their heads the moment they showed up.
And that fear was not unfounded. With the iron grip Mingxin now held over the northern court, and with the little emperor of Longcheng's name to invoke, he could cut down anyone he pleased.
Fine — so you won't come back?
Then stay put on your steppe! Keep building your Mongol navy out there!
As for that fleet you had quietly constructed along the coastal waters on this side — I'll be taking that off your hands.
Longcheng understood, of course, what was going through the minds of these various courts.
It was nothing more than preparing an escape route for themselves.
None of them were blind. Anyone with eyes could see that Longcheng would sooner or later take the whole realm.
Yet because of how the existing institutions were structured, it could only advance one step at a time.
This had bought them breathing room — but it was still a slow death, prolonged rather than escaped.
Now that the door to the wider world had been thrown open, finding a foothold overseas wasn't such a bad idea.
When Longcheng finally flipped the table for good, if it saw fit to let them live, they would live; if it left them no road out, then they would simply leave.
Without that prospect, they probably wouldn't have bothered making the effort to go anywhere.
After all, nowhere outside is as comfortable as home.
And deep down, they looked down on the foreign barbarians beyond the seas. We are the Celestial Empire, lacking for nothing, heir to thousands of years of civilization — how could these mere savages compare?
Well — they had never been given a thorough thrashing by foreigners, so they still had that confidence to spare.
One could only hope that after they ventured abroad to scratch out a living and actually crossed blades with the foreigners, some of that confidence would still remain.
Longcheng had its own difficulties too — there was real concern that these court factions would get beaten to a pulp the moment they stepped outside.
So it promptly handed over, free of charge, every dossier and document it had painstakingly compiled.
It even disclosed, at no cost, the locations and reserves of numerous easily-worked mineral deposits.
It went so far as to share certain closely-guarded advantages it had never previously been willing to reveal — including assistance in building power plants.
The power plants could only be constructed, managed, and maintained by Longcheng's own people, under the stated pretext of preventing the technology from leaking to foreigners.
By now, many foreign powers were already aware that electricity existed and were actively researching it.
But without Longcheng's technical knowledge, they could surely be held back by ten or twenty years at least, no?
Then there were the latest grades of steel — no technology transfer, but supply was possible!
What had been a swirling, world-shaking contest for supremacy had suddenly transformed into a war fought through proxies.
And this was exactly what Zhao Bairen was delighted to see.
Longcheng's own population was simply too small — what could they really accomplish overseas on their own?
As things stood, they had managed to occupy little more than the most oil-rich territories.
But if the full energies of nearly two hundred million souls across the Central Plains were roused, and all of them drawn into the scramble for a share of this great global feast —
The mind could not begin to grasp it.
Never mind Jinyi — even Zhao Bairen himself was fired up with excitement!