Chapter 191 - 131: It’s Easy to Learn Bad, Hard to Learn Good!

Harano attempted his first attack on the Chita Peninsula, successfully kidnapping an entire village. He patted his butt, didn’t give a damn about what the Takeda Family thought, retraced his steps to the landing point, squeezed everyone back onto the boat, and sailed back to Wanjin. Overall, the operation was quite a success. The initial strategic blueprint was spot-on and could be pushed forward. His future fiefdom would be on the Chita Peninsula, no doubt. The new army performed better in practice than he’d expected when it came to discipline. From start to finish, not a single soul attempted rape or plunder, or challenged military order. This truly shocked him. He’d even been planning to kill a few "chickens" to warn the "monkeys," show them some bloody heads so they understood Wanjin would never budge on discipline—break the rules and you die, no questions asked. In the end, he didn’t even find a chicken to slaughter. Everyone behaved themselves. Maybe the Japanese are just inherently obedient, surrendering to authority and force with impressive speed. As long as you draw clear lines in the sand, then give them a hard beating so they feel the pain and understand those rules are non-negotiable, they’ll develop this bizarre, collective sense of belonging. The rules become sacred, and they start pushing each other to follow them, even forcing the newcomers to comply. Instinctively, they start pushing out any "misfits." This really caught Harano off guard. He never imagined he’d reach his goal in just three-odd months. He thought, at minimum, he’d have to fight for at least half a year, maybe a full year... As for this odd psychological quirk, he didn’t quite figure it out either—maybe it’s related to the Japanese tendency toward group cohesion after facing constant natural disasters. In any case, it was a good thing, more or less. He’d ended up with a small "melting pot." All he had to do was keep adding "raw materials," and he’d have all the qualified soldiers he needed. Saved him a ton of headaches. The discipline was up to snuff, and the casualties were outstanding. Zero deaths, zero disabilities for the whole operation. Only a dozen or so had minor flesh wounds from arrows—utterly trivial. If he wanted to brag, he could even call it zero casualties. Basically, the Chita Peninsula was relatively closed-off, and the local gentry’s fighting strength was a joke. Just a bunch of bumpkins who’d barely even seen Iron Cannons. Over a hundred of them rushed up in a noisy mob and got flattened by two rounds of heavy musket volleys. The force collapsed without even putting up a melee. Whatever didn’t run fled into the hills, and Takeda Castle immediately went into lockdown, not even thinking of coming out for a fight. It was an effortless win. In short, everything about this operation was near perfect. Harano hadn’t had a truly resounding victory since his misfortunes began—he was very pleased. After returning to Wanjin, he didn’t rush to launch a second "kidnapping" operation. After all, Wanjin only had a population of about six hundred. Suddenly dragging back three hundred and fifty or so people—all of them ignorant commoners, sporting Debuffs like "anxious" and "absent-minded"—was bound to cause chaos for a while. He’d have to digest what he had before stirring up more trouble with the Takeda Family. That’s right, next time he didn’t plan to switch targets—he’d keep raiding the Takeda Family. They still had three villages left. His plan was simple: empty out the Takeda Family first. As long as he stuck with the story that the Takeda Family attacked his cargo ship first, they couldn’t explain themselves. That made it a personal feud, and it wouldn’t alarm the other local gentry on the Chita Peninsula so quickly, so they wouldn’t gang up on him. It would also keep the Imagawa family from getting involved too early and hindering his manpower collection. Anyway, he just kept an eye on outside reactions while focusing on digesting his spoils. As for the entire kidnapped village, he still didn’t plan on having them farm. The soil in Wanjin was terrible, and it was within Oda Nobunaga’s strike zone—most likely, he’d have to abandon it in the future. Putting serious effort into improving the land was pointless. So, he threw these people straight into Wanjin, forcibly transforming them from agricultural to industrial and commercial labor. The men went into the labor corps to build houses. The existing laborers were transferred into workshops, and from the workshops, a batch was picked for the army, allowing him to complete yet another stepwise conscription. The women and elderly weren’t allowed to be idle either. There were plenty of light tasks in the workshop, and everyone had to pitch in. He even took the time to tally up the number of marriageable women to prepare for mass matchmaking in the future. After all, thanks to the Takeshige Manor incident, he still owed many of his men a wife. He had to start making good, or at least put on a show of keeping promises. His new army were all bought men, and right now he was using harsh discipline to force them to fight. It’d be fine so long as they kept winning, but if they lost badly, there would almost certainly be backlash. So, relying solely on military discipline wasn’t a long-term answer. Having them settle down with wives and kids was best. With families to worry about, they’d be more obedient, and if need be, they’d even fight to the death to protect their loved ones. Besides, men without wives and kids had no hostages—free agents were scary business. History had proved that time and again. Better to plan ahead. Before, he didn’t have the means, but in the future, with the right conditions, he’d recruit his soldiers from "good families," the bigger the families, the better—ideally four generations under one roof. He’d feel much safer using those men, and when someone hit thirty-five, it’d be much easier to fire them. Yet, here he was, the "First-Generation Head of the Nozawa Family," struggling to get by and still without a wife. Every day, he had to put up with Ah Man giving him these weirdly sympathetic looks at his lower body, and now he had to worry about his subordinates’ marriages and find them wives first. Not exactly how he pictured things—rather flavorless, to be honest—but there was no choice. Being the First Gen meant thinking of everything, worrying about everything, even moonlighting as a matchmaker. Just a heap of helplessness. He had his own plan: having gone to all this trouble to capture labor, he dove in at once like a tiger, hitting the ground running. Naturally, the villagers kidnapped from the Takeda Family weren’t happy about it. Generation after generation, all they’d ever done was farm. Now, having been dragged to Wanjin, they saw how crappy the soil was, and their hearts sank. Worse, they weren’t even allowed to open new land. Even when Harano kept his promise and handed out a round of rations, they were still uneasy. A few even tried to slip back to their original villages, regardless of whether they could swim the distance. Seeing how useless they looked, Harano simply changed payday from once a month to once every five days, letting them choose between food or copper coins as payment. Only then did the new immigrants start to settle. They all picked food, hid it at home, and gradually realized that whether you farmed or worked as a laborer, you got food either way. Getting paid as a laborer even meant no annual land tax, which was a better deal. The trek back was a pain anyway—might as well stay put. If the day ever came when the rations stopped, then they could always run. People in this era just went with the flow. As long as they could live, it didn’t matter where. Soon enough, the new immigrants surrendered to their fate, went to work regularly, lined up every five days to collect rations, and thus began the first stage of transformation. The only remaining issues were about habits—getting used to town life, learning time management, hygiene, and dropping bad work habits. Overall, the digestion of spoils was reasonably smooth. Harano, along with his "internal affairs officials" like Endo Chiyoda and Maeshima Shichiro, spent more than ten days wrangling a pile of issues. All the basics—housing, food, water, even toilets—got managed. At last, the new immigrants integrated into the Wanjin system, and normal operations resumed. Only then did he have the leisure to turn his attention back to the military: summoning junior officers and noncoms to check their assignments—how to take Takeda Castle with minimal casualties. Of course, fighting was one thing, but he wasn’t planning to occupy Takeda Castle or settle there. His future fief would need lots of rivers for iron sand extraction; good soil, so he could grow his own food, or at the very least supply his own beans and other essentials; abundant forests for charcoal, steel, and iron making, and eventually a shipyard. It would also need to be close to the sea to enable shipping and sales. Most importantly, if he grabbed a patch of land on the Chita Peninsula, the local gentry, the Matsudaira family, and the Imagawa family would definitely form an alliance to stomp him. He needed somewhere defensible, at least not like Takeda Castle, where you’d be flanked on three sides and might not withstand an assault. He was self-aware enough to know he wasn’t a military genius—no fancy maneuvers for him—so the plan was to entrench himself, play it safe, and pick a spot with strong natural defenses. But with all those requirements, a suitable place was hard to find. Ah Man had been sending out "Intern Ninjas" again and again, probing down to the southern tip of the Chita Peninsula. That place had sea on three sides and faced the enemy on the fourth; it looked great for a war of attrition. The road there was full of checkpoints and travel was inconvenient, and her resources were limited, so she couldn’t get a full read on the area for now. That would have to wait. So, he didn’t plan to occupy Takeda Castle—he just wanted to break it open and see if there was anything good inside. Wanjin wasn’t as strapped for manpower now, but there were suddenly a lot more mouths to feed, and he was coming up short on both cash and food. That made him want to up the ante—he wasn’t going to settle for just kidnapping people anymore... Well, what can he say? Learning to be bad is way easier than being good! After all, with three hundred fifty or so people, if he tried to accumulate them himself, especially now with population buying getting harder, it would take him at least half a year. But a single day out, a bit of gunpowder spent, and he brought them all back in one go—saved money, time, and hassle. He was hooked. Now he was short on both grain and money, so he couldn’t help but wonder just how much wealth the Takeda Family had hoarded over a hundred years as feudal overlords on the Chita Peninsula. He wanted to break their piggy bank and spend it all himself. Maybe the Takeda Family should be renamed the Zhutao Family—he always felt swallowing them would be a huge supplement, and besides, morality wasn’t something to get hung up about anymore. It was the Warring States Era; he had his own domain now. If he didn’t fatten himself up, someone else would. The massacre at Takeshige Manor might repeat itself. Of course, this sort of thing was a little embarrassing. Farming was the real way to go, and robbery just wasn’t respectable. But since he was going to keep kidnapping people from the Takeda Family—and return several more times—it wouldn’t hurt to try cracking the castle open, too. At least it made sense to study it early. The problem was, defenders had way too much of an advantage in this era. Even with all his guys wracking their brains for days, they concluded that, without pulling out some kind of black tech, a full-on assault would cost at least fifty men—a price he could not afford. As for clever schemes, no one could come up with a good plan on short notice. They were all green recruits, barely literate, and it was hard to train a capable group of officers. He wasn’t discouraged, though. Patience was his superpower. He kept urging everyone to think hard, promising whoever came up with a low-casualty siege plan would be promoted as a strategist. In the meantime, he surveyed the external situation: things were quiet outside; Oda Nobunaga showed no unusual reaction, probably chalking up Harano’s kidnapping spree to revenge. Minor squabbles among the local gentry didn’t even register. The Takeda Family had already defected to the Imagawa family, and if they died, Nobunaga would probably cheer. That settled Harano’s only worry: that Oda Nobunaga might show up and smash his base. He didn’t care about anyone else. He immediately mustered his men, set sail again, and headed for the Takeda Family once more. Same as last time—if he could bring back another boatload of people, he’d be satisfied. His requirements weren’t all that high.