Ah Man quickly wrote a letter to Harano, informing him of her plans and asking for support.

Harano didn't object; previously, he'd been misled by modern information and really thought of the Ainu as a single "ethnicity", but once he actually dealt with them, he realized that wasn't the case at all—just getting these tribes to form a loose alliance was hard enough, and getting them to go to war together was even harder.

Just by their current loose combination, at most they could hold back the expansion of the Lizi Family, maybe only slow it down—they couldn't possibly drive them out.

He thought it over for a while and agreed with Ah Man's judgment, telling her just to send people over; he would certainly make the preparations here. After sending the letter, he went back to raking in money.

No choice but to rake it in. They were about to fight a major war, the Wanjin Army needed to expand, aiming to grow the field unit to five thousand men, and at the same time, with the Wanjin Navy having to protect trade, shipbuilding couldn't stop, and recruitment and training couldn't pause either. Just military expenses alone were about to break Wanjin's finances.

Weapons, armor, vehicles, horses, clothing, food, all the supplies needed for reserve and logistics—even more money, not a single area you could actually skimp on, and he didn't dare cut corners either.

Now, he even had to wage economic warfare against the Daimyo on Ise Peninsula—buying up a ton of stuff they didn't immediately need at exorbitant prices, selling off a big chunk of land just to ease cash flow a little, but the financial pressure was still huge.

The worst part was, he looked around for a local landlord to shake down for some blood money, but there were no good targets left. He could only tough it out himself.

Of course, they did do a bit of looting—while Harano led the Wanjin Army on campaign, the Wanjin Navy hadn't been idle either, actively cleaning up the scattered water thieves along the Wanjin-Kantou-Northeast sea lane. There were some spoils, but those scattered water thieves were all small-time, half fishermen, half pirates, all broke—honestly, they hardly got any real loot.

Whatever, just tough it out. In novels, warfare always looked easy—a single command from the commander and hundreds of thousands of troops took the field. But in reality, war was an extremely complex operation, a full-blown test of a country's overall strength; it could drive a normal person crazy.

So, the next two months passed in a blur of frantically raking in money and supervising preparations, or drafting tactical plans and contingencies with the officers.

Everything was progressing smoothly. The "East Factory Temporary Director" Ah Qing came by for daily briefings on the situation in and around Wanjin. During one of these, she casually mentioned, "According to reports, the bamboo in Suzuka County and Hequ County in Ise Province has flowered, and the local population is a bit restless."

Harano was stamping his way through paperwork as he listened. He looked up in surprise, "Oh? The bamboo on Ise Peninsula is flowering? Only in those two counties? Does it include all kinds of bamboo?"

Ah Qing paused, flipped through the intelligence summary, and answered with a trace of puzzlement, "The latest news... yes, only the Life-saving Group members who traveled to those two places have reported this."

Harano fell silent for a moment.

Bamboo flowering en masse was a rare thing. Bamboo, as a plant, was pretty weird.

Bamboo is actually a kind of grass—a woody grass. They say it existed even in dinosaur times—they've found bamboo ancestors in fossilized dinosaur dung. The reason bamboo evolved to grow thirty or forty times faster than other plants—shooting up a meter or two in a single day and quickly storing silica—was apparently to protect the seedlings from herbivorous dinosaurs.

At the same time, its reproduction is fascinating too: it often takes decades or even a hundred years to bloom and bear fruit once, and the timing is unpredictable—could be spring, summer, autumn, or winter. There are even historical records of bamboo blooming and seeding generation after generation within just two or three years.

Simply put, bamboo seems almost able to sense disasters, judging in some mysterious way if the coming year will be tough, or if the whole population is at risk of dying out. If so, then it decisively blooms and sets seed, scattering seeds everywhere to ensure the species survives sudden natural disasters—and can even ride out back-to-back disasters, waiting for things to improve a little.

Even more, as a species that's survived tens of millions of years without being eliminated by nature—in fact, it's only gotten stronger—bamboo is quite resilient to natural disasters in its own right. Typhoons and the like, it hardly cares about at all.

So, when bamboo blooms, there's usually big trouble ahead.

Through generations of agrarian life, people vaguely noticed this: when bamboo blooms, some kind of natural disaster usually follows, flood or drought, sometimes accompanied by plague or rodent outbreaks. So "bamboo blooming" became seen as a major evil omen.

Of course, disasters like plague and rodent outbreaks probably aren't things that bamboo predicts. More likely, it's because bamboo blooming produces lots of bamboo rice, providing sudden abundant food for rodents and other small animals, and they breed like crazy. Three to five months after the flowering, the rat population can suddenly spike seven or eight times, then when the bamboo rice runs out, with nothing left to eat, they flood into human settlements, sparking plagues and huge rodent disasters.

Ancient people didn't understand this, so they blamed it all on bamboo flowering. Technically, though, it is connected to the bamboo events.

Bamboo blooms are unpredictable. Even in regular ecological cycles—like old rhizomes aging, reduced nutrient storage, and the stand needing to renew itself—those flowerings have some pattern, but the timing can vary by years or over a decade, and typically only covers small patches and not a wide range. If it's a large-scale, cross-variety mass flowering, then nine times out of ten, bamboo is sensing a disaster it can't withstand—one it believes puts the entire population at risk of extinction.

So...

Is it just coincidence that there'll be a major natural disaster later this year or early next, like a Lake Tai flood drowning the Ise Peninsula, or a ten-month drought with the earth cracking open? Or is it because he's had Wanjin frantically buying up all the beneficial birds and bugs on the Ise Peninsula?

If the latter—could bamboo, of all plants, really be that sentient? Can it foresee a coming insect disaster, specifically one that targets rice, buckwheat, soybeans, or other crops?

Then again, bamboo actually is a member of the grass family—closely related to rice and wheat and all that...

Harano's mind ran wild, shifting gears rapidly. He genuinely couldn't figure out whether this "bamboo blooming" had anything to do with his own actions. He'd been secretly sabotaging the Daimyo and elite clans on the Ise Peninsula, and those people had no clue at all—yet the bamboo seemed to have noticed first. In sudden retrospect, this all looked a bit fantastical.

But, whatever the reason, this was good news for him. After all, with all the schemes he'd been brooding over, he hadn't been entirely sure they'd work.

If he spent heaps of cash, burned a year's energy, and it all came to nothing, he'd still be facing one single county against thirteen counties—or even several provinces—head-on. That'd make him look like a total idiot. He might as well have spent the money beefing up the Wanjin Army directly.

Now, he felt more confident; the signs were already appearing. Most likely, by this year's end or early next year, the Daimyo on the Ise Peninsula would be in for a hard time. It was unlikely they'd be able to muster enough strength to gang up on him or drive him into the sea—in fact, they'd probably suffer such heavy losses that their ability to mobilize would drop several notches.

On the flip side, though, that dumb plant bamboo bloomed without even a warning, most likely alerting the local Daimyo and elite clans. That would end up severely blunting all the tricks he'd carefully planned.

Even so, now that they were on alert, crop failures were basically unavoidable. The losses in strength would still be significant, and it shouldn't impact his future landing operations too much.

Harano zoned out for a moment, face subtly shifting, brows sometimes tense and sometimes relaxed. Ah Qing, already used to this, nonetheless found it a bit baffling, wondering where his mind had wandered this time.

She didn't care in the least whether bamboo bloomed or not. Seeing Harano buried in work day and night these days, worrying about tactics and frowning at the balance sheets, she secretly felt a bit sorry for him. Her little ears wiggled—hearing no one nearby, she leaned over, reached out, gently massaged Harano's frown, and softly asked, "What's wrong?"

Harano came back to himself, took her little hand, pulled her in to sit by his side, and said with a smile, "Nothing, just suddenly thought of something..."

Well, Ah Qing was definitely over sixteen now, and he'd already packed Ah Man—who was always chattering away—off to Yakushima Island to play wildman. Some things just happened naturally, and their relationship had moved another big step forward.

Even when things "went all the way," and Harano held her gently, Ah Qing was still a little shy. She did her best to recall everything she'd learned, her little ears twitching again to make sure nobody would suddenly knock on the office door. Only then did she relax a little, leaning her head lightly on his shoulder, and said, "You really don't have to work so hard—we... we're already doing really well."

Life now was rich, peaceful, and stable—a kind of goodness Ah Qing had never even dreamed of. As long as she could have another... or a few children, she'd feel this was pretty much the pinnacle of happiness in the world. The only thing left, if there was a chance, was maybe to get revenge for her parents and her whole village. Aside from that, she could ask for nothing more.

So, she felt it was enough. They had more or less everything they needed. Harano didn't need to chase after bigger territory or sail to the Ise Peninsula to fight and kill. The two of them... well, add Princess Dog, so the three of them... uh, actually, have to count Ah Man too, since she eats with them—four of them, living life like this to the end would be enough.

Harano paused, then smiled and shook his head, "No way. In times like this, if you don't move forward, you fall behind. If we don't make progress, we can't even keep the life we have now."

Japan's Warring States Era was like a battle of poisonous insects in a bottle—a brutal and bloody arena. Some things couldn't be avoided just because you wanted to. If you didn't eat others, they'd want to eat you! Just like how, when he was hiding out in Takeshige Manor before, minding his own business and earning a little extra money, suddenly the Owari local bigwigs started eyeing him.

In this era, only by devouring others could you grow stronger. There wasn't a single good egg among the Daimyo and Samurai—they were all snakes, scorpions, centipedes, and toads. If he didn't turn himself into a crab and pinch them all to death one by one, he wouldn't stand a chance.

At the very least, as a person, you should have the power to resist when in danger—at minimum, you should at least have the strength to fight desperately for your dignity.

What's more, everyone has to have some ambition in life. He still had his own plans, his own opportunities—he had to make something of them. He couldn't just settle for his personal happiness and nothing more.

Ah Qing didn't entirely understand, but she knew he was speaking sense. She could only gently smooth the furrow in his brow again and softly say, "Just don't push yourself too hard."

"It's not hard work."

And honestly, Harano didn't think it was hard at all. Being able to marry Ah Qing, it already felt like his transmigration hadn't been for nothing. Besides, in modern times, he wasn't anything special. After college, he'd have probably just ended up a wage slave—no way he'd ever have a shot at real success.

Ah Qing wasn't the talkative type. Even though she'd take a bullet for Harano, she wasn't sweet with words, so she didn't say any more and just leaned against him. Harano also loved this kind of quiet warmth, letting his mind go blank for a while to rest.

Only when footsteps passed in the hallway outside did Ah Qing suddenly turn agilely and kneel back opposite him. Harano, feeling a bit guilty, quickly shifted back to business and said, "Send word to all Life-saving Group agents in the Ise Province area to report any bamboo flowering in time and to investigate whether local elites are stockpiling against famine. If so, find out the details of their preparations."

Then, he picked up his pen and wrote out another order—telling the civil authorities to collect even more miscellaneous grains from Kantou and the Northeast, and raising Wanjin's disaster grain reserve line, in case they conquered territory on Ise Peninsula but the disaster was worse than expected, and they themselves ended up with nothing to eat.

By the way, he also sent out a military order, issuing new casualty quotas, demanding that the Wanjin Army speed up recruitment and new soldier training again and again, and hurry on with preparations for war.

And then, all he could do was wait—wait and see after the autumn harvest.

In any case, he was determined to land on the Ise Peninsula. Hopefully, the bamboo wouldn't give him too much trouble!

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