If the Governor's Office were allowed to open the granaries and stabilize grain prices, forget about recovering their capital—nearly a million piculs of grain would be left rotting in their hands.
Therefore, upon receiving the news, Lin Zhenghong and the others—at the suggestion of the Ji State Trading Company's Wind Patrol Envoy, Li Sanyuan—rushed frantically to the Governor's Office.
After learning from Liu Hong that they had three days at most, Lin Zhenghong and his peers, no matter how reluctant they were, could only scurry back to their grain shops to figure out another countermeasure.
"Three days. Even if we lower our prices, there's no way we can sell off all the grain," a pot-bellied merchant in brocade garments wailed as if he were at a funeral. "Furthermore, now that the word from the Government Office has spread, most of the city's commoners are planning to just tough it out. We... we're going to suffer a massive loss this time."
