Chapter 1058

After a brief exchange of pleasantries, it was time to assign these people their positions.

As Feile had said, the Lincheng Society would give them officer-level positions of colonel rank as agreed, though these posts were not in frontline units, which let these young masters breathe a sigh of relief.

Even the representative of the martial-minded Woz family among them had only just reached the level of a naval field-grade officer, the sort who would be tossed out to guard some Haidao in the four seas.

Without protection, in the New World they'd shatter at the slightest touch — practically professional scam-bait.

At least for now Lin Cheng had no intention of throwing out these professional scam-baiters; placing them at the G5 base was the best way to handle it.

Although he wouldn't assign them military posts, he also couldn't just toss them into some random logistics department as Feile had suggested and be done with it.

Setting aside the face of these young masters, the families behind them would not be pleased — such an ugly way of eating looked bad, better to just keep them at home.

After thinking for a long while, Lin Cheng finally came up with a fairly suitable way to handle it.

He planned to throw these young masters into the base's internal finance department; finance, in any faction, was a critical department, not some clean-water yamen, a genuinely lucrative post.

The previous batch of people Lin Cheng had purged were mostly from the finance department — basically from the top leader down to the small fry; there might have been some collateral damage, but absolutely no innocent deaths.

Putting these young masters into the finance department also achieved a form of waste recycling.

These fellows might be talentless and shallow, but their resistance to money was absolutely first-rate in this world.

These fellows might even, upon seeing the miserable state of the finances, dig into their own pockets to give a wave of relief — this kind of reverse healing was genuinely possible.

Therefore, entrusting the critical finance department to their management, Lin Cheng was truly a hundred percent at ease.

The original plan was to bundle the four of them and send them in, let the four quasi-admirals take over the military, everyone happy and harmonious, and the matter would be handled just like that.

But after meeting Feile, Lin Cheng planned to send those three in; this little fatty he would handle separately.

"Where are you taking me?" Feile said self-deprecatingly. "I'm not like that guy Karl — I don't have any decent skill to speak of. Karl, though, is quite the hand at running a restaurant."

Lin Cheng arranged dinner with the other three young masters, then took Feile and left the parade ground. Feile, specially treated by Lin Cheng, wasn't nervous at all — he just kept chattering and denigrating himself the whole way.

"Have you been to the restaurant Karl opened on Jaya Island?" Lin Cheng asked.

"A few times. The food tastes good — eating it occasionally feels quite refreshing." Feile swayed his somewhat plump body and gave a helpless shrug.

"It's just that guy charges way too much, treating us like fat sheep to fleece — that restaurant of his owes half its success to me."

Lin Cheng smiled and continued asking, "What do you think of Karl's experiment?"

Karl, a sociologist, had once opened a restaurant on Jaya Island to try to eliminate class antagonism and thereby achieve a symbiotic model.

"Oh, heavens." Feile looked at Lin Cheng in disbelief. "You mean that farce of his — it's not funny at all."

"How can you call it a joke? He's exploring a model of coexistence; in the future it might shine brilliantly."

Lin Cheng stopped walking and looked at Feile beside him.

Feile's chubby face looked rather harmless, but at this moment he wore a cold smile that didn't match it.

"You should be clear — the gap between us and them wasn't shaped by ourselves, but by their own choices."

"Even wild beasts instinctively ostracize those of their own kind who are stronger, let alone us."

"Humanity has developed to what it is today precisely because we must completely shed the label of beasts." Feile said with a smile, looking at Lin Cheng. "The generations of effort by our ancestors were to make us different from them — how could we betray the glory of our forebears?"

Feile looked at Lin Cheng with burning eyes; he wanted to know how Lin Cheng viewed this matter.

"I think so too," Lin Cheng replied.

Feile once again became the harmless little fatty, his face thickly sincere as he said to Lin Cheng, "I knew it — only that fool Karl is the smart one playing dumb."

Watching Feile's smug expression, Lin Cheng smiled faintly.

"But coming here isn't a choice for smart people."

This time, asking the noble houses for people certainly had the reason that Lin Cheng was short-handed now, but the real purpose was to make these noble houses declare their stance.

To make these long-established noble houses stand completely on one side is impossible.

Spreading bets everywhere, speculating on all fronts — that is the essence of the noble houses.

Apart from special cases like the Borusa family that stand out alone, the main branches of all ancient noble houses shift with every change of regime.

And those noble-house scions whose bets fail will, along with the factions they attached themselves to, vanish into the tides of time.

So when Lin Cheng sent out this kind of signal, the ancient noble houses would swarm in without hesitation, afraid of missing a single opportunity.

And this time the ancient noble houses' investment in Lin Cheng was already a rare grand gesture — a five-hundred-strong elite corps plus one high-end combatant, with a member of the direct line sent as a hostage.