Chapter 343: Opening the Port (10)

To any newborn regime, city thugs are the most loathsome of crowds.

This class commits every crime under heaven in peacetime, parasites on society itself; the moment turmoil strikes, looting and smashing amid chaos, burning, killing, and pillaging become the thugs' standard repertoire. Such a situation forces the new regime to waste precious time and troops on suppression everywhere just to restore social order.

Most vexing of all, reforming this class later on is also exceedingly laborious.

You cannot expect a ruffian to honestly become some painter or fitter; unlike farmers and the artisan class, they cannot seamlessly integrate into a new society. In a new society they remain tumors, a class that requires extra resources spent just to reform.

In fact, the Transmigrators had long experimented with cleaning up these urban underworld gangs. In Hangzhou, starting with the rectification of the Beggar Sect, it later gradually extended to Da Hang and other criminal gangs. Nowadays, inside and outside Hangzhou City, there is no longer any living space for this lot.

Yet the significance of this so-called social experiment was actually quite limited: Hangzhou Station could at most use the pretext of turf wars to squeeze out and disperse these gangs; they could not round up these tumors on a large scale, ship them to Taiwan, and throw them into the Pits. After all, these were not unclaimed refugees — they had families and kin in the city; massacres and disappearances would draw the officials' inquiries.

Truly "digesting" this lot would have to wait until the Transmigrators governed the cities themselves in the future. So, although the Transmigrators, appearing with the mindset of "masters of the nation," held these city thugs in utter contempt, since they did not yet directly hold political power, they could only hand them over to the authorities.

Once the hundred-odd men from the Jiading County Office entered Yuewang Temple, the subsequent procedure could only be handled by the book — after all, the criminals had been caught red-handed, and the most critical arrest work had already been done for them. So even though some of the men groaning on the ground were old acquaintances of the yamen runners, they were still all tied up by the stony-faced officers and locked in chains to face justice.

One point that satisfied the officers: a large amount of stolen goods and silver, along with some jewelry and ornaments, had been seized on the scene.

This immediately changed everyone's enthusiasm. They had assumed all the spoils had been scooped up by Master Xiong's household retainers; they never expected them to still be there. It seemed great households were indeed different — so fastidious, disdaining even such a wealth of goods.

With the stolen goods in hand, the runners' attitude shifted at once. Amid shouts and bellows, the thieves were noosed by the neck and hauled off en masse by the auxiliary runners. The formally established runners, meanwhile, began directing their apprentices to dig three feet deep in search of more loot.

In truth, if even a tenth of these stolen goods ever made it back to the complainants, that would already be remarkable. By convention, every "concerned party" high and low in the yamen would eventually divide up this windfall cleanly, without a trace.

And this was precisely the situation Master Xiong needed: having swallowed the stolen goods, everyone now shared a faint flavor of mutual complicity, so the Criminal Division would not easily let these bandits off the hook.

Xiong Dao's objective was crystal clear: if it was inconvenient for him to act personally, borrowing the authorities' knife worked just as well. Since a wealthy "Gang Kou Zi Mao Qu" was going to emerge here in Jiading in the future, it was best to start striking at these demons and monsters early.

After all fifty-odd thieves were thrown into the county jail, within two days, Comrade Lai Fangwei, the County Magistrate, under the impetus of a certain mysterious force, had this batch of unlucky wretches all convicted.

Since they were caught red-handed, plus the incriminating evidence extracted by the runners through torture in the jail, the County Magistrate showed no courtesy: Lao Guai and a few ringleaders with blood debts were sentenced to beheading after autumn; the remaining thieves were exiled, pressed into military service, caned, jailed — every variety of punishment, not a single one escaped.

Now everyone got what they wanted: before autumn arrived, a wretch like Lao Guai would be squeezed by the runners for the property he had stashed away.

Normally, if things were handled properly, Lao Guai's sentence would be commuted by the prefecture to "beheading deferred pending review" — in other words, a suspended death sentence — before he was executed. This time, however, due to the intervention of a certain mysterious force, Lao Guai, kept completely in the dark, was fated to go to the execution ground in autumn and sing a chilly tune.

The surprise attack on Yuewang Temple without a doubt raised colossal waves in the underworld. Since the dawn of banditry, the authorities had never caught so many thieves in one go, and with both criminals and loot seized. Normally, even if arrests were made, both sides would negotiate to hand over a few men to satisfy the assignment; it would never come to such a brutal outcome.

Leaving aside the various onlooking bystanders, the person truly slapped swollen-faced and hopping mad over this matter was Deng Hu, the Grand Steward of Da Hang.

Having never imagined things would devolve into this ghastly state, Deng Hu spent these days in a kind of schizophrenic state: at times he wanted to mobilize men to go settle scores with Xiong Dao, at other times he was intimidated by the opponent's background that he had managed to ferret out, leaving him afraid to act rashly.

Deng Hu's anxiety was soothed not long after.

What finally made him see the situation clearly was a ruffian who had fled from Hangzhou. This man had originally operated in Hangzhou City; then, toward the end of last year, after Hangzhou Station gained a firm foothold and began, intentionally or not, to sweep away crime, this fellow could no longer stay and came to Jiading to seek refuge with ruffian friends.

After this affair blew up, the man was shocked to hear that the Bear Steward from Hangzhou had come to Jiading, so he urgently sought an audience with Deng Hu and laid bare everything Xiong Dao's group had done in Hangzhou.

After hearing it, cold sweat dripped down Deng Hu's head: the sworn brother of the Hangzhou Beggar Sect leader? Backed by maritime magnates with over ten thousand men?

... In an era without internet, without television or newspapers, where transmitting news relied entirely on travelers carrying letters, ordinary commoners were actually extremely isolated, even so-called city dwellers.

So unless Deng Hu possessed a Gentry-level information network and transmission channels, and moreover took an interest in specialized intelligence from as far away as Hangzhou and Fujian, a local thug like him in a county seat simply had no capability to investigate Xiong Dao's background. So this time he was lucky — he happened to have someone at hand who knew Xiong Dao's background. Otherwise...

Once he understood that taking a job had caused his own side to kick an iron plate, Deng Hu immediately engaged a go-between — Du Yaren — to bring gifts to Master Xiong to apologize and beg forgiveness.

Yet the other side would not swallow that routine at all. When Du Yaren emerged from Crane Tower — now called Bear Mansion — the message he brought back was cold and hardcore: bring Wu Meng's head from Zhang Sutan as atonement.

"You foreign bumpkin, this is pushing it too far!" Upon learning the message, Deng Hu smashed a fist onto the table.

On the seventh day after the Chief Thief Lao Guai was clapped in irons and thrown into jail, Wu Sanye of Zhang Sutan finally met his phased conclusion.

Early morning, a large force of manpower arrived at Zhang Sutan.

Most of these people were Xiong Dao's subordinates, with a minority being Official Runners in black uniforms and civilian laborers. And when Wu Sanye, alerted by the news, rushed over and hid among the reeds to observe, what greeted him was a plume of black smoke.

Yes, these out-of-town bumpkins had begun slash-and-burn.

A group of civilian laborers with mouths and noses wrapped in damp cloth began setting the wild grass ablaze with long torches. Before long, vast swaths of fire and rolling black smoke appeared across Zhang Sutan — following the burning of the Jetty, the other half of the means of production that Wu Sanye depended on for survival was also finished.

Huang Cao Tan was a vital means of production: it could screen vision, hide private salt and fugitives, and allow Wu Meng's gang to run amok inside it, acting like overlords.

Now Huang Cao Tan was gone. The slash-and-burn operation lasted only three days and swept Zhang Sutan and the surrounding wild grass completely away.

Wu Meng, Wu Sanye, now had no standing even to negotiate, because his earlier tricks had ruined his credibility: claiming he needed a few days to consider, he had turned right around and bought the tower-burning job from Da Hang. Now the tower hadn't been burned, and he was left holding the bag.

Originally, Third Lord and his gang had still planned to charge in with hot blood for one wild rush. However, after the slash-and-burn, on the now featureless riverbank, Third Lord and his men suffered a heavy blow from the landlord master's hired thugs: from 400 meters away, five firearms easily blasted Third Lord into utter terror, sending him fleeing with his tail between his legs.

The originally ferocious confrontation thus came to a feeble, anticlimactic end for the time being.

It was for the time being because Wu Sanye did not perish under the firearms; instead, he fled with his remnants all the way to Taihu, vanishing among the mass of bandits to slowly lick his wounds.

And as this matter evolved to this point, Deng Hu of Da Hang had become the most injured party: Wu Sanye could flee, but with his extensive property and business, Deng Hu had no way to run.

Shopkeeper Deng Hu at this moment undoubtedly felt he had been caught in the crossfire... Wasn't it just a matter of burning a tower? The man had been caught by you, the tower hadn't been burned, and it had even cost him several dozen thieves — was it necessary to be so relentless?

What he did not know, however, was that the Transmigrators took the thorough purge of city thugs extremely seriously. If they did not strike now, the damage these types could cause would be magnified many times over once the port was built in the future.

This was what they called "the rat dragging a wooden shovel — the big head's still behind." In fact, Master Xiong himself had not expected that what was originally just Wu San's gang's affair would end up dragging in the entire Da Hang... Well, since it had come to this, he might as well just keep at it.

And so, with communication hopeless, Deng Hu was forced into a state of cold war with Xiong Dao's side.

Da Hang was now on high alert; without catching them in the act, Xiong Dao's side had no way to launch a major assault inside Xiancheng either, so for now it could only be a cold war — wait until a crack was found, then strike. The example of Lao Guai was sitting right there.

While Master Xiong was busy with demolitions and cracking down on local thugs and riffraff, the land acquisition campaign led by Yu Bende was also already in full, fiery swing.

Compared to Master Xiong's side, since Yu Bende's side dealt with more scattered households, the overall task was still fairly heavy. But the good point was that what Clerical Staff Yu's side played with were account books, silver, and land deeds — a completely different approach from the fighting and killing on Xiong Dao's side.

The first place Yu Bende's land requisition team moved into was Zuo Family Village, not far from Gaoqiao.

Zuo Family Village had a sizable population, nearly five hundred households. Zuo was the dominant surname in the village, with Zhao, Qian, Sun, Li, and other surnames also well represented.

And after Clerical Staff Yu brought the land brokers and accountants into the village, without a word, he first scattered silver to buy up several plots of farmland at premium prices.