Chapter 490: Li Dazui

Beneath the bright moonlight lay a grove of longan trees perched on a low hill, with some Buddhist pines mixed among them.

Wearing a flashy floral shirt, striking a pose at the front of the grove and overlooking the village below through a night vision device, was Deputy District Chief Li Dazui, sporting a short buzz cut.

The next moment, he spat out the cigarette butt in his mouth and swung his hand coldly: "Go."

Before his words faded, a mass of dark figures burst from the woods behind him. These shadows moved swiftly and silently, wielding various tools, spreading like quicksilver toward the village not far downhill.

Li Dazui was plain-looking, a middle-aged greasy man. This fellow had crossed over only a short time ago, less than a year so far, and was one of the last few Transmigrators to arrive in the Ming dynasty.

Li Dazui had little seniority and possessed no skills scarce in the New World, so in theory, the position of Deputy District Chief should never have fallen to him.

But Dazui came anyway, and he came without encountering much obstruction.

All of this traced back to his special relationship with the Cao Emperor.

Before this, Li Dazui was a web novelist; earlier still, this gentleman had wholesaled slippers; anything before that was lost to verifiable history.

The reason Dazui was somewhat special was that he was the only person who had "actively" involved himself in the great undertaking of Crossing Over — Brother Dazui had perceived and discovered the Cao Emperor's secret ahead of time.

Note, at that time he was still in the Old World.

No one knows the exact details of that affair; those involved are tight-lipped, but even the scraps of peripheral information that leaked out were hair-raising: by a stroke of fate, Li Dazui discovered the Cao Emperor's secret, yet he neither exposed the matter nor tried to extort ten-odd billion from the Emperor... Probably seized by the literary youth syndrome from his days as a failed writer, he simply sought out the Cao Emperor and crossed over, bringing all the secrets with him to the New World.

Of course, Li Dazui took an enormous risk in doing so, because he had no idea what awaited him behind the space-time gate — a beautiful New World? Thirty thousand feet in the air? A seething steelmaking furnace? Five hundred drawn heavy crossbows: Great King, kill or not?

In the end, his gamble paid off. He did not turn into a Terminator diving into a frying pan of oil, but formally became a member of the Transmigrated Nobility, securing for himself and his descendants a foundation bound to the nation's fortunes.

After crossing over, Li Dazui actually revealed his true colors very quickly: this guy was a loudmouth powerhouse who failed at everything he tried. Normally, aside from flooding the forum with spam and spewing criticism everywhere, he was good for nothing worthwhile — which is precisely why people swiftly nicknamed him Li Dazui.

Yet, surviving a great calamity is a blessing in disguise. Because of the aforementioned entanglement with the Cao Emperor, Li Dazui was naturally different from the other losers.

After he crossed over, the Cao Emperor not only publicly held his hand and introduced him to everyone as "my old brother," but also specially approved "several crates" of personal supplies for Li Dazui, giving off the air of a one-word shoulder-to-shoulder king.

Thus, overnight, Li Dazui became an "indescribable" person. People uniformly offered him "polite smiles," and even Grand Secretary Xia dared not act rashly: whatever you like, do as you please.

Finally, after a year of idling about as a high official, Li Dazui at last felt he ought to do something for the New World. So, after posting one final mass-taunting thread on that local network's crappy forum, burning all bridges with the people, he came to Guangzhou, ready to get some real work done.

Unexpectedly, this trip turned out to be perfectly timed. The Huangpu Special Zone was just then undergoing demolition and relocation. Originally, Ding Liqiu had no intention of making him do such bitter and exhausting work, but who knew Dazui would volunteer and rise to the challenge — his old house in the Old World had never been demolished by any developer, so he could never become a second-generation demolition beneficiary, leaving him full of resentment. Now, at last, he could play the savior and demolish other people's homes.

The demolition and relocation work in the Special Zone was still very heavy. The Phase One project planned from the start covered a total area of twenty square kilometers. Excluding official land, there were over a dozen villages requiring on-site demolition and relocation.

In the seventeenth century, the areas outside the prefectural city were, without a doubt, all agricultural land. Demolishing and relocating so much agricultural land naturally met with resistance, because the vast majority of Ming People could not understand that set of policies. They knew only one thing: someone was going to seize the land they had depended on for survival for generations.

This, without a doubt, triggered a series of conflicts, and then Li Dazui began his campaign of conquest in all directions.

As for demolition and relocation policy, back when they were in Taiwan, the Transmigrators had no seventeenth-century demolition experience. With the local natives, it was all outright seizure first, then considering compensation afterward.

The experience now applied in Guangzhou was summarized during Master Xiong's demolition and relocation in Jiangnan earlier. The terms were considered quite generous, because the Transmigrators were not short of money.

If a relocated household was willing to sell their land, the purchase price here not only exceeded the average for Lian Di, but the relocated household would also have their entire family arranged with jobs and temporary housing, along with subsidies.

Those unwilling to sell did not lose out either. As long as they cooperated with the relocation, while receiving a portion of the demolition fee, in the future, their farmland would be exchanged for valuable shops or residences in the bustling city center, based on equal area. In short, the contracts were certainly generous and contained no traps; landlords would become rent-collecting landlords, guaranteed against drought and flood.

Unfortunately, many local landlords simply refused to cooperate. Because in the eyes of the Ming People, selling land farmed for generations was, without a doubt, a shortsighted and muddled decision — the Ming People had absolutely no concept of a modern city in their minds; they truly could not accept a fine piece of farmland being turned into some damned ground-floor commercial property.

This being the case, the Special District Government had no choice but to first acquire land elsewhere, then come back with the deeds to exchange.

This move, combined with local labor recruitment and explanatory infiltration by relevant stakeholders, managed to win over a portion of the people. After all, the land area exchanged was certainly larger than the original, which amounted to an increase in value.

As for the remaining diehard elements, there was no other way: shut the door, release Li Dazui.

One must understand that this was Guangdong, where the Emperor's writ ran thin. The Transmigrators' power projection here was ample, nothing like the difficult situation Xiong Dao had faced in the beginning. So the moment Li Dazui appeared on the scene, it was the forceful demolition style — imposing in spirit, mighty in force.

Then these diehard elements met their misfortune. In just a few short months, the rural petty landlords, originally isolated from information and utterly ignorant of who Regional Commander Cao even was, all learned the hard way.

Thus, the land requisition work in the Special Zone finally proceeded smoothly. The land needed for the Phase One project came in one after another, and a grand and vigorous construction boom began. And now, the place Li Dazui had brought men to forcibly demolish was the very last pocket of stubborn resistance in the Phase One project.

The village at his feet was called Chenshi Village, composed of two major clans, the Chen and the Shi, with a total population of roughly seven to eight hundred people.

Before this, the smaller Shi Clan in the village had already signed the demolition and relocation contract, and the entire clan had withdrawn from the village. A minority of their landlords went to Taiwan to buy land and property; most of the people stayed in the New District and got new jobs, laboring for the Transmigrators.

The remaining Chen Clan, however, would rather die than retreat, forming the final fortress of resistance against the Cao Bandit.

The next moment, Li Dazui spat out the cigarette butt in his mouth and swung his hand coldly: "Go."

Accompanied by his words, a large number of black-clad figures, brandishing all manner of tools, charged toward the perimeter of Chenshi Village below the low hill.

There were rice paddies there, lychee groves, and mulberry-dike fishponds.