Chapter 112: Finally Falling Prey

No matter how complicated Yang Er's inner journey, that seventeen-year-old Hangzhou thief with a purple-red birthmark on his face was ferried across the Taijiang shore by nightfall and finally settled in the Chikan New District.

Along the scenic Taijiang shore, neat checkerboard plots held row upon row of tidy stilt houses, each room fitted with orderly bunks and long tables, the thick sturdy bed frames giving off the fresh scent of raw unfinished wood.

The spacious, bright stilt houses far surpassed the dark, cramped communal bunks of Moyun Temple; with the radiant sea view, the vast open land, and the fierce guards nowhere in sight at the moment, the laborers' uneasy hearts, ever since arriving at Dayuan, finally settled a great deal in this moment.

That evening, the mess hall served the customary "initiation meal": a main dish of air-dried venison and pork stewed together, vegetable dishes of bamboo shoots, seaweed, and kelp, all generously heaped over rice, making the newcomers eat until their mouths dripped grease and they cried out in satisfaction. Of course, from this day on, they would bid farewell to the great enemy of blood vessels and livers — red meat — and embark on a healthy life of eating seafood at every meal.

After the meal, the laborers, long versed in the Transmigrators' routines, quickly elected dorm heads, then queued up and cheerfully received their personal supplies from the storehouse: a thick bamboo cup, a homespun cloth suit, a wooden basin, a straw mat, and a thin blanket.

Everyone soon recognized that the homespun cloth suits and thin blankets were products of the Moyun Temple workshops… Truly, you reap what you sow — nothing more, nothing less.

Worth mentioning was the straw mat: the red, yellow, and green interwoven mat was clearly made from the wild grass along the beach, red at the root and deep green at the top. This grass had a high salt content; sleeping on it kept bugs away and prevented prickly heat on the skin — it was top-grade straw mat material. What made the laborers marvel was this: the mats were finely woven, crisp and firm, smooth and faintly fragrant. Even the most expensive Yinxian salted straw mats in Hangzhou City were no better than this.

…With the advent of electricity at the Kiln Area Base, simple agricultural devices like the straw mat machine and bamboo curtain machine also began to be deployed. A machine was a machine; in a very short time, Dayuan's bamboo and straw products already met internal demand, and these products were finely crafted, uniform in quality, and low in cost — before long, they could be sold back to Jiangnan and become export goods.

The arrival of electricity made another former bottleneck — the difficulty of woodworking mortise-and-tenon joints — a thing of the past. A hand saw could now effortlessly cut any concave or convex shape a woodworker desired into a pillar head within a single minute, increasing efficiency more than tenfold.

The checkerboard grid of Chikan New District was currently being filled with "Ocean Mansions" at a jaw-dropping pace, and with the arrival of this new batch of laborers, that speed would only increase.

Yang Er naturally had no idea that his grand straw-sandal-making enterprise had already been replaced by some machine; the thief was currently scurrying all around the school district house assigned to him, familiarizing himself with the terrain.

The Crossing Faction's first boarding school had been under construction for quite some time, located right next to the checkerboard grid where Yang Er was. The school's rectangular courtyard design had a ring of collective dormitories and other functional buildings on the outer perimeter, classrooms on the inner ring, and a plaza in the center.

Several timber-framed buildings of the school were already completed; these few structures could already guarantee the most basic daily teaching and living needs. In the planning, all the school's remaining buildings would be solid brick-concrete structures, built to the same specifications as the yet-to-be-started Chikan Castle, to guard against the harm typhoon season might bring to the students.

The first batch of Type 95 red bricks and the first batch of soil cement produced by the Kiln District's earth brick kiln were all used to build the school's walls. After Yang Er moved into his school district house, he could at any moment look through the bamboo window and see that beautiful red brick wall — a wall that, in the Great Ming, would be considered an act of presumption.

Presumption or not, Yang Er didn't understand such things; he only knew that red brick walls were something only wealthy and noble households could use. So that red brick wall, already half a man's height and under construction just across a dirt road, would surely be enjoyed in the future by the great households of Yizhou.

The newcomers passed a pleasant first day, and the second day was, truth be told, also pleasant: everyone rose early, took their newly issued work clothes, and queued up to walk several li to the Kiln District, where, in the newly built large bathhouse, the newcomers collectively took a bath.

The bathhouse's decoration was quite advanced: the main structure was built of raw logs, the floor was paved with square basalt slabs, and the floor tiles were made of pumice — lightweight volcanic stone riddled with fine pores — providing a built-in massage effect. The Industrial Party members had their own separate bathhouse built of black ebony next door, complete with a pumice massage pool; after shift changes, one could often hear the kiln masters singing at the top of their lungs during dry steam sessions.

A dedicated atmospheric-pressure boiler was responsible for providing all the Kiln District workers with drinking water and bathwater. The newly inducted people that day comfortably took a hot bath in the bathhouse — that hot water actually flowed from the shiny iron pipes overhead, a marvel that left the newcomers, accustomed to cold spring baths at Moyun Temple, exclaiming in wonder.

The Ming people team leader, megaphone in hand, proudly announced after everyone changed into new clothes: from now on, every person coming off shift could bathe here for free… This caused quite a stir; those in the ranks who had worked as servants immediately began to educate the others: even in the great households of Hangzhou, only the Family Head and favored concubines could enjoy a wooden tub bath…

The tour group's cheerful atmosphere suffered its first blow at the woodworking factory: logs thick enough to wrap one's arms around were sliced into square pillars by iron-toothed discs the size of cartwheels amid an enormous shrieking noise. The newcomers who witnessed this scene covered their ears in terror, and the entire group began to shrink back.

The crusher that followed also gave the newcomers their fill of a horror-film thrill. Fortunately, most of the people operating the machines were "cellmates" who had previously vanished from Moyun Temple, so when fellow locals stepped forward to demonstrate, the majority's state of mind steadied — "If the friends from the cellblock can do this work, I can probably do it too…"

The newcomers of the tour group spent the entire morning adapting to the new environment; they still had an afternoon of leave time. After this, everyone would be successively assigned to various work posts according to the files prepared back during the Moyun Temple period.

Yang Er did not need to wait for assignment, because he found work later that very evening — it was only after Yang Er left that the newcomers in the school district houses realized a formidable person had been hiding among them, formidable enough that the Mighty Spirit God himself had come calling in person to invite him.

At dusk, Yang Er, rubbing his bulging belly and leaning diagonally against the wooden steps in front of the door listening to his roommates shoot the breeze, was the first to spot the figure slowly approaching in the distance.

The young thief's instinct for danger told Yang Er that this visitor came with ill intent. He shrank back into the house and peered through the crack of the window; before long, the sweat-drenched thief confirmed that the Abbot was coming for him — hiding beside the urine bucket at the back door, he clearly heard the Abbot's voice at the front door asking after him.

Patiently waiting until the heavy footsteps that only the Abbot could produce sounded on the wooden steps at the doorway, Yang Er executed a Lazy Donkey Roll, silently tumbling out the back door and smoothly sliding underneath the stilt house.

Beneath it, using all four limbs, he cleverly crawled in reverse back toward the front door direction, hearing the heavy footsteps pass overhead along the way; at this, he had no more hesitation, silently rolling out from under the front door, intending to escape and spend the night in another dormitory first.

The next moment, the thief's collar was seized by a certain giant standing on the wooden steps at the door, long since impatient from waiting… Amid a burst of roaring laughter, Yang Er, stunned, strained to twist his head around, and then he saw one of his roommates inside the house, vigorously stomping his feet as he walked…

The sun set in the west; gulls and egrets skimmed the surface of the Taijiang, splashing up shards of molten gold. In the fiery glow of the dying sun, two figures, one large and one small, gradually receded into the distance, and upon the sea wind, a few pleading cries drifted from time to time:

"Ouch, my neck, my neck can't take it!"

"You little monkey, still gonna run?"

"I wouldn't dare, Abbot, Yang Er wouldn't dare ever again, spare my life, I beg you…"