Chapter 499: The

On the fifth day of the first lunar month, popularly called "Po Wu", the firecracker noises in the Capital City had not yet ceased, yet a group of uninvited guests arrived at the large courtyard in the western suburbs bearing the sign "Xinghan Agricultural Machinery Repair and Manufacturing Plant".

Several black sedans bearing embassy plates barreled in and stopped directly on the oil‑stained, metal‑shavings‑covered open ground. The doors flung open, and Williams, his face dark, stepped out, followed by a group holding inspection devices and wearing credentials around their necks; their demeanor was not that of New Year well‑wishes but of a raid.

In the yard, the sparks from the oxy‑cutting torch sizzled. Dozens of workers were busy around a pile of rust‑spotted iron lumps, the cutting noise grating.

Lu Qingshan, dressed in blue work clothes smeared with black engine oil and still gripping a pipe wrench, had hair as messy as a chicken coop. Seeing Williams, he rubbed his hand over his rear a couple of times and greeted him with a broad, forced smile.

"Hey, aren't you the Ambassador? It's the New Year, why are you taking time to inspect my junkyard?" Lu Qingshan pulled a crumpled pack of Da Qianmen from his pocket, flicked out a cigarette and handed it over, "A Huaxia specialty? It'll perk you up."

Williams grimaced, sidestepping the blackened hand, and snorted, "Mr. Lu, stop the act. We've received reliable intelligence that you are violating the Dawn Accord by privately dismantling and replicating Soviet offensive weapon technology. Under the terms of the accord, I have the right to conduct a surprise inspection."

He waved his hand, and the technicians behind him instantly dispersed, their Geiger counters waving erratically at the pile of scrap iron.

"That's false!" Lu Qingshan jammed the cigarette into his ear, his face full of grievance, "Ambassador, look around—these are discarded T-62 Tanks that the Soviet Union abandoned. I bought them at scrap‑iron prices. I was just about to dismantle them and sell the scrap steel."

Williams ignored him, pulling a high‑resolution satellite photo from his briefcase and stabbing his finger onto it, "Scrap iron? Then what is this?"

In the photo, a massive red‑brick warehouse deep within the plant complex was heavily guarded, with even heat signatures detected around it.

"This…" Lu Qingshan's complexion changed, his gaze wandering, a thin sheen of sweat forming on his forehead, "It's just a… storage warehouse. It's messy inside; I feared it would soil your shoes."

Williams caught that fleeting panic. He smiled, a grin like a shark that had just sighted blood.

"Dirty or not, you'll only know when you see it," Williams strode toward the warehouse, "Open the door!"

Lu Qingshan hurried after him, blocking the doorway, reached into his pocket for a thick envelope and lewdly thrust it into Williams's chest, "Ambassador, may I have a word? It's the New Year; the brothers aren't having it easy…"

Flashbulbs around snapped "click click" in a blaze. A few Western reporters were present, their lenses now fixed on Lu Qingshan's "bribery‑failed" face.

Williams ripped the envelope away, speaking with righteous authority, "Mr. Lu, your charade ends now. Open the door immediately! Otherwise I will treat it as Xinghan Group unilaterally tearing up the agreement and impose full international sanctions on you!"

Lu Qingshan looked at the envelope on the ground, sighed, his shoulders slumped, a resigned expression on his face.

"Fine, since you insist on seeing it, go ahead. But the ugly part comes first; if it scares me, I won't be responsible."

Lu Qingshan waved at Lin Yueqiang standing nearby.

Lin Yueqiang kept a stern face, walked to the massive iron gate and forcefully pushed open the electric barrier.

"Boom—"

The heavy iron door slowly slid open to both sides. A strong smell of Diesel Engine flooded the air, followed by deafening engine roars.

Williams' eyes widened with excitement, and the camera behind him was set up, ready to record the iron evidence of Huaxia's hidden Su-27 production line.

The dust cleared.

Williams' smile froze on his face, slowly cracking.

Inside the warehouse there were no fighter jets, no precision machine tools, and no missiles.

Only a few hundred oddly‑shaped, hulking, black‑fat tractors.

These massive machines were neatly lined up; their chassis truly used tank tracks, but now each bore a huge bucket welded on top, a deep‑plow attached behind, and exhaust pipes puffing black smoke. A group of workers wielded spray guns, coating the bodies with a gritty green paint that bore four bold characters on the side: Xinghan Agricultural Machinery.

"What… what the hell is this?!" Williams pointed at the machines, his voice cracking.

Lu Qingshan walked over, patted the thick armor plate, a proud grin on his face, "Xinghan Heavy Crawler Tractor. Ambassador, you know the soil in Africa is hard and riddled with mines; ordinary tractors can't handle it. I thought the tank chassis is sturdy and powerful, perfect for repurposing. We're about to ship them to Angola to aid our African brothers in agricultural development."

He turned his head, looking at the stunned reporters, spreading his hands, "What, is the United States sanctioning even a hoe? Or does the CIA think this thing can fly across the Atlantic to bomb the White House?"

The reporters glanced at each other, and someone couldn't help but let out a "pfft" laugh.

Williams' face turned a pig‑liver hue; unwilling, he rushed forward and lifted the hood of a machine. Inside was indeed a Diesel Engine, but it had been heavily altered, its injectors replaced with crude civilian parts—powerful but devoid of any technical sophistication.

What he didn't know was that the engine's original core turbocharger components and fire‑control chips had long been removed, now riding on a semi‑trailer hundreds of kilometers away on a highway.

"Is this your intelligence?" Lu Qingshan leaned close to Williams's ear, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "Ambassador, does this count as… treating a tractor like a tank?"

Williams clenched his teeth, staring intently at Lu Qingshan as if trying to read a flower on his face. But he lost, utterly. In front of the camera, he resembled a fool who brought people to gamble, only to lift the table and find everyone playing marbles.

"We're leaving!" Williams crumpled the satellite photo into a ball, tossed it on the ground, and turned to leave.

Lu Qingshan shouted from behind, "Hey, Ambassador, don't be in a hurry to leave! Since you're here, take two back? Let American farm owners try them? I'll give you a twenty‑percent discount! Free shipping!"

The convoy trudged away, kicking up a cloud of yellow earth.

The next day, the front‑page headline of The Washington Post was maximally satirical: "The CIA Farce: The $1 Billion Tractor Threat Theory."

The plant's main gate closed.

The merchant‑like grin on Lu Qingshan's face vanished instantly, his eyes turning deep and calm. He stripped off his filthy work clothes and tossed them to Lin Yueqiang.

"Wash them clean; you'll have to wear them again next time."

"Brother‑in‑law, you had those foreign devils running in circles," Lin Yueqiang said, picking up the envelope from the ground with a grin, "But that batch were the real deal…"

"They're already on the road."

At this very moment, on the Jingkun Expressway.

Over a dozen Liberation‑brand semi‑trailers loaded with Large Cabbage braved wind and snow toward the Qinling Mountains. The cargo bays were packed with shock‑absorbing foam. Beneath the layers of cabbage lay the complete original schematics of a Su-27 and two pristine AL-31F engines.

Lu Qingshan returned to his office, locked the door, and walked to the bookshelf, pressing a mechanism behind a copy of Capital.

The bookshelf slid open silently, revealing a hidden room behind it.

Inside the secret room, smoke swirled around a silver‑haired, high‑bridged‑nose Soviet elder seated at a table, holding a vernier caliper and staring blankly at a blueprint. On the table lay a half bottle of Chinese baijiu and a plate of peanuts.

He is Igor Mihailovich, former chief mechanic of the MiG Design Bureau, and also the "tractor factory director" who existed only on paper earlier.

Seeing Lu Qingshan enter, Igor set down the caliper, a hint of melancholy in his gray‑blue eyes.

"Lu, I don't understand," Igor said, pointing outward, "Those T-62s are old, but they're the skeletons of a steel torrent. Have you really turned them into… plows for the fields?"

Lu Qingshan sat down and poured himself a drink, the one he hadn't offered to the guests earlier.

"Comrade Igor, swords in the armory, horses grazing the southern hills—that's a scene only a peaceful age can afford," Lu Qingshan said, sipping the fiery liquor, "But in today's Huaxia, we must first fill our bellies before we have the strength to forge swords."

He pulled a neatly folded set of schematics from his coat, spread them on the table. They were a partial backup taken from the Large Cabbage convoy's compartment, detailing improvements to the AL-31F engine's vectoring nozzles.

"Sorry for the grievance, Mr. Dawari," Lu Qingshan's finger traced a graceful arc on the drawing, "You've been stuck in that pile of scrap for far too long. Soon, you'll see a real 'tractor' soar into the blue sky."

Igor stared at the blueprint, his previously dim eyes gradually brightening. It was the fervor engineers feel when confronting an unsolved problem.

"Vectoring nozzles…" Igor muttered, his hand trembling as he touched them, "We only have a concept in the bureau; we haven't even built a model. Do you have a plan?"

"I have money, you have brains, and we also have a bunch of desperate good students," Lu Qingshan raised his glass, clinking it against the one holding Chinese baijiu, "In this world, as long as you swing the hoe well, there's no wall corner you can't dig down, and no tractor that can't take flight."

Igor froze for a moment, then burst into loud laughter. He downed the wine in the cup in one gulp, grabbed a pen, lay on the blueprint, and began to draw.

"Give me three months! No, two months!" the old man yelled, "I want those Americans to know what Soviet violent aesthetics is! Even if it's in a tractor factory!"

Lu Qingshan watched the old man's frantic silhouette, smiling. He turned and walked out of the secret room, gazing at the darkened sky outside the window.

In the distance, the outline of the Qin Mountains resembled a giant dragon in the night.

There, the lights of Base 101 were about to blaze all night. While the Americans were still writing review reports for those few tractors, Huaxia's aviation industry had quietly swapped in a new heart.