Chapter 233: Preparing to Make a Move

You want my money.

I want your life.

Very reasonable, right?

After the woman left, Erwen walked in from outside. "Resolved?"

Lanse nodded. Erwen was the one who went to find the person. "Are there many people in this situation among the immigrants?"

Erwen nodded. "Not few. There are always dozens."

Two hundred thousand legal immigrants, plus a bunch of illegal immigrants, there would always be people whose bodies had problems and couldn't hold on for too long.

Although medical science was advancing by leaps and bounds every day and miracle drugs were born every day, this world seemed to be cursed by a mysterious curse.

When people solved one terminal illness, a new terminal illness would appear. No matter how hard people tried, it seemed that something was constantly reducing the number of surviving human individuals.

It was as if there was a special mechanism, screening, blocking, not letting people live better.

God said this was a tribulation, but it was more like a curse!

"Make a list of these people, look at their situations, and divide them into an order. When we need to, we will go find them."

These people were actually also very pitiful. After finally smuggling in or exhausting their family fortune to come to the Federation, whether they obtained legal survival or not, they survived anyway.

But before they had lived a good life for long, they contracted a terminal illness, and their lives entered a countdown.

If it was someone who came alone, then the situation might be slightly better. After all, one person comes, one person goes, and there is no burden.

But like those who had already formed a family here, there would be a lot of reluctance.

They left, what would their families do, what would their children do?

Perhaps five thousand dollars couldn't let them live without worry for a lifetime, but at least it could let them not worry so much about the living situation of their wives and children after they left.

Five thousand dollars, calculated at thirty dollars per month, even adding inflation, this money was enough for these widows and children to grow up without economic pressure.

After Erwen sat down, he brought up another matter. "Bodun said that many outsiders have come into the Imperial District in the past two days, and these outsiders are all concentrated near the nightclubs."

"It might be that people from over there have transferred manpower from other places, at least one or two hundred!"

He mentioned Bodun, and Lanse asked about Bodun's situation in passing. After all, he had killed Luo Bu, and Bodun, the biological father, would definitely have some emotions and dissatisfaction. He needed to know these situations.

Erwen's expression was a bit strange. "Mo Lisi arranged for people to watch Bodun. When you weren't here, Bodun went to the hospital, and he went to ask the doctor..."

Lanse was a bit curious. "Asked what?"

"He asked the doctor if he could still have children..." Erwen couldn't help but laugh as he said this. "The doctor told him he is very strong and can still have them."

Lanse was also laughing. This was actually a good thing. "He is a very typical villain. When he feels he can't bite you, but instead will have his legs broken by you, he will obediently crawl at your feet."

"But we can't relax and slack off because of this, because once he feels he can bite you to death, he will pounce over when you aren't paying attention."

Erwen frowned. "Then why not kill him?"

Lanse sighed lightly. "This isn't so easy to do. He has done a lot of work for us and didn't stop us from punishing Luo Bu. If we kill him now, what will others think?"

"Actually, some people even feel we should have forgiven Luo Bu, so we must emphasize discipline issues now, and killing him without reason will bring some trouble."

"But don't worry, he is very smart. He might have thought of this point, so... soon he will get married again."

Erwen was indeed very smart, and his brain was active, but he indeed hadn't encountered this kind of situation. He didn't know what Lanse meant and could only look at him blankly.

Lanse explained it to him. "He knows we don't trust him that much anymore. He is even afraid that if he loses his job now and doesn't appear in front of people often, he will be quietly killed by us."

"So the best way is to give us another handle to grab."

"Marry a new wife, then have a few children, right under our noses. He has new concerns and things that can threaten him, so we can set our minds at ease about him."

Hearing this, Erwen reacted. He felt it was unbelievable. "He can think of so much?"

Lanse nodded. "People can burst out with endless potential when facing danger, potential that even we ourselves can't imagine."

He paused. "Have Bodun arrange for people to continue watching those outsiders. How is the situation at the Hazardous Materials Bureau?"

"They are still investigating." Erwen took out a cigarette, walked to Lanse's side, handed him one, and struck a match to light it for him.

"They aren't just investigating us; they are investigating the whole of New Jincheng. The Honggou Gang also had a bar taken down by them."

Lanse became a bit interested. "Tell me."

After the Daobang Sect finished, the Honggou Gang couldn't care about the "friendship" of Lanse driving them out of the Imperial District and started to develop rapidly. But the Honggou Gang's own strength wasn't very strong, and after the Daobang Sect finished, some former members of the Daobang Sect, or some street families that had been suppressed and couldn't get ahead, started to develop rapidly.

The entire Port District was a mess.

Wars and struggles between gangs, in the end, required a large amount of funds. These gangs all started to go crazy trying to make money.

For the current New Jincheng, doing anything was not as fast as selling smuggled alcohol.

Bi Er of the Honggou Gang didn't know what nerve was wrong, but he actually wanted to unify the Port District, so recently they were recruiting gang members on a large scale while crazily opening bars.

Because they did it too blatantly, I don't know if they were reported by someone, or if the people from the Hazardous Materials Bureau found the location, but a bar was taken down.

"There was about five thousand dollars worth of alcohol, and several thousand dollars that wasn't taken away."

"Their profit is much higher than ours. For the same alcohol, their profit is close to double ours."

Lanse nodded. "There will be plenty of opportunities to raise prices later. Didn't Bi Er say anything?"

"What else could he say?" Erwen asked. "Besides throwing a tantrum in the office, I can't think of what else this sissy can do."

Under Lanse's influence, everyone looked down on the Honggou Gang a bit.

"Have those bars of ours reopened?" Lanse asked another question. Bulinton and the others hadn't opened for business since they got the bars.

Many people were guessing what they were actually doing, but Lanse felt they might be mobilizing alcohol, or... trying to find a way to get some free alcohol.

Erwen didn't know about this aspect.

Lanse chatted with him for a while longer, telling him to notify Bodun to keep a close eye on those outsiders and pass back any news in time.

Bodun was very attentive and seriously completed all the work Lanse handed over, as if Luo Bu wasn't his son at all.

While Lanse was highly focused on Bulinton's group, Bulinton was also paying attention to Lanse's situation.

The mayor's secretary had already contacted him twice to deal with Lanse's group as soon as possible.

He could feel the secretary's intense emotions when conveying these orders, and he also knew that this kind of thing couldn't be delayed.

But the manpower wasn't all there, and weapons and such had to be transported over. He couldn't just go fight Lanse's people empty-handed, right?

New Jincheng was a strange city, including those weapon dealers. They actually weren't willing to sell weapons to outsiders, which was something Bulinton hadn't expected.

It wasn't that he hadn't gone to other cities to do some work. After they arrived locally and found weapon dealers, as long as there was money, the other party would sell anything.

But here, when they proposed to buy weapons in large quantities, the weapon dealers directly refused the transaction, with the reason being that they didn't want to intervene in their competition with the locals.

In the end, Bulinton could only first mobilize a batch of weapons from outside, which also gave him a very general, but absolutely deep understanding of the local situation—extremely xenophobic!

Now, with the arrival of personnel, the weapons would arrive in these few days, and he could start considering how to deal with Lanse.

"Lanse and the others usually live in the New Jincheng area. They bought several row houses and then renovated them..."

Someone placed photos taken from afar on the table. In the photos, several houses were surrounded by a high wall. Wanting to break through silently wasn't that easy.

Wanting to destroy this kind of high wall was a very difficult thing in itself. Once discovered by the people in the house, even if they opened a gap, it would be very difficult to break in.

Bulinton just took one look and rejected this plan. He had heard the mayor say before that the New Jincheng area was a focus of later development. If they fought in the New Jincheng area, it was very likely to destroy the mayor's plan.

And as his subordinates said, the high wall made the attack difficult.

You have to know, they were all gang members, not professional soldiers. In this offensive side that was clearly at a disadvantage, wanting to take down this house meant they had to pay a higher price!

Bulinton didn't want to lose a large amount of manpower right from the start. The people here were very united and very xenophobic. It was very difficult for him to recruit manpower here.

Even if these people weren't xenophobic and he could recruit some manpower, whether he dared to use the people he recruited and whether he could trust them became a problem he needed to worry about.

"Find a way to lure them out." Without a doubt, Bulinton had already heard about the incident where the Lanse family was blocked in an alley by the Kamila Gang and a firefight occurred.

He had also heard about this clearly unequal battle and the incredible result. This was a resilient family. Wanting to take them down on the offensive end, the price to pay would be very high.

"So I have an idea. We can't fight them in a place where they have an advantage. We must lure them out."

"We will set up an ambush first, then wait for them to come, and then attack them, just like we created an ambush circle and are waiting for them to come."

"This way, the advantage will be on our side."

The others spoke all at once, and finally, the small man beside Brinton gave this idea great approval, "A very good idea, I think it's worth a try."

"But we have a few new problems now: how to lure them out, and how to judge which road they will take, and how many people will come."

The guy who had been serving as Bulinton's staff officer or advisor said, "The Lanse family's main income currently comes from two aspects. One is their office."

"We can't handle this thing very well, because when the workers get off work, they get off work too. When the workers don't get off work, there are too many people there, and it's daytime."

"As for the other part, it's their bars."

"If we can find one of their bars, they will definitely find a way to come over and see what happened."

"The Hazardous Materials Bureau has already taken down two of their bars. Their income should have decreased quite a bit, so they will value the remaining bars more."

This was a speech that clearly had wisdom. Bulinton trusted his advisor very much, and what he said also made a lot of sense. He continued to play the role of not using his brain much. "Then how do we find these bars?"

The advisor smiled, a very confident smile, as if he had already seen the ending. "We don't know, but the drunks know!"

Drunks, regardless of the era or the social and cultural background, have surprisingly similar traits.

People who weren't familiar with them might not be able to distinguish who was a drunk and who wasn't from the crowd that well, but those who were familiar with drunks could easily do this.

Bulinton's order was issued, and soon these people from the Viper Gang started to take action.

In the morning, outside a bakery on the side of the road, as the weather had already warmed up, many bakeries put tables and chairs outside.

This made some elderly people very happy. They just liked to sit in an open-air environment, eating bread, drinking coffee, and chatting with others.

For many elderly people who had lost their labor capacity, this was the only way they wouldn't annoy their children, if they lived with their children all the time.

As for those elderly people who lived alone or didn't live with their children, they could relieve their loneliness through this way.

Three or five elderly people at a table, two or three tables, ten elderly people sitting together, they could chat about everything related to their lives or the country.

Starting from whether the President was an alien, to why people's wages hadn't risen, there was nothing they couldn't chat about.

These people were even more political than those politicians, and they would argue endlessly for their different positions, which became a part of the slow-paced life in the big city.

Of course, not all areas were like this. Places like the Port District, the Bay District, the city center, and the Starlight District had fast-paced lives. Besides the elderly people sitting at intersections in a daze, there would also be some homeless people wandering the streets.

Sometimes middle-aged people would join them. Those people who were frustrated in life or work also needed an environment to release some negative emotions, and this was a very good choice.

"... The President is talking about the illegal immigrant problem. Recently, more and more illegal immigrants have made him have to pay attention to the things he promised during the election."

"These politicians are always like this. They are like those funny young people who are willing to say anything and promise anything when they want to go to bed with you."

"After they pull up their pants, every word and every character you say will only make him annoyed!"

An old man plucked at his bread and said a profound remark, and the others laughed out loud one after another.

Another old man teased, "First you have to make the young people like your butt!"

The first old man was immediately unhappy, and his voice increased a bit. "I was using a metaphor, damn it, are you senile?"

Two old men started arguing, which was very common here, and the others just watched them with smiles.

After their argument was almost over, they continued to chat about subsequent topics.

Actually, it wasn't just the President who had been talking about the illegal immigrant problem recently; some local officials were also discussing this.

"Do you know that William who has been particularly active here recently?" someone asked.

Someone also replied, "I know. A kid from the Federal Party. He must want to run for councilor of the Imperial District, so he often comes here and promises a bunch of things."

The old man curled his lips. "As for whether he can fulfill them in the future, I have no hope at all."

"The politicians here are even more shameless than the nobles of the Empire!"

"At least the nobles know that not fulfilling what they say will make people sneer at them for not having the cultivation of nobles, but the politicians here will take it as an honor because they have successfully deceived the people again!"

These people laughed out loud again. This was their life.

When each table started chatting about their own things, a middle-aged man who looked to be in his early thirties bought a piece of bread and sat in an empty seat.

A piece of dry bread, twenty-five cents, a quarter of a pound, with a hard, charred yellow surface, was some people's favorite.

He learned from the old men, plucked a small piece off, put it into his mouth, and chewed.

The old men were a bit embarrassed. Everyone was familiar, and suddenly a stranger appeared.

But this was a table and chair in a bakery. Since the person bought bread in the bakery, they had the qualification to sit here.

While eating, this middle-aged man suddenly sighed, which made the old men frown.

They didn't like people sighing early in the morning. The older they got, the more so.

"If you have something you can't get over, why not chat with us? We aren't people who talk too much. Besides us, no one else will know."

The middle-aged man hesitated to speak, which made the old men excited. Probing into other people's privacy was always a craving in human bones.

"We have all experienced a lot. Our experience and wisdom might be able to help you find an exit from the maze of life, child!"

The middle-aged man started to narrate why he sighed. He talked about his family, his work, and also indicated his immigrant status.

"... Everything happened too fast, too bad, and destroyed my life before I could react at all!"

"I now... just want to get drunk, but the damn prohibition actually makes me unable to buy alcohol!"

The middle-aged man waved his fist. He looked at these old men. "Do you know where I can get some alcohol?" ===== CHAPTER 234 =====