Chapter 677 - Village Consolidation

"Is it him?"

"It's him," the laborer whispered.

"Carry this body to the village and dump it on the threshing floor." The order came swift and cold. "Let everyone see what happens to traitors."

Under the anxious gaze of the gathered villagers, the Fubogun marched into the settlement and set about demolishing the liaison's house. In less than fifteen minutes, the entire structure lay in ruins. What could burn was hauled outside the village and put to the torch. Only the massive bamboo beam was spared.

Soldiers drove up a cow dragging an iron plow and turned the bare foundation deep into the earth. A sack of sea salt was scattered into the fresh furrows and buried. Finally, the salvaged beam was erected upon that salted ground, and from it hung the body of the liaison who had betrayed the work team.

"Leave it there until only bones remain," Lin Shenhe commanded.

A new work team arrived from Danzhou with Lin Shenhe serving as interim leader. Liu Yixiao and Yu Zhiqian soon followed, bringing the work team with them. For the moment, Danzhou's power center had shifted to this desolate hamlet.

"Is it wise for you to come here as well?" Liu Yixiao asked with evident concern.

"Danzhou isn't without transmigrators in my absence," Yu Zhiqian replied. "I need to survey the battlefield myself. Besides, when an incident of this magnitude occurs and leadership fails to visit the front line—what will the Yuan Laoyuan think?"

The entire village underwent a thorough cleansing. The new work team abandoned all talk of developing mountain land or cultivating cash crops. Even the previous efforts to recruit soldiers and laborers had ceased.

Both Lin Shenhe and Liu Yixiao suspected that others in the village had connections to the bandits. Liu Yixiao was also convinced the villagers couldn't possibly be ignorant of which gang had attacked.

These questions demanded answers. Without rooting out the source of danger, peaceful construction would remain impossible.

Under the soldiers' supervision, the village men constructed a bamboo palisade around the settlement, dug a defensive trench, and erected a watchtower. Anyone leaving for the fields now required approval from work-team personnel. Every permanent resident was entered into a new household-registration system.

Work-team members wearing blue collar tabs began conducting individual interviews with the villagers—one by one, back-to-back. From the elderly to children as young as eight, everyone was questioned. Everyone had to pass.

The investigation turned each villager's history inside out. Eventually, someone revealed that Chen Lianjian had connections to bandits.

Chen Lianjian had ridden with bandits for years before returning to farm after an injury left one leg useless. He had a wife and several daughters. Without able-bodied male laborers, the family barely scraped by.

He admitted he had been a bandit—but not with the gang that had come.

"They're Hu Lanyan's men! Nothing to do with me—I never invited them!" Chen Lianjian protested again and again. "Hu Lanyan's bunch came over from Lingao!"

He knew little about Hu Lanyan's gang—only that they had arrived from Lingao the previous year with many men and had swiftly become the largest bandit force in the region.

Lin Shenhe slammed the table. "Tell me everything you know about local bandit activity. Confess honestly!"

Chen Lianjian was illiterate and had been nothing more than a lowly foot soldier. He knew little of real value. But he still revealed information about aliases, gang sizes, methods, and jargon. Lin Shenhe recognized immediately that this man could prove useful. In the hands of professional investigators, even more could be extracted.

"Guards—lock him up separately," Lin Shenhe instructed. "Watch him carefully."

"Yes, sir!" The guard turned to leave.

"Wait." Lin Shenhe stopped him. "Also arrest his wife and daughters. Lock them up separately."

"This humble one is already a cripple! I can never work that trade again—I wouldn't dare even think of it! Please investigate, Your Honor!" Chen Lianjian pleaded desperately, terrified the Australians might make an example of him and his family—just as they had with the liaison.

"Should we kill a few to establish authority?" Lin Shenhe asked Liu Yixiao. "We could execute Chen Lianjian based on his bandit history."

Liu Yixiao shook his head. "That wouldn't be appropriate. Chen Lianjian wasn't involved in the attack on the work team. Most of these villagers are neither perpetrators nor accomplices—at worst, they failed to act heroically. Executing them under such circumstances would be unjustifiable."

"What a shame not to kill a few," Yu Zhiqian said, deeply disappointed. "This won't deter the locals."

"These people have lived in hardship for so long that their thinking has grown numb and obtuse—they know only self-preservation," Fang Jinghan observed. He was directing the political investigation and social survey. "This is classic submissive-populace mentality: any master will do, so long as survival is possible. They're so poor they have nothing left to lose."

"I still think we should execute a batch," Yu Zhiqian pressed. "Without bloodshed, we cannot establish authority in Danzhou. It's crippling public security."

"Slaughtering innocents is meaningless." Liu Yixiao's opposition was firm. "These villagers are contemptible, but there's no justifiable grounds for execution. Indiscriminate killing only betrays our own weakness."

Yet for all his conviction, Liu Yixiao had no clear alternative.

His report on the Zhaopu Village incident sent shockwaves through the Yuan Laoyuan. The word from Liu Muzhou was grim: the transmigrators were furious with his leadership. He might well be stripped of his position as Danzhou Work Team leader.

If that happened, his hopes of becoming Danzhou's first County Magistrate would be finished. Worse, this political stain would prove nearly impossible to wash away. Dejection and anxiety gnawed at him in equal measure. All he could do was try to salvage points through the follow-up.

Too lenient a response would only deepen the Yuan Laoyuan's displeasure. According to Liu Muzhou, some transmigrators were already demanding the entire village be massacred.

But excessive cruelty would alienate others. The balance between severity and leniency had become an impossible needle to thread.

After considerable deliberation, Fang Jinghan proposed a plan he called "collective punishment."

The proposal was to confiscate all property belonging to Zhaopu Village residents as restitution for the destruction of the work team.

"That's nothing—what property do they even have?"

"The land here, meager as it is, constitutes property."

"Fine. What do we do with the land?" Danzhou had no shortage of land—only people.

"The land isn't the point," Fang Jinghan explained. "Stripping them of it strips them of any means to survive here. All the village's laborers become population directly at our disposal. If you like, call them 'state slaves.'"

"Like how all immigrants become contract slaves..."

"Exactly. We relocate the entire village to better conditions through consolidation—turning them into directly controlled population. This becomes Danzhou's first commune."

"Thirty-odd households? That's too few for a commune."

"We implement village consolidation—gradually relocating and merging these scattered settlements. It facilitates population management while promoting development."

After the relocation, the original site could be abandoned entirely—it held little development value anyway. When the time came to exploit the mountain resources, new migrants could be moved in.

As for the relocated villagers, Fang Jinghan recommended immediate utilization. All eligible males between eighteen and twenty-five would be drafted.

"The military is a great melting pot," he said. "Throw them in, let Wei Aiwen feed them gruel, make them march in formation for three years. They'll develop discipline. When they come out, they'll be qualified 'new people.' For adults, only such coercion works."

Children under eighteen would all be sent to Lingao for compulsory education—younger ones to national school, older ones to apprenticeship training. The remaining population would serve as laborers. No manpower would be wasted.

"We'll proceed with this approach." Liu Yixiao nodded his approval. "Road construction needs labor. Once this group is resettled, start them with three months of roadwork."

"Better to establish the commune first," Yu Zhiqian interjected. "Zhonghe Post's garrison city has a solid foundation—plenty of empty buildings, more than adequate for housing immigrants. Make Zhonghe Post the site of Danzhou's first commune."

The following week, additional work-team members and a second infantry company arrived from Danzhou. Soldiers encircled the village in a tight cordon. The work team then entered in batches, ordering each household to pack up and prepare for relocation.

The villagers possessed almost nothing. Their sole property consisted of ragged clothes, crude farm tools, and the barest necessities. The wealthiest families had cattle.

"Except for clothes, valuables, and livestock—bring nothing!" Native work-team members bellowed through megaphones. "The new village will have everything you need. Food and drink will be provided on the road!"

By transmigrator standards, the villagers owned nothing worth calling property beyond themselves and their livestock. The local farm tools were so wretched they were better melted for scrap. Even the most treasured iron pots struck the transmigrators as a waste of metal, to say nothing of the hygiene concerns with their utensils. After due consideration, everyone agreed that a full supply system would be simpler.

What remained in the village would be inspected. Usable materials—iron goods, metal objects, cotton and hemp textiles—would be disinfected and recovered. Everything else would be destroyed on site. The houses, too, would be demolished entirely, severing any thought of return.

Only one thing would be left standing: the bamboo pole with its badly rotting corpse. Flies swarmed thick around it.

As the villagers shouldered their meager belongings and set off, the demolition was already underway behind them. The rumble of collapsing houses and the rising clouds of dust drew expressions of grief and bewilderment across the faces of the departing.