Chen Lin fell silent for three seconds.
He quickly ran through it in his head.
Thirty elite special forces soldiers who had practiced the stripped-down breathing technique, each able to lift four hundred jin with one hand, with physiques three times stronger than an ordinary person's and reflexes and recovery far beyond normal human limits.
Send them against a rabble in a scam compound?
Chen Lin almost laughed out loud.
This wasn't a combat test.
This was a slaughter.
"All right," he said casually. "Send them over."
An "Understood!" came through the communicator from General Zhao, his delight barely restrained. Then the connection cut off.
Chen Lin handed the communicator back to Ye Wenjun.
He turned around.
Everyone in the courtyard looked as though they had been frozen in place.
At some point, the half-smoked cigarette between Chen Guofu's lips had fallen to the ground and scorched a small patch of his trouser cuff. He hadn't reacted at all. He sat nailed to the stone stool, his eyes bulging almost out of their sockets.
Liu Desheng's mouth hung open as though his jaw had been dislocated and he couldn't close it.
At the entrance to the main room, his second aunt, Liu Shuqin, clung to the doorframe, her legs shaking. Wang Guihua leaned against her, the tear tracks on her face still wet, but she had forgotten even to cry. Her expression hovered between terror and blank shock.
General Zhao.
Those two words.
To these farmers, who had never left their province and whose encounters with high-ranking officials stopped at the town mayor, that wasn't a name or a military rank.
It was something from television.
The sort of figure who sat in the front row on the national news, his chest covered in medals.
And that sort of figure-on