Setting the Trend in Yanling Commandery

"Ding-dong! To activate it next time, you need to accumulate two hundred popularity points."

Two hundred people... that was too hard.

So, as soon as Tang Wen arrived, he instructed Bu Feng to select more people to station in Yanling Commandery.

Their first task was to gather intelligence; their second was to take in refugees fleeing the war and victims of disasters.

This was the first intelligence organization Tang Wen had established in this other world. When Zhan Dongwen asked him what to call it, Tang Wen blurted out, "Call it War Fox."

Heh, that was because the movie Wolf Warrior was so famous.

Bu Feng was the first leader of the War Fox Team, with only five or six men under him.

On this trip between worlds, Tang Wen had sold eight thousand taels of gold for ninety-six million yuan. He used forty million to buy back two hundred thousand taels of silver ingots and spent the remaining fifty-six million entirely on supplies.

Four hundred tonnes consisted of cement, reinforcing steel, special operations training equipment, and other materials.

Just then, Sun Ping came to report that they had discovered a large quantity of stone not far away in the hills behind them.

Weeds and trees had grown all over the stones, completely concealing them. They were probably the stones left behind by the people who had secretly mined the Tang family's silver mine years ago.

These stones were all hard granite. Once crushed in the stone crusher, they could be used to mix concrete, solving the major problem of raw materials for building the dam.

Li Quan seemed to have attracted someone's attention when he last went to Yanling Commandery to exchange silver for gold. So, after this exchange, Tang Wen decided he would have to temporarily shelve his plan to profit from exchanging gold for silver.

Moreover, as the sums grew larger, he would also have to guard against attracting the attention of those special departments in the Great Eastern Republic.

For ten days, Tang Wen and Qiao Xiao's group worked at a site they had selected, installing special operations training equipment.

There were sand pits, walls of fire, water pits, mud pools, patches of grass, staggered training posts, a shooting range, wire obstacles to crawl under... swings...

Of course, these were all facilities that required no electricity to operate. Otherwise, there would have been no way to set them up.

Meanwhile, Ge Ziyun was assigned to lead a team in widening and improving the island's main road.

The stone crushers and sand crushers worked overtime, with more than a dozen flatbed horse carts taking turns transporting materials, supported by a medium-sized excavator and a road roller.

With two hundred laborers working at full tilt, they managed to level the road and widen it to eight or nine meters. Including the drainage ditches on both sides, it was nearly ten meters across, comparable to county roads in the Huaxia Nation several decades ago.

In those days, most county roads were only five or six meters wide and were surfaced entirely with crushed stone.

If cars could travel on them, why couldn't horse carts?

Once these disaster victims from the Great Chu Kingdom had eaten their fill, they worked far faster and with somewhat greater strength than the casual laborers of modern society, who ate fish and meat every day and even washed down their evening meals with a few ounces of liquor.

Besides, laying a crushed-stone road required little technical skill, so progress was fairly quick. They laid four or five hundred meters a day.

At this rate, they could reach the stone bridge by the sea in a month.

To get rich, build roads first. This road had to be completed.

Otherwise, the large quantities of crops and other goods the island would produce in the future could not be transported out.

A month passed in the blink of an eye. The road was finished, and work on the Crouching Dragon Lake dam was about to begin. That would require enormous quantities of cement and reinforcing steel.

Purchasing horses, mules, medicinal pills, and other necessities had cost more than thirty thousand taels.

Yet Tang Wen had not earned a single penny in nearly two months. Eating away at his reserves like this, even a mountain of gold and a sea of silver would not withstand the drain.

However, over the past month, Tang Wen had recruited only fifty-odd people, still far short of the two hundred popularity points needed to activate the Great Landlord System again.

Tang Wen was beginning to feel anxious.

He had just returned to camp when Gu Hanyan approached with graceful steps. "Master, this servant has now fully recovered. I can attend to you."

"Surely you're unwilling at heart?" Tang Wen asked, looking at her.

"Willing or not, I must do it. I, Hanyan, am not someone who breaks her promises.

"Since I was sold to the Tang family, I am the Tang family's servant.

"You need not worry about anything, Master. I will fulfill my duties as your servant.

"I will never put you in a difficult position or neglect my obligations." Gu Hanyan spoke with an indifferent expression.

"Very well. I'll have someone divide the tent into three rooms later. You, Junru, and I will each have one," Tang Wen said with a nod.

"Mm." Gu Hanyan gave a soft reply.

Afterward, Tang Wen summoned a carpenter and had the tent divided into three rooms with fire-resistant boards.

He would sleep in the middle-a beauty in each arm, one on either side. Of course, that was merely an indulgent fantasy.

That afternoon, Li Quan returned from Yanling Commandery, bringing two hundred taels of gold with him.

"Master, this is from Miss Li Chun'er of the Floating Fragrance House. She said she has sold all three batches of goods you gave her. She asked whether there are any more, and if there are, she wants me to deliver them immediately." Li Quan took out a letter and handed it over.

Tang Wen pulled out the letter and read it, discovering that it was an account statement.

He was immediately taken aback. He had never expected those mirrors, lipsticks, and perfumes to sell so quickly. They had all sold out in just over two months.

Those three batches had all been low-quality goods, costing Tang Wen only a little over two hundred thousand yuan. If he took the two hundred taels of gold ingots back to the Great Eastern Republic, he could easily sell them for more than two million.

A tenfold return-more lucrative than drug trafficking.

"Master, you have no idea. A new craze has swept through the Lord of Yanling's domain lately," Li Quan said with a broad smile.

"What craze?" Tang Wen asked.

"A mirror craze and a perfume craze. Whenever any young lady or noblewoman of standing goes out...

"If she doesn't smell of perfume and occasionally take out a little round mirror to tidy her hair and preen...

"People will look down on her and treat her as someone of low status.

"So, for a while, little mirrors were everywhere in the city.

"But now there's no stock left. Quite a few people have taken the opportunity to resell mirrors and lipstick, and the prices have doubled overnight," Li Quan said.

"Such a thing actually happened?" Tang Wen was rather dumbfounded.

"It's absolutely true. I personally saw several officials' wives and daughters showing off their little round mirrors," Li Quan said.

"Then that's wonderful. Li Quan, take some men and escort another batch to Li Chun'er immediately. Sell them under the same terms as before," Tang Wen said.

"Mirrors and perfume have gone up in price now. If we still charge the old price, won't we be losing out?" Li Quan asked, pained by the thought.

"It's fine. In business, you have to think long-term. You must leave a little money for others to earn. Small profits and high sales-we won't lose out." Tang Wen brought Li Quan into the warehouse and gave him all the remaining goods.

Of course, it was not that Tang Wen did not want to raise his prices. He had to consider what the women of Yanling City could afford.

The first people to buy mirrors and lipstick had all been wealthy. This next batch would probably go to women from middle-income households.

These people could only just afford to eat their fill. Scraping together half a tael or a tael of gold from here and there was no easy task.

If the prices rose, they would no longer be able to afford the goods. Sales would stagnate, which would hinder the growth of his business instead.

After all, Yanling City was merely a commandery seat. Tang Wen had his sights set on the provincial capital, Jiangzhou.

There were more wealthy young ladies and officials' wives there. The next day, the first phase of construction on the Crouching Dragon Lake dam began.

At the center of Su Mei Island stood Skyward Peak, which rose more than a thousand meters high.

The land extending outward from Skyward Peak stretched twenty or thirty li from east to west. Tang Wen was not yet sure how far it extended from north to south. All the island's fresh water flowed down from Skyward Peak.

The water heading toward Crouching Dragon Lake first plunged down a series of waterfalls upstream into a deep pool below, then formed a small stream that ran straight toward the lake.

The stream was not large either. Near Skyward Peak, it was only ten meters wide, and even near its mouth at Crouching Dragon Lake, it was merely thirty-four meters or so across.

To build the dam, they first had to divert the stream through huge pipes to another location and drain the lake before construction could proceed.

Tang Wen had anticipated this. A month earlier, he had selected a relatively level site upstream, five li from camp, and poured an enormous concrete water reservoir.

He had also built several more downstream at intervals of one li, continuing all the way into the camp.

At the time, Zhan Dongwen and the others had thought their master was fooling around. They had no idea why he was wasting so much cement on these things. Today, Tang Wen would show them.

"Dongwen, before this, we had to go down to the lakebed to fetch water. Tell me, wasn't that exhausting?" Standing before the reservoir, Tang Wen asked with a smile.

"Of course it was. And now we have more and more people and animals, all of whom need drinking water.

"We also need water to wash clothes and vegetables. If we keep expanding...

"I'm afraid we'll have to assign a dozen people every day just to carry water," Zhan Dongwen said with a nod.

"A dozen probably won't be enough. Suppose our camp grows to two or three thousand people and over a hundred animals. How much water will we need every day for drinking, cooking, and washing? We'll need dozens of people dedicated to carrying water," Ge Ziyun said.

"Exactly. A few thousand is nothing. What if we have ten, twenty, or thirty thousand people?" Tang Wen asked with a smile.

"Then we simply wouldn't be able to carry enough. I understand now. That's why you're building the dam, Master. Once the water level rises, we'll use the water from Crouching Dragon Lake." Zhan Dongwen had gotten the wrong idea.

"Heh, no, no. Crouching Dragon Lake has another purpose. To solve our drinking and household water needs, we'll be relying entirely on this from now on." Tang Wen pointed at the enormous concrete reservoir.

"Could it be that you intend to channel the stream into the reservoir, then connect pipes from it to the camp?" Ge Ziyun was much sharper.

"Exactly! And look, our reservoirs descend in steps. There are several of them all the way down to the camp," Tang Wen said.

"Isn't that wasteful? We could simply connect a pipe directly from the reservoir to the camp," Zhang Kui asked.