Initial ideas for internal affairs work

"What are you joking about, Chairman VanCleef?" Felix had never expected this bandit chief to have such a bizarre train of thought. He replied through gritted teeth, "Don't forget, I was the one who planned that riot in Stormwind City. The nobles of Stormwind City humiliated not only you, but everyone in the Stonemasons' Guild. They oppress all the suffering people across the Alliance!"

VanCleef breathed a sigh of relief. A moment earlier, he had been worrying about what he would do in the future if a strategist like Felix chose to abandon the Brotherhood.

"All right, then. We'll do as you say. Let the brothers whose resolve isn't firm enough take their money and leave, while the other brothers keep fighting alongside us. Just as you said, our force will shrink in size, but its will to fight will grow stronger."

Those who stay won't necessarily be good brothers with firm resolve who will fight to the end. They could also be SI:7 spies, Felix grumbled inwardly, but of course he would not openly undermine VanCleef at this point.

It was certainly a good thing that the chairman trusted his own brothers so deeply, but that would also come at a heavy cost. The Brotherhood could very well be torn apart by SI:7's infiltration and attacks.

So Felix knew that he would have to find an opportunity later to gather the Defias Brotherhood's most reliable and steadfast Rogues and establish an organization along the lines of a "Political Security Department" or an "All-Alliance Counterrevolutionary Commission" to specifically combat SI:7's infiltration.

But Felix absolutely could not act rashly.

Proposing the establishment of a counterrevolutionary organization without any convincing reason would only provoke unanimous resentment from all the Rogues, including VanCleef. When that happened, before political work even had a chance to enforce discipline, strike at traitors, and put the Defias on the right track, the Brotherhood itself would collapse and disintegrate.

So, just as with letting those adventurers transporting coins go last time, only after these people suffered a setback of moderate severity would they recognize the necessity of his proposal and put Felix's sound advice into practice.

If a few traitors appeared within the Defias who betrayed the organization and defected to Shaw, and if these traitors, who posed an enormous threat to the Brotherhood and even attempted to assassinate Chairman VanCleef, were all discovered and stopped in time by the farsighted Felix, then no one would oppose him when he asked to establish an organization to enforce strict discipline and sniff out and eliminate traitors.

So who would be the best candidate to play this traitor?

Of course, it was the vice chairman of the Stonemasons' Guild, VanCleef's apprentice, and the future chief architect of Stormwind City-Mr. Baros Alexston.

With VanCleef's support, over the next few days, Felix held individual conversations with the Stonemasons' Guild's skilled workers and migrant laborers, one after another.

These private conversations involving only a few people were essential, and far more effective than "holding a mass meeting."

After all, as an auxiliary poverty-relief worker, Felix really had done grassroots work. He knew he was not the protagonist of some wish-fulfillment webnovel. Things like "a shudder of his mighty frame, an aura of kingly dominance radiating from his entire body, and everyone bowing in submission" were simply impossible.

In a certain impoverished village in southwestern Sihe Province, there had been only a hundred or so households in the entire village. Felix had gone door to door to notify every one of them, but when the village meeting actually came around, some arrived early to brag and shoot the breeze, while others still had not arrived after two hours of waiting. For a meeting scheduled at eight in the morning, having everyone present by ten was already something to thank their lucky stars for. There was simply no such thing as "give the word, and everyone in the village quickly arrives on time."

In the end, Felix and his fellow students had worked out a way of convening meetings by "press-ganging" people-since the villagers had to work during the day, they would wait at the village entrance at dusk and grab each person as they returned. Only then could they just barely get everyone together.

And even once everyone had arrived, that was only the first step.

"Say a few words onstage and everyone is inspired, eager to roll up their sleeves and get to work" existed only in the fantasies of these online leftists.

The reality was that, during meetings, some people complained because they were hungry, while others grumbled and raised all sorts of objections. Hardly anyone listened when the village head, the Party branch secretary, or the poverty-relief officials spoke. They did not even know when a show-of-hands vote had taken place, and after the meeting, everyone still had to be notified again of what had just been said.

And even those who listened attentively would not quickly "bow in admiration." People spouting specious arguments and deliberately taking the opposite side were common occurrences.

If money needed to be collected to buy feed or seeds, they were lucky to collect it within a week, even when Felix had already promised that part of the cost would be refunded afterward.

As ordinary university students, Felix and his group of online leftists had long since been driven to fury. They finally realized how difficult and precious the "peasant movement" was.

Later, however, they came to understand it: people who spent half their time daydreaming while their teachers lectured during their school years would be downright strange if they could give a village collective meeting their undivided attention. Work required attention to methods and approaches.

So, although individual conversations were inefficient, these one-on-one meetings could more effectively allow Felix to convey his ideas to every member of the Defias Brotherhood.

"What did you say? Is all of this true?" Shaw listened incredulously to Jasper Fel's report, his mustache forming an inverted V along with his tightly closed mouth.

"Yes. Every word of it."

Shaw widened his sea-blue eyes and paced around the room incessantly.

Everything Fel had described was far too fanciful, inconceivable, and unbelievable:

A band of robbers had attacked the Gold Coast Quarry, yet they had released all their prisoners and even handed out copper coins for them to go home. All they had done was confiscate their weapons, shields, and armor;

These robbers had neither slaughtered all the miners working in the quarry nor cruelly exploited their labor. Instead, they had raised their wages and standardized the rules and regulations governing production;

When Shaw thought back to the audacious band of robbers he had encountered a month earlier who had stolen the king's tax money, to how they had decided to release all the adventurers through a show-of-hands vote, and to their fortitude in saying nothing even after being beaten within an inch of their lives in prison, he felt even more deeply shaken.

What if these two bands of robbers were the same group?

He had seen countless bandits in his life, but he had never seen robbers like these, much less such a novel method of making decisions as a "show-of-hands vote."

People were always both curious about and afraid of the unknown. Although all sorts of robbers were now everywhere within the Kingdom of Stormwind, and even the Kingdom of Lordaeron, Shaw decided to give this particular band of unusual robbers more attention.

"Fel," he took a deep breath, "we're going to visit Grand Duke Bolvar and King Varian right now. We must persuade them to devote more attention to this band of robbers that has appeared out of nowhere."