Under one person: I, Zhang Zhiwei, the arrogant Zhang.

When the landlords learned that Zhang Mazi and his gang had been severely damaged, they were relieved that their money had not been wasted. They had finally dealt a heavy blow to these despicable bandits and were now wondering if they would dare to cause trouble again.

Immediately afterwards, Zhang Mazi sent out another message saying that he had suffered heavy losses in the encirclement and suppression and that he would take back double the losses, which frightened the landlords into silence.

Zhang Mazi and his gang lived up to their promise and robbed several landlords again.

Upon learning this, Liu Mang was furious and donated another third of his family fortune to suppress the bandits, and also ordered the landlords to continue donating money.

Some landlords, seeing the situation was not good, wanted to flee with their property and families, but wasn't that exactly what Zhang Mazi wanted?

They were basically intercepted before even leaving Sichuan and taken away in one fell swoop.

Staying might bring disaster, running away would bring immediate disaster. Zhang Mazi's existence had become a terrifying legend throughout Sichuan.
Landlords are different from ordinary businessmen. Most of their assets are in the land. They can run away, but they can't hide!
Most importantly, the Chairman's policy on legal tender required the direct exchange of silver dollars in banks for legal tender. To cope with this policy, many people had already converted their money in banks into gold and silver and stored it at home, making it even more impossible for them to take it with them.

You can't exactly drag the gold and silver out to exchange for legal tender, can you? And then just leave with the bankbook, traveling light!
It's likely that it will be robbed before it even reaches the money exchange.

Moreover, given the current situation, I'm afraid even the people from the money exchange wouldn't dare to come and collect the money.

Left with no other choice, the landlord had to grit his teeth and bear it, and continue to fund Liu Mang's campaign against the bandits.

They notified Liu Mang to send men to collect money to suppress the bandits. When Liu Mang's men came to collect the money, they followed them all the way to Yucheng with their families, abandoning their land to fully support the suppression of the bandits.

In their view, as long as Liu Mang could get rid of that pockmarked man, it wouldn't matter if he suffered a huge loss. Even if he lost his money, he still had land and his family's assets. He could go back and make the tenants suffer, and in a few years, he would be rolling in money again.

Liu Mang, of course, welcomed them. These landlords had a large network of connections at the grassroots level, and if they were offended, his orders would not be able to be implemented. Therefore, he had never dared to push them too hard before.

But now that they've moved to Chongqing and left the grassroots level, aren't they at our mercy?!

However, there was a group of landlords who were very steadfast and refused to leave their land. Among these landlords, some were simply trying their luck, while others had powerful backers.

These days, many sects of extraordinary individuals don't engage in production, yet they can still live comfortably because they have wealthy backers supporting them. The Sanyi Sect is an example of this. And if their wealthy backers encounter problems, they will also help them.

The landlords who remained felt that with the support of the supernatural forces they sponsored, Zhang Mazi wouldn't dare to touch them, which is why they were able to stay put.

When dealing with landlords who had connections to outsiders, the magistrate did indeed lower their priority.

It's not that we can't deal with it, but it would easily expose our identities, which isn't worth it.

Pick the soft persimmons first, save the tough ones for later when the time comes, and ask the little celestial master to help.

Zhang Zhiwei agreed to this, and he would personally take action when the time came.

It is worth mentioning that the incident in Sichuan and Chongqing caused quite a stir, known as the "Zhang Mazi Bandit Disaster," which caused a huge uproar. Landlords across the country were paying attention to the outcome, and even the Chairman issued a document condemning the Zhang Mazi gang and verbally commending Liu Mang's anti-bandit operation, encouraging him to continue his efforts.

This also silenced some of the bandits who actually had the name Zhang Mazi, who were terrified of suffering an undeserved disaster.

In fact, Chiang Kai-shek already knew about the situation in Sichuan. Not long after the banditry began, some landlords with powerful connections reported the matter to him, hoping he would intervene.

The Chairman originally intended to make an issue of this and criticize Liu Mang for his ineffective suppression of bandits. However, to his surprise, Liu Mang changed his previous pretense and actually began to take action against the bandits in his jurisdiction.

This pleased the Chairman for a long time. You see, these bandits were not easy to deal with. They were all desperate people who risked their lives and occupied strategic locations. If we really sent troops to surround and wipe them out, who knows how much damage we would suffer!

To put it bluntly, bandit suppression is an economic matter, a losing proposition. There are still many bandits within his own sphere of influence that have not been eradicated.

Now, seeing Liu Mang plunge headlong into this unprofitable deal that weakens his own power, the Chairman was naturally pleased and gave Liu Mang a great reward.

Liu Mang was well aware of Chiang Kai-shek's little scheme. He secretly laughed at Chiang's short-sightedness, which only saw this one point, but he didn't know that Chiang was making a fortune in secret. At the same time, under the guise of suppressing bandits, he also began to legitimately expand his military.

While Zhang Mazi's operation was in full swing, the excavation of the air-raid shelters also made great progress.

With the concerted efforts of hundreds of unloading warriors, thousands of blasting personnel, and tens of thousands of gang members, the entire mountain was almost hollowed out and extended downwards and widened, forming a huge space.

The entire space was well-planned and clearly defined in terms of function. There were areas for housing the steel plant units, areas for cooling the furnaces with underground water, activity areas for the steel plant workers, canteens, and other facilities, as well as a separate area designated as an air-raid shelter.

In the event of a disaster, this place can not only accommodate the workers of Tiantong Steel Plant, but also provide safe shelter for the surrounding residents, truly embodying the core function of an "air raid shelter".

The entire layout reflects an extremely high level of planning, perfectly combining a modern steel plant with a large-scale civil defense facility, making it an engineering marvel.

To achieve this, not only were two masters, Chen Yulou and Zhang Qishan, who were experts in tomb mechanisms, employed, but architects and scientists from both China and abroad were also invited to participate.

Because the bases of many machines in a steel plant need to be custom-cast, they need to be completed during construction and the equipment placed inside.

At this moment, several experts from home and abroad are discussing how to place the core equipment of the steel plant inside this mountain.

The foreign experts mainly came from the German company Krupp.

Many of the advanced steelmaking equipment at Tiantong Steel Plant were acquired cheaply by Wang Ai from Krupp, a company severely affected by the economic crisis and social depression that occurred in Germany some time ago.

Since it's German equipment, their experts should naturally be invited to be in charge of the installation and commissioning.

At that moment, Chief Engineer John Anderson was inspecting the factory area with a shocked expression, occasionally letting out a few exclamations.

After surveying the area, John Henderson exclaimed in astonishment, "Moving the entire steel mill inside the mountain is an insane plan, and the fact that you actually managed to excavate it is unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable. You shouldn't have this kind of technology."

Subsequently, domestic experts began to negotiate with him.

While they were talking, Wang Ai whispered to Zhang Zhiwei, "Senior Brother Zhang, don't be fooled by this old man's arrogant demeanor. He looks down on this and that."

"When I first met him, he looked very haggard, and his family was barely making ends meet. But when he found out I was there to buy things, he practically treated me like a grandfather. If I had known he'd be like this, I would have definitely haggled down the price even more," Zhang Zhiwei said. "Looking at his rosy complexion, he must be doing quite well!"

“Not bad at all,” Wang Ai scoffed. “That godforsaken place, no matter how good you live there, it’s still the same. The food is terrible. I lost several pounds in just a few days there.”

"However, I heard that they changed to a capable leader, and in just a few years, they turned a terrible mess around and now they're thriving. I wonder when we'll have a decent leader here."

……

……

While Zhang Zhiwei and Wang Ai were talking, Zhang Qishan, the internal designer of the entire project, also went to talk to John Anderson.

Zhang Qishan pointed around and said, "Because the entire air-raid shelter was originally built for the Tiantong Steel Plant, the steel plant's equipment must be located in the very center of the entire air-raid shelter."

"This area is very open, and the ground and walls have been specially reinforced to support the most core and heaviest large equipment in Tiantong Steel Plant, such as blast furnaces, converters, and rolling mills."

"The steel foundation has now been poured and is ready for your equipment to be moved in and installed. Mr. John, if you have any questions or thoughts, please feel free to ask me!"

The accompanying interpreter translated Zhang Qishan's words to John.

"That's wishful thinking. You can't just install these devices by digging such a big space."

John exclaimed, “Do you know what? Our open-hearth furnace is the most advanced in the world, weighing nearly forty tons. If we follow your requirements, we would need to load four of these furnaces into the mountains.”

“Each of these open-hearth furnaces is a water-consuming behemoth. The furnace door and the arch beams—which one of them doesn’t need hundreds of gallons of cold water per minute to extinguish the fire and dissipate heat?”

"And what about the rolling mill! What are you going to do if those rolls get red-hot? Are you planning to fan them away?"

"You built the steel plant in the mountains. How do you ventilate it? How do you dissipate heat? The water pumps needed for so much equipment could drain half of the Jialing River..."

John kept talking.

Zhang Qishan's gaze passed over the roaring John and landed in the distance, where several unloading warriors hung from ropes, hammering at the rocks. He laughed:
“Mr. John, we don’t need to pump water, we need to bring water.”

Upon hearing this, John stared at him as if he were an idiot. If it weren't for the contract, he wouldn't have wanted to say another word to this man; it was simply too far-fetched.

“Follow me!” Zhang Qishan said.

John was skeptical, but he led his team to follow. The air-raid shelter was very large, and the large lights inside could not illuminate the whole place. The surrounding area was filled with the sounds of chiseling stones, which masked certain movements.

As he went deeper, he heard a deep, continuous rumbling sound.

"This is... the sound of water, and a very loud sound of water!" he muttered to himself.

After rounding a bend, the view suddenly opened up, and a thick, waterfall-like stream of water rushed out from a huge crevice in the mountain above, like a hidden vein in the mountain being forcibly channeled into a huge man-made stone trough.

The water surged with tremendous force, crashing against a huge wooden waterwheel, splashing up icy steam that instantly dispelled the surrounding heat.

Zhang Qishan said, "The wisdom of the Chinese people, the underground river inside the mountain. I searched for it for three whole days!"

Because of the translation, John looked at Zhang Qishan with a black line on his face, thinking to himself: Three... three days... such a short time, is it necessary to emphasize this?

However, he had no time to correct these grammatical problems. His eyes were fixed on the underground river and the huge waterwheel below, his mind racing. If the conditions were right, those previously outlandish ideas might actually be possible.

Amidst the deafening roar of flowing water, Zhang Qishan raised his voice and said, "The water temperature here is only a few degrees Celsius year-round; its source is much higher up."

Zhang Qishan pointed to the wildly spinning waterwheel's main shaft, which was connected to a distant room via a set of sturdy gears:
“I plan to use that place as a blower room. This water won’t generate electricity; it will directly supply air to the blast furnace for heat dissipation.”

Then, he pointed to the area below the waterwheel, where there were several huge steel pipes, and said:
"The water flowing down from this mountain has a drop of 120 meters. It's like an ice knife, piercing straight into the heart of the factory area to cool down the scorching hot machine room."

John was stunned. He stared at the roaring water dragon, his engineer's instincts racing through his mind.

A drop of 120 meters means that the water pressure at the factory inlet exceeds 1.2 MPa, eliminating the need for water pumps...

The water temperature is five to ten degrees Celsius, far lower than the river water's temperature of over twenty-five degrees Celsius, resulting in drastically different heat exchange efficiencies…

Judging by the flow rate and the current, it definitely exceeds 800 cubic meters per hour even during the dry season...

After a moment's thought, John exclaimed in shock and admiration, "It's incredible! You...you're using an entire mountain to build a cooling machine!"

“That’s right, that was our initial idea when we started building it!” Zhang Qishan said.

John abandoned his earlier disdain and said with admiration, "This idea... this is simply a genius idea! In this way, not only is efficiency greatly improved, but costs are also saved, and the entire steel plant is protected by the mountain. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant!"

"This idea was proposed by our leader; we are merely the implementers!" Zhang Qishan said.

"The person who came up with this idea is a genius, and the person who put it into practice is an even greater genius. I admit that I underestimated you before. You are a group of great talents. Please forgive my previous arrogance and rudeness!"

John said with a sincere expression.

This apology came from the bottom of his heart. Although he was arrogant, he was also a scholar. He knew the educational environment in China. If he could achieve what he had in such an environment, what kind of achievements would he have made if he had gone to where he grew up? After thinking it through, he immediately put away his arrogance.

They then returned to their office and began a very formal discussion of various matters. (End of Chapter)