Dawn City's southern industrial zone was quiet at this hour. Most workers had already clocked off, leaving only scattered lights on in the guardrooms on duty.
Ever since the railway to Daybreak City had been completed, the Alliance's heavy industry and a large portion of its industrial workforce had shifted north, leaving this earliest industrial zone with only light industries.
Yet precisely thanks to this, with the relocation of heavy industry, the light industries that remained received focused support from Dawn City and the Alliance authorities.
Last year in particular, when the Alliance engaged in fierce competition with Boulder City across numerous sectors, this light industrial zone gave rise to a large cohort of exceptional, large-scale factories.
The Tujia Printing Factory was one of them.
The factory's owner was named Wang Tu, a survivor from Jinchuan Province and among the second wave of immigrants to arrive after the Bone Chewers turmoil.
Because the printing industry had practically reached the verge of obsolescence during the Era of Prosperity, the Alliance's industrial sector had no ready-made production lines to refer to.
At the time, the war in Sunset Province had just broken out, and the Alliance faced the threat of the Legion's Eastern Expansion faction. The players' wild ideas were all concentrated on military applications, having neither interest nor energy to fiddle with a field as niche as printing, which even lifestyle-class players deemed unpopular. As a result, the Alliance's printing technology at that point was barely automated, requiring manual labor for everything from boiling pulp to the actual printing.
Under such circumstances, this traveling merchant from the south saw a business opportunity. He cleverly modified a cannery production line, giving the Alliance its very first fully automated line capable of handling everything from boiling pulp to printing and publication.
Indeed, it did not just handle printing; it also engaged in papermaking.
Later on, the factory carried out further improvements upon that foundation. Relying on its formidable market competitiveness, it secured procurement orders from multiple news agencies and publishing houses, including the *Survivor Daily*, gradually expanding from a small workshop of less than five mu into a massive factory the size of five football fields.
This footprint might have seemed unremarkable or even on the smaller side back in reality, but compared to the Alliance's population of barely a million cobbled together from all over, such a facility was already enormous.
At present, the Tujia Printing Factory was not only the largest printing plant in Dawn City, but also the largest in the Alliance, boasting an astonishing market share of sixty-three percent. *Awakened Pol*, printed by his presses, had sold as far west as the Lion Kingdom and as far north as the Free State.
Most factories in the Alliance had grown from nothing in just this way. Some stemmed from flashes of creative genius, others from dogged perseverance, good fortune, or pre-existing wealth. The Alliance's mighty military provided all competitors with a relatively stable and fair competitive environment, allowing them to give full play to their talents.
Though not everyone had the chance to carve their name into history, nearly everyone who managed to build an enterprise had a near-legendary story behind them.
Wang Tu took immense pride in this, whether it was his choice to move his entire family north to the Alliance, or his choice to enter the printing and publishing industry.
He planned to write a memoir when he retired, chronicling this miraculous, wonderful era.
If a cannery worker who had only just learned to write could author a bestseller that inspired tens of thousands of people, he had no doubt that if he set his mind to it, he could achieve the same.
To prevent himself from forgetting his younger days entirely when he grew old, he decided to begin writing now, at least jotting down daily occurrences.
Every day after the factory lights went out, he would pull open his desk drawer, take out a flask of potato moonshine brewed by the shelter dwellers, and draft his future Alliance-wide bestseller while gazing out at the dim, tranquil nightscape.
Yet just as he wrote the words "Nothing happened today," he caught sight of strings of bright lights on the street outside, not far away.
Thoroughly tipsy, Wang Tu pushed himself up, swayed over to the window, peered out, and mumbled under his breath,
"What's that?"
Wasn't the celebration the day after tomorrow?
Just as he was wondering what could be causing such a commotion out on the street, hurried footsteps echoed outside his office.
No knock sounded.
The door swung wide open.
His accountant rushed in in a total panic, his face pale as paper.
"Boss! Something terrible has happened!"
Seeing the terror on his face, Wang Tu froze, not yet turning fully around.
"What's got you in such a frenzy—"
Seeing his boss looking utterly clueless, the accountant was on the verge of tears as he babbled frantically,
"There's trouble with the batch of newspapers shipped out today! Word has it the front page of the *Qingquan City Daily* badmouthed the Administrator, and all the newsstands and kiosks are saying the paper was printed right here! Outside is swarming with citizens who read it, and there are even soldiers from the First Corps among them... We're in massive trouble!"
"Wait, what the hell is the *Qingquan City Daily*? Did we print that paper?"
Wang Tu stared at his accountant in bewilderment, feeling as if a colossal scapegoat pot had dropped straight from the heavens and clamped onto his head.
Wait, no—
Something wasn't right!
Wang Tu suddenly snapped back to his senses. If there was a problem with what was written in the paper, go after the newspaper office! He was just running a printing plant—what was the point of coming after him?
His plant churned out over a thousand tons of print products a day, including not just newspapers, but textbooks, novels, and even packaging boxes for deliveries.
How was he supposed to keep track of every little thing his presses printed?
"Did they get the wrong place?" Sweating profusely from panic, Wang Tu grabbed the accountant's arm. "Go out and explain it to them—"
Seeing that his boss was still trying to reason it out, the accountant replied between tears and exasperation,
"Oh, come on, forget whose fault it is for now! Hurry and come out the back door with me—don't let those people catch you!"
Hearing this, cold sweat instantly broke out across Wang Tu's forehead, shocking him halfway sober.
Looking outside again, he saw that the glittering lines of light were actually beams from flashlights.
At the very moment he looked toward the lights, countless eyes from the dense, dark crowd happened to follow the flashlight beams up toward his room.
After all, this was the only room with lights still on.
Now Wang Tu was stone-cold sober, his soul scared half out of his body. He hurriedly followed the accountant downstairs and fled helter-skelter out the plant's back door.
Right around then, the security guards at the front gate could hold the line no longer, and the indignant citizens surged into the compound.
The vast, surging sea of people split, some heading for the office building and others toward the warehouse where newspapers were stored.
Drenched in cold sweat, Wang Tu gripped his accountant and yelled in panic,
"Hurry, call the police... get the guards over here!"
The accountant swallowed nervously and stammered,
"A-already did."
Wang Tu released the man's arm and paced frantically by the back exit, muttering anxiously,
"Already called?! Why aren't they here yet?"
While the two were fretting in agony, reinforcements from the guard team finally arrived from the direction of the city.
However, the guard team's reinforcements were a step too late after all.
By the time they reached the scene, a roaring blaze had already erupted from the warehouse, illuminating the pitch-black factory grounds in brilliant orange.
Stored inside that warehouse were freshly printed newspapers that were supposed to be loaded onto trucks in just a few hours. Now, a single fire had reduced them all to ash.
Staring at the flames billowing from the warehouse, Wang Tu looked like he wanted to cry but had no tears left. He stood with his mouth agape for a long while before finally wheezing out,
"What kind of unholy disaster did I bring upon myself?!"
...
A fire in the industrial zone was no trifling matter.
As early as when the crowd first started gathering, Chu Guang had Xiao Qi instruct the guard team to send people over to contain the situation.
Yet in the face of the enraged citizens, the few guards dispatched to control the crowd proved completely useless, shrinking back one after another under furious accusations of "That's disloyal!"
Particularly after hearing about the *Qingquan City Daily*, some guards were even won over and took the side of the rioting citizens.
The Alliance's earliest regular military force had been the guard team; both the Guards Corps and the First and Second Corps had emerged from its ranks. When it came to loyalty, they considered themselves second to none, and naturally they would never tolerate anyone insulting their great Administrator.
Thus, the commotion escalated further and further, until the fire blazed up and people finally realized they had gone too far, hurriedly turning around to help extinguish the flames.
Fortunately, the farce caused no casualties, costing only a warehouse full of newspapers.
After hearing the whole sequence of events, Chu Guang, who was discussing details of tomorrow's negotiations with Enterprise alongside Old Charlie, was utterly dumbfounded.
It took him a good while to utter a single sentence:
"...They burned down the printing factory?"
"You underestimated your own influence, as well as those young lads' adoration for you," Old Charlie sighed softly, watching the stunned Chu Guang, and quipped playfully, "I'd wager that right now, every citizen in Dawn City is sympathizing with the rioters... except for the business owners in the industrial zone."
The interests and demands of each class varied; though the Alliance claimed to unite everyone, it was impossible for all people to truly form a monolith.
Yet indisputably, Dawn City's soldiers, farmers, workers, clerks, and shopkeepers—nearly all of them—were ardent supporters of the Administrator himself.
Unlike the technical personnel drawn here by the Alliance's ideals, they had little grasp of complex theories and cared even less; they simply believed whatever was said by the Alliance's Administrator and the shelter dwellers under his lead.
And that was precisely why, the moment that gunshot rang out, everyone had boiled over.
The social cohesion reflected behind this solidarity was unimaginable; hearts bound together could generate a brilliance not inferior to nuclear fusion.
Thinking of this, Old Charlie could not help but sigh with emotion.
Given the Administrator's current prestige, even if he were to cast aside the Alliance's ideals entirely and crown himself Emperor, probably no one would stop him; instead, everyone would cheer for him.
Among them, of course, was Old Charlie himself.
Perhaps other shelter dwellers would object, but having lived on the wasteland for so long, he had long seen through the ugliness of human nature and harbored none of the blue jackets' haughty reservations.
He had zero doubt that having a wise monarch govern those ignorant fools was by no means a bad thing; even an incompetent monarch would be better than watching foolish wastelanders reach consensus on one stupid act after another.
Yet that was precisely what made it so commendable.
He could become the Emperor of an empire at any time, yet he had chosen the far harder path:
An almost impossible union.
At that moment, the door to the study opened. Lü Bei stepped inside, halted beside the sofa, snapped to attention, and saluted.
Half an hour ago, Chu Guang had sent him to investigate the whole affair.
Now, it seemed there were results.
"...The matter has been thoroughly investigated. It was a group of traveling merchants from the Bugra Free State. They first checked into the newsstands' suppliers, then bribed the supervisor of the printing factory's second production workshop, the warehouse manager, and the transport drivers, slipping in the *Qingquan City Daily* that they had fabricated overnight. It's currently unclear whether they were instructed by the Bugra authorities or had other motives. In accordance with your request, we did not make contact with them to avoid tipping them off."
Having said that, Lü Bei couldn't resist chiming in,
"Oh, by the way, during our investigation we also found glaring loopholes in the Tujia Printing Factory's oversight—it was practically nonexistent... I think this qualifies as an industrial safety incident."
Being torched by enraged citizens because they didn't scrutinize what they were printing—thinking about it that way, it actually sounded pretty reasonable.
At least he and the other lads in the Guards Corps felt so.
Chu Guang shook his head.
"Regardless, arson is unacceptable! That's an industrial zone—less than a kilometer away sits a flour mill! Thank goodness the fire was contained; if it hadn't been, the damage they caused would have been countless times worse than that lousy rag of a newspaper."
Lü Bei murmured,
"They didn't intend to set a fire at first. They only meant to find the printing plant's owner and demand to know where the *Qingquan City Daily* came from... But when that boss saw the crowd outside, he got scared and ran away, so people started suspecting he had a guilty conscience."
Old Charlie looked at the young fellow and teased,
"And so tomorrow the entire city won't have any new newspapers to read?"
Lü Bei wore a subtle expression and nodded.
On a personal level, he sympathized with the rioting crowd and even felt like cheering them on; after all, they had done what he wished he could do but never had the chance to.
Fair's fair—if not for the Administrator, forget the industrial zone, the entire northern outskirts would still be a wasteland.
Those treacherous ingrates were utterly blinded by money, forgetting where the silver coins in their pockets had even come from!
Chu Guang saw right through what the kid was thinking in a single glance and understood why he instinctively pleaded on behalf of the rioters.
And without even asking, the corps commanders of the Alliance's other units were bound to feel the exact same way.
Not long after the incident, Chu Guang had heard from the guard team that Wrench, commander of the First Corps, had personally gone to the guard detention center to demand his men, taking away the soldiers who had participated in the riot on the grounds that only a military tribunal had the right to try his troops.
While Chu Guang was touched by his subordinates' spontaneous loyalty and devotion toward him, this was precisely what gave him a headache.
Unable to fully read the Administrator's reaction, Lü Bei asked softly with a guilty conscience,
"We've already got eyes on the merchants involved in the *Qingquan City Daily* case. They're right here in Dawn City and haven't gone anywhere... How do you plan to deal with them?"
"Round them up first—don't let a single one get away!" Chu Guang said harshly. "Interrogate them thoroughly and find out exactly who put them up to this!"
Those son-of-a-bitches.
He hadn't bothered to waste time on them originally, yet one moment of inattention had stirred up such a huge mess. It was indeed an oversight on his part.
Lü Bei nodded and continued in a small voice,
"What about the rioters..."
Chu Guang pondered for a moment, ultimately unable to hold back a twinge of compassion, and asked,
"Did anyone confess?"
At that hour, it had been pitch-black outside, with a huge crowd packing into the factory; nobody could tell who had set the fire.
If no one stepped forward to take the blame, he could let it slide. Almost every factory had purchased the fire insurance offered by the Alliance Bank, and approving the payout would only take a word from him.
Fortunately, no lives were lost.
Lock up the ringleaders for two weeks to cool their heels, make them sit through a few legal-education lectures, and the matter would essentially blow over—
"Yes, sir," Lü Bei nodded, his face full of admiration. "That fellow is a brother from the First Corps. He said a real man takes responsibility for what he does—a true man!"
Chu Guang: "..."
Looking at Chu Guang's pained expression, Old Charlie knew exactly what was on his mind. Although he knew laughing right now was inappropriate, he couldn't help clearing his throat with a couple of dry coughs.
"This matter truly is tricky to handle, especially when the perpetrator has a military background... What's more, I heard that among those who initially stirred up the ruckus, there were shelter dwellers as well."
Chu Guang naturally knew about that; after all, Xiao Qi was the one who had issued the yellow card.
"Did many people hear about that?"
Old Charlie shook his head.
"Not many... I already reminded that innkeeper to mind his words and deeds, though I suspect he knows well enough even without being told."
Chu Guang sighed.
"Thanks for taking care of it."
Hardly any of his players were low-maintenance; this was far from the first time he had to wipe their asses for them.
Old Charlie smiled and said,
"You're too polite, sir. It is only my duty. We can't have you fretting over such trivial matters... By comparison, how to use the chip of the Qingquan City broodmother to bargain for more support from those ancient survivor factions is what you should be concerning yourself with.
"What we won wasn't merely a war; we created a miracle. I get the sense that it's not just Enterprise and the Academy—lately, many others have set their sights on us... Though they haven't made any moves for now, they are all watching in the shadows."
Pausing, he continued,
"It is inconvenient for you to step forward and handle this matter personally, nor is it large enough to warrant your direct intervention... If you trust me, leave it to me to resolve."
Chu Guang naturally didn't doubt Old Charlie's competence, and thinking that he made a good point, nodded.
"Then I'll leave it in your hands."
With that, Chu Guang turned to Lü Bei.
"Take action on your end as well. Arrest those merchants on charges of espionage and inciting sabotage. I want to see the interrogation results after tomorrow's meeting."
Lü Bei pressed his right fist against his left chest, delivering a crisp, loyal salute, and answered sharply,
"Yes, sir!"
Chapter 649