Iron Fist and Loyal Heart

Chapter 34 The Shadow of the Financial Clique

The next morning, Su Xinpei brought copies of the inspection list and the property change registration form to the Special Meteorological Bureau. He waited for Ye Xinghe outside the field team's office until he finished his morning meeting, and the two stood in the tea room at the end of the corridor for five minutes. Ye Xinghe had just pulled an all-nighter, his eyes were dark, and he was holding a cup of shiny black instant coffee. After listening to Su Xinpei explain the comparison results between the crack coordinates and the list of hidden danger points, he didn't drink the coffee but placed it on the windowsill in the tea room.

"Are you sure the signature is from the same person?" Ye Xinghe asked.

"Liao, head of the bidding approval team of the Construction Management Section of Zhongcheng District." Su Xinpei spread copies of two documents on the folding table in the tea room and tapped the signature column with his finger. "Last year, he rejected all the repair applications for twelve hidden danger points in Beihe District, all on the grounds of 'unqualified.' During the same period, he approved all the property rights change registrations for three plots of land in Xiacheng District under Tianheng Heavy Industry, all before the active period of the cracks. This is not a coincidence."

Ye Xinghe looked down at the two photocopies and remained silent for a while. The exhaust fan in the break room hummed, cutting the eternally gray-white sky of the Ironthorn City's lower district into diagonal lines. He picked up his coffee, took a sip, and then picked up the photocopies, saying, "Come with me."

He led Su Xinpei into his office, closed the door, and retrieved two internal investigation reports from the Special Meteorology Bureau from the safe. The first was a summary of a containment operation conducted by the Chengnan Branch last year—the target of which was a batch of illegally circulated runic materials, which were seized in a warehouse belonging to a subsidiary of Tianheng Heavy Industry. The containment operation was abruptly halted at the time due to "insufficient evidence." The second was an earlier internal memo analyzing Tianheng Heavy Industry's acquisition intentions in subspace technology-related industries. A line had been written in red ink at the end of the page: "The company is systematically acquiring abandoned industrial sites around subspace rift-prone areas; continued monitoring is recommended." This recommendation was rejected.

Su Xinpei stacked the two documents together. Three things—the contract application was rejected, the land surrounding the crack was acquired, and the Special Meteorological Bureau's monitoring recommendation was suppressed. Not three things. Three stages of the same event. "Tianheng Heavy Industry already did something similar in the crack incident—their contractor delayed the Beihe Agricultural Machinery Factory's repair application for six months, and the crack tore open within those six months. Now I'm comparing the entire Lower City area, and the pattern is exactly the same." Su Xinpei looked up.

Ye Xinghe opened the office door a crack to make sure no one was outside, then sat back in his chair and rubbed his temples. Su Xinpei continued, "Last night I went through all of Tianheng Heavy Industry's public information. Personnel structure, revenue reports, supply chain, factory distribution—these surface data don't reveal any problems. But I circled its old factory site in the Xiacheng District and overlapped it with the crack-prone area—the boundary of the old factory area almost entirely falls within the crack warning zone. It's all old factory buildings and plots slated for demolition, each of which was taken over by Tianheng Heavy Industry through a subsidiary three to six months before the cracks appeared, with the ownership transfer handled cleanly. Not a single plot came directly from Tianheng's headquarters; they were all transferred through related shell companies."

"Can you detect shell companies?" Ye Xinghe asked.

"It's normal that they can't find anything—the registered addresses are all post office boxes, and the legal representatives are all retired elderly people, but the flow of funds all ends up in the same place." Su Xinpei took out a notepad from his coat pocket, flipped to the equity structure diagram he had drawn last night, and placed it on the table. "These plots of land were all acquired before the cracks were active. They didn't acquire them after the cracks appeared—they knew precisely which plots would crack beforehand."

Ye Xinghe frowned more and more as he looked at the simplified diagram. Su Xinpei added, "Tianheng Heavy Industry is doing the same thing in the other three border cities of the Southern Alliance. This morning, I used my special bureau's access to search the news in the outer cities—Limen to the south of Ironthorn City, Salt Port to the east, and Puli Port, the largest commercial port on this side of the strait, each city has an 'Old Factory Area Urban Renewal Plan,' all led by Tianheng Heavy Industry or its subsidiaries. Each project is registered with the local urban construction bureau, with the exact same wording—'In line with urban planning upgrades, revitalizing abandoned industrial sites.' This isn't just a layout in Ironthorn City; it's being promoted simultaneously in four cities."

He paused, then continued filling in the remaining information. "The other two conglomerates are doing similar things. Mingguang Communications—the one that makes communication encryption—has acquired land in four cities, all of which have subspace signal records, two years earlier than Tianheng's. Lianyu Manufacturing, which makes prosthetic parts, acquired land that wasn't in the crack zone, but completely renovated it into a so-called R&D center. I went to the Special Meteorological Bureau to look at the related environmental complaints, and during drilling and sampling of the foundation of one of the centers, they found more than three layers of waste glass shards on the surface." He turned to the next page of the notepad. Underneath the Lianyu Manufacturing page were the names of two smaller companies: a transportation contractor and a rune ink importer, both second-tier suppliers to Tianheng or Mingguang. He opened the notebook on Ye Xinghe's desk and wrote four words at the end of the page in pencil: Capital Infiltration.

Ye Xinghe was silent for a moment, then stood up and walked to the wall where the complete map of Ironthorn City was displayed. He drew a circle around the city's location with his finger. "This isn't a conspiracy by one family. They're all vying for the same piece of the pie—warp resources. To them, the rift isn't a disaster, it's a mining area. They buy up the land around the rift, wait for it to expand naturally, and then take over the reconstruction project as 'post-disaster contractors.' During the reconstruction, they can directly build warp monitoring stations on the original rift site—using government funds to build their own infrastructure."

Su Xinpei leaned back in his chair. He recalled what Aunt He had said to him before she retired, when she helped him compile the inspection list for the last time—"These potential hazards have been reported for three years." Three years. It wasn't that no one had noticed them; it was that someone had kept them locked away from repair, waiting for the cracks to come and tear down the walls themselves. "I need the ownership change records of Tianheng Heavy Industry's old factory site in the Xiacheng District, as well as the signatures of the approvers of all the rejected repair applications in the past five years," he told Ye Xinghe.

Ye Xinghe sat back down at his computer. "I can access some business files through the Special Bureau's internal system, but Tianheng Heavy Industry is a supplier of biochemical warfare equipment to the military, and the access to files for military-related companies is handled by the military region." He typed a few keys to bring up some external data, then turned the screen to Su Xinpei. "This is what I can access—summaries of Tianheng Heavy Industry's shareholder meeting minutes from the past three years. It's not confidential; it's part that listed companies must disclose publicly. Look here—at the shareholder meeting three years ago, someone proposed establishing a 'Subspace Business Development Department,' and there was only one vote against it. The shareholder meetings two years ago no longer mentioned this department's name; it became the 'Urban Renewal Business Department.' They weren't careless; they were too careful."

Su Xinpei looked at the summary on the screen and mentally retraced the timeline. Tianheng Heavy Industry's actions were divided into several phases: the first phase was information gathering, using loopholes in the administrative system to pinpoint all weak points in the cracks in the lower city and rejecting all applications for hazard repair; the second phase was asset allocation, quietly taking over the land through subsidiaries before the cracks fully opened; the third phase was waiting, allowing the cracks to develop naturally until their activity reached a certain threshold before paving the way for post-disaster reconstruction and monitoring station operation. Now, only the final step remained—the cracks had not yet fully expanded to the scale they anticipated. If the cracks fully erupted, the Southern Alliance military would have to withdraw from part of the border, at which point Tianheng Heavy Industry would take over infrastructure reconstruction as a "post-war contractor," naturally gaining the operational rights to the original crack sites.

He wrote this deduction on a blank report sheet and handed it to Ye Xinghe. "This isn't just someone's selfish motive—it's a strategic layout at the conglomerate level. Administrative loopholes are just the entry point, land is the chessboard, and rifts are the resources. If they obtain the operating rights to the original rift site, the next step is to commercialize the subspace resources—rune materials, energy extraction, and even exclusive rights to use the rift passages."

Ye Xinghe stared at the paper, his fingers interlaced on the table. He remained silent for a moment, then took out a blank field memo from his drawer. In the "Further Verification Required" section, he wrote three lines: the spatial overlap between the land acquired by Tianheng Heavy Industry and the high-incidence area of ​​cracks; tracing the source of funds for the associated shell company; and the timeline of similar land acquisitions in three other cities in Nanmeng. He handed the memo to Su Xinpei. "I will submit this memo to Director Yan. It will take some time."

Su Xinpei took the memo and put it into the briefcase. Rain began to fall outside, the raindrops pattering against the rusty window frame at the end of the corridor. He suddenly remembered the last time Aunt He sent a document to the Central District Municipal Office via fax before her retirement. The fax machine receipt showed "received," and Aunt He glanced at it and said only two words: "The stone is gone." Now he knew where that stone had gone—it had been retrieved and used to build another house.