Chapter 43: Wang Anguo in Desperate Straits

Over the next two days, Li Yi was as busy as a spinning top, juggling his deliveries and street vending with helping to build his new house.

Of course, the progress of the house building was gratifying.

In just two days, with the concerted efforts of everyone who came to help, all the stones, red bricks, and timber needed for construction had been purchased.

Even though money was flowing out like water, Li Yi was in exceptionally high spirits.

After all, these building materials would soon transform into a tall, spacious brick-and-tile house, and in that very house, he would marry Tang Xue, making up for the lifelong regret that had haunted his previous existence.

Compared to that, what did a mere bit of money matter?

In stark contrast to Li Yi's busy and fulfilling days, Wang Anguo's days of late were agonizingly difficult.

As the deadline set by the municipal bureau drew closer and closer while they still remained entirely empty-handed, he grew increasingly irritable.

Inside the conference room of the Criminal Police Detachment!

At this moment, the room was thick with cigarette smoke. Everyone held a cigarette between their fingers; an outsider glancing in might have thought the building was on fire.

Yet no one cared. Everyone kept their heads down, their expressions extremely grave.

"Bang!"

Wang Anguo slammed his hand down onto the conference table and shouted angrily, "Still no news? What on earth are you people good for?"

Deputy Captain Li immediately stood up and said, "Captain Wang, don't be angry. The brothers have all done their best..."

"Is a simple 'we tried our best' enough? The ordinary people and the leaders up top are all waiting for us to crack this case. What everyone wants is results, do you understand?" Wang Anguo said loudly.

"Captain Wang, more than three thousand of us have turned the county town upside down, but we simply cannot find where those human traffickers are hiding, nor have we found a single trace of the children. There's nothing more we can do..."

Wang Anguo slammed the table once more. "What do you mean there's nothing you can do? How do you expect me to face the ordinary people who lost their children with an answer like that?"

Deputy Captain Li thought for a moment and suggested, "Could it be that our approach is wrong?"

"What do you mean?"

"Captain Wang, our search over the past few days has been focused entirely on the county town. Do you think the traffickers might not even be in the town at all?" Deputy Captain Li said.

"That's a possibility, but if we expand the search area to the outskirts and even the rural communes and townships further down, our current manpower simply won't be enough," Wang Anguo said in a deep voice.

"But we've already mobilized the militias in every single commune; we genuinely don't have any spare manpower left!"

Wang Anguo thought for a moment and said, "If we don't have enough people, we'll request personnel from other counties and districts. In short, we must crack this case in the shortest time possible, or the reputation of our county bureau will be completely dragged through the mud!"

"Captain Wang, borrowing personnel from other regions requires submitting a formal application to the superiors..."

"I'll write the report. You people immediately cross-reference the map and re-zone the priority search areas. I'm going to make phone calls to the county government and the municipal bureau right now!" Wang Anguo commanded.

"Yes!"

Following Wang Anguo's calls, several neighboring counties of Qingshan County quickly dispatched large numbers of personnel into Qingshan County while simultaneously setting up checkpoints within their own jurisdictions to cut off any possibility of the traffickers fleeing into their territory.

In an instant, the atmosphere throughout the entire Qingshan County grew even tenser!

Aside from Wang Anguo, whose mood was far from pleasant, there was someone else whose state of mind was equally grim. This person was none other than Xu Hong, who harbored a single-minded obsession with retaliating against Li Yi.

Ever since returning from the county town that day, Xu Hong had been relentlessly taunted and ridiculed by the other educated youths at the youth point.

Originally, everyone had been full of hope, waiting for him to return and distribute the profits, only to find out he hadn't even caught a single hair.

Upon hearing that the state-run restaurant refused to accept wild mushrooms from outside sources, the other educated youths looked at Xu Hong with undisguised contempt.

As the saying goes: do not fear not knowing the goods, fear comparing goods to goods.

They had heard that the good-for-nothing Li family youth delivered hundreds of catties of mushrooms to the county town every single day, whereas Xu Hong, who had explicitly promised guaranteed market channels, ended up failing to sell even a single catty.

Comparing the two, it was instantly clear who was superior and who was inferior!

Xu Hong was utterly furious. He hadn't wanted it to turn out this way; the staff at the state-run restaurant had clearly told him they would buy his mushrooms, only to renege the very next day.

An enraged Xu Hong immediately lied to the other educated youths at the point, claiming that Li Yi had deliberately prevented the state-run restaurant from buying their mushrooms and had even made them claim that the educated youths' mushrooms were substandard.

Hearing this, the resentment toward Li Yi among the educated youths reached a boiling point, and they vied with one another to curse Li Yi as unprincipled.

Seeing that he had successfully deflected the anger of the educated youths, Xu Hong finally breathed a sigh of relief.

Filled now with bitter hatred and jealousy, he thought: if he, Xu Hong, couldn't make a business out of this, then no one else should either.

Anyway, the whistleblower letter had already been submitted, and now he would just wait for the person surnamed Li to meet his downfall!

Oh right, and that bitch Tang Xue—this time, she had to be dragged down with him so that he could fully vent the hatred festering in his heart.

Yet, what depressed Xu Hong was that no matter how long he waited, he simply could not get any news of Li Yi being arrested.

Every single day, watching Li Yi drive his large red mule-cart off to the county town and return to the village loaded with supplies, Xu Hong felt a mixture of anxiety, fury, and helplessness.

He didn't know which link in the chain had gone wrong or why things had turned out this way. Clearly, all anyone had to do was casually investigate at the entrance of the sugar factory and they would catch the culprit red-handed with both stolen goods and buyer. Why was Li Yi still completely unaffected?

In his fury, he had no idea that at this very moment, every single military policeman, police officer, and militiaman in the county was busy searching for human traffickers and missing children; who on earth had the time to bother with someone running a petty peddling business?

After all, looking across the entire county, there were easily two to three thousand people engaging in covert little businesses. Could the authorities possibly arrest them all?

Besides, over the past couple of years, the higher-ups hadn't been cracking down on this too strictly. Even if someone was caught, the absolute worst that would happen was the confiscation of their illegal earnings.

Since even the authorities above adopted this attitude, the local officers naturally turned a blind eye.

Thus, the major case that Xu Hong imagined was nothing more than a trivial matter to the county bureau.

If it were normal times and the bureau wasn't swamped, receiving such a report would certainly prompt them to take action.

At the very least, they wouldn't just leave it sitting there unattended; they would at least send someone to investigate the actual situation.

As long as the scale wasn't particularly large, the most probable outcome would merely be a warning or a brief detention.

If the involved monetary amount was exceptionally large, then it would be handled with greater severity.

To be frank, judging from similar cases investigated over the past few years, the amounts involved for most people only reached a few hundred yuan, with very few exceeding a thousand yuan.

Consequently, the county bureau generally didn't pay much attention to cases of this nature.

Moreover, the entire bureau was currently tied up investigating the child abduction cases, and their own manpower was stretched so thin that they were even forced to borrow personnel from neighboring counties and districts.

Under such circumstances, where on earth would they find the spare manpower to investigate such an insignificant, trivial matter?

Turn by turn, the matter concerning Li Yi was thus delayed indefinitely!

Li Yi remained completely oblivious to all of this, but Xu Hong was not willing to let it go.

Amidst his lingering anger, he decided to make another trip to the county bureau tomorrow. No matter what, he had to get someone to arrest that good-for-nothing, or he would never find peace after all the grievances he had suffered.