Iron Fist and Loyal Heart

Chapter 37 The Tentacles of Tianheng Heavy Industry

Su Xinpei printed out all of Tianheng Heavy Industry's listed company announcements from the past three years, laying them out on the apartment floor in a long line in chronological order. The announcements were downloaded from the Special Affairs Bureau's public database, each one stamped with a "publicly disclosed" watermark, the wording as smooth as if it had been oiled—not a single word could be used as leverage, nor was any superfluous. He sat cross-legged on the floor, a cup of cold instant coffee beside him, and began to peruse them one by one.

The first document that caught his attention was the announcement of the establishment of the "Urban Renewal Division," dated March 2145 (United Calendar). The announcement was extremely vague, stating only that the division would "focus on the redevelopment and community upgrading of old industrial sites in the city," without mentioning sub-spaces, fissures, or any other sensitive terms. However, Su Xinpei noticed a detail: the division's establishment occurred exactly two weeks after the Beihe Agricultural Machinery Factory fissure was first recorded by the Special Affairs Bureau as an "unstable and active period." He attached a yellow sticky note to the announcement, writing "Time Matches."

He continued scrolling down. The second announcement was from August 2145. Tianheng Heavy Industry, through its wholly-owned subsidiary "Chen'an Communications," acquired four old industrial plots in the lower district of Tieji City. The acquisition price was about 8% lower than the market valuation. The seller was the Tieji City Municipal Assets Management Bureau. The announcement stated that these plots would be used for "low-density community supporting facilities construction." One of these four plots was the location of Crack No. 12 in the Beihe Abandoned Industrial Zone. Su Xinpei pulled out the crack coordinate record from the file box and compared it with the acquisition list—it matched perfectly. He then added a sticky note.

Then he began to extend his investigation to the outer cities. This required cross-city data—the Special Bureau's internal system only covered Ironthorn City, and data for the outer cities had to be pieced together from publicly available information. He opened the municipal information disclosure platform and searched for Tianheng Heavy Industry's land transaction records in other Southern Alliance cities. A dozen or so search results popped up, and he filtered them one by one, removing those obviously irrelevant commercial development projects, finally narrowing it down to four cities—Ironthorn, Gravelgate, Salt Port, and Puli Port. Each city had a "Old Factory Area Urban Renewal Plan" from Tianheng Heavy Industry or its subsidiaries, each plan superimposed on local abandoned industrial sites, and each site saw news reports of cracks appearing shortly after the transaction was completed.

The news from Yancheng Port was the most direct. A local newspaper published a report last year titled "Geological Anomalies Found After Change of Ownership in Old Port Industrial Land; Residents Question Development Timing." The article quoted an anonymous municipal official as saying, "The relevant plots were marked as unsuitable for development before the ownership transfer," but the development plan was still approved. Su Xinpei saved this article and wrote four words in red next to the title: "Administrative Loophole."

The Gravel Gate model was even more covert. Tianheng Heavy Industry didn't acquire it directly, but instead operated through a company called "Hengtong Real Estate." The company's business registration information showed that its major shareholder was another fund called "Zhaoyi Investment." Zhaoyi Investment's beneficiary list included a shell company registered in an overseas free port, whose actual controller was listed as the private secretary of Cao Zhi, a director of Tianheng Heavy Industry. Su Xinpei spent nearly two hours clearly drawing this equity chain. He drew it on a new page of his notepad, tracing it upwards from the shell company, finally stopping next to Cao Zhi's name and drawing a circle around it.

Port Puri is the largest commercial port in Southern Australia, and Tianheng Heavy Industry owns more than one plot of land there. One of these plots is located at the old port of Puri, and its plot number differs from that of the Ironthorn City agricultural machinery factory by only one digit. Su Xinpei retrieved the meeting minutes of the Port Puri City Hall—the minutes mentioned that "there are structural hazards on this plot, and it is recommended to postpone development," but the development contract was still approved. The voting results attached to the minutes were four votes in favor, one vote against, and two abstentions. The opposing vote came from a retired consultant rehired by the Municipal Works Department, and the abstentions came from two engineers from the Port Authority. He wrote down the names of these two votes in his notepad.

At this point in the investigation, Su Xinpei had already seen three different company names, four cities, and no fewer than ten plots of land in various public documents, but every clue, when traced back, ultimately pointed to the same core interest—Tianheng Heavy Industry. And this was only part of what he could find. He also searched for Mingguang Communications and Lianyu Manufacturing.

Mingguang Communications holds a near-monopoly in the field of communication encryption between the Northern Alliance and the Southern Alliance, but it is also making significant moves in the subspace domain. Su Xinpei found a spectrum allocation record from the Southern Alliance Communications Administration, which showed that Mingguang Communications had leased special spectrum in Ironthorn City, Gravel Gate, and two other cities—not regular communication bands, but extremely low frequencies. Extremely low frequencies are typically used for submarine communications or geological exploration, but the coverage areas of these spectrum segments happened to overlap with areas prone to fissures, and the purpose of the lease was listed as "backup of communication infrastructure." Su Xinpei circled the Mingguang Communications spectrum coverage area on a map, and it overlapped very closely with the boundary of Tianheng Heavy Industry's land plot.

Lianyu Manufacturing took a different path. Instead of buying land, it manufactured precision prosthetic parts—military-grade joint bearings, neural interface connectors, all core components of bio-warrior equipment. Su Xinpei reviewed Lianyu Manufacturing's supply contract summaries from the past two years and discovered it was simultaneously supplying both the Southern European Military District (SMU) and the Northern Freeport. Supplying the military was public knowledge, with records available in the Ministry of National Defense's budget appendix; the supply to Freeport was noted in the procurement documents as "experimental civilian prosthetics," but the customer's name was half-redacted. Su Xinpei compared the dates of these two contracts—the SMU contract and the Freeport contract were completely overlapping in time; within a month of each batch delivered to SMU, a batch of the same type of parts would flow to Freeport.

He put down the contract records from Lianyu Manufacturing and leaned back in his chair. This information was all public, lying in different databases—listed company announcements, municipal meeting minutes, spectrum filing forms, defense budget appendices, business registration information—none of it was confidential, and every single one was legal and compliant. But if you pieced all these announcements, minutes, filing forms, and contract summaries together, they would speak for themselves. They were saying the same thing: large conglomerates were systematically acquiring Rift resources. It wasn't a secret plan of one company; several companies were heading in the same direction via different paths—Tianheng Heavy Industry was buying land, Mingguang Communications was controlling the spectrum, and Lianyu Manufacturing was supplying both sides simultaneously. In their eyes, Rift wasn't a disaster, but a mining area, an asset waiting to be sold.

Su Xinpei stood up from the floor and went to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water. Rain began to fall outside, the raindrops pattering against the air conditioner unit. He finished his water, sat back down, and stacked the assembled heat map along with all the notes, news articles, and announcement summaries. On the first page of his notepad, he wrote a sentence: "Tianheng Heavy Industry, Mingguang Communications, and Lianyu Manufacturing are simultaneously expanding their operations in four cities, suspected to be a systematic infiltration of subspace resources by capital. Detailed evidence is attached." He closed the notepad, locked the file box, and then went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. The water was cold, but the warmth at his Guanyuan acupoint remained, steady and deep.

At three in the morning, he finally lay down. The cracks in the ceiling were faintly visible in the dim light of the rainy night. He remembered the time Aunt He sent a document to the Zhongcheng District Municipal Office via fax. He stood beside her, and after she finished sending it, the fax machine receipt showed "received." She glanced at the receipt and said, "It's sunk to the ground." At the time, he didn't fully understand how heavy those two words were, but now he understood—the place where the stone had sunk was the crack.

The next morning, he rode his bicycle to Iron Bone Hall an hour earlier than usual. Old Iron Head sat in a rattan chair, his left arm still in a sling, but his complexion was better than three days ago. An enamel mug rested on his lap, and a radio played the weather forecast, its sound crackling like a pot of peanuts that would never be fully cooked. Su Xinpei hung up his coat, neither practicing his stance nor his punches. He walked to the door of the storage room, took out the old sandbag from the toolbox, and picked up the rune detector that Wang Shu had left behind—he was already familiar with this thing; it helped him calibrate the precision of his power output. He had reflected on this last night while lying in bed: the last time he chased Duan the Cripple at the dock warehouse, he was tricked by illusion magic during their first contact because his reaction was too fast but too rigid. The completion of his tendon training gave him speed and explosiveness, but his control precision hadn't kept up. He needs to improve the precision of his force output—not by increasing the force, but by increasing the accuracy—to precisely control his finger strength over an extremely short distance, striking the target with the shortest possible distance, while simultaneously using a rune detector to establish real-time feedback on the target surface, so that the error of each strike can be seen on the instrument's readings. This fine-tuning cannot be achieved through brute force practice; it requires a great deal of repetition until his fingertips can distinguish the subtle differences in the jumps in the panel's experience value.

He attached the rune detector to the side of the sandbag and began practicing his finger strength. Not with his fist, but with the tip of his index finger, he concentrated the trembling energy he'd been training in at a single point, rapidly stabbing the canvas surface. With each strike, he tried to use the same range of force, angle, and frequency of trembling energy. A green flash on the detector indicated that the force was within the prescribed range; a red flash meant it was off. After about a hundred repetitions, the correct percentage was still less than half. He readjusted the tension in his wrist joints and did another set; the green light percentage rose to 70%. The progress bar for practical experience on the panel was also increasing—refining operational skills required at least a hundred hours of dedicated practice, and he was only just beginning to build a foundation.

Old Tie Tou leaned back in his wicker chair, watching him without saying a word. The weather forecast on the radio finished, and it switched to an evening news program. The announcer said that Beilian Free Port had recently relaxed export permits for several rare metals, which experts analyzed might be to expand production capacity for a new round of subspace monitoring equipment. Su Xinpei thought that Lianyu Manufacturing was most likely the parts supplier for that batch of equipment. He withdrew his index finger and looked at the fingertip—it wasn't broken, but it was as hot as if it had been soaked in hot water. He continued practicing on the sandbag.