Flip the table and divide the family property! Take his wife and daughter into the mountains and eat

"Zhao Shanhe!"

Enemies meeting are bound to be furious, and the moment Boss Huang saw the person in question, the bloodshot veins in his eyes instantly flared up.

He gripped the switchblade tightly, roaring like a desperate beast: "You little bastard, you finally dared to show your face! You set me up with a bunch of rotten rats soaked in sodium sulfate, swindling me out of 150,000 yuan in cash! You'd better spit the money back at me right now!"

Zhao Shanhe stopped, swallowed the last bite of sweet potato, and patted the black ash off his hands.

Looking at Boss Huang's ferocious face, he not only didn't get angry, but instead showed an extremely astonished and absurd expression.

"Boss Huang, you've come to our village in the middle of the night with a knife and a gun, just to extort money from us?"

Zhao Shanhe spread his hands, his face full of innocence, his voice exceptionally clear in the quiet snowy night: "I've never even seen what you look like before. When did I ever swindle you out of 150,000 yuan? You can eat whatever you want, but you can't just say whatever you want."

"Stop playing dumb with me, you son of a bitch!"

Enraged by Zhao Shanhe's innocent-looking face, Boss Huang trembled with anger. Pointing at Zhao Shanhe's nose, he cursed, "That Dazhuang who brought 20,000 yuan to smash the plate! And that Ergaizi who led the way in selling top-grade leather! They're all your men! You ordered them to mix thousands of scrap leather pieces into the product and sell it to me! You dare say no?!"

"Boss Huang, are you really desperate from losing, or has the wind and snow in Northeast China frozen your brain?"

Zhao Shanhe chuckled, looking at Boss Huang as if he were a complete lunatic.

He took a step forward, his tone so frank that even he almost believed it: "Yesterday evening, your Wenzhou gang set up a table at the entrance of our village to grab supplies, insisting on buying hides at an exorbitant price of five yuan and fifty cents, handing out money without even glancing at them. Who in the surrounding area doesn't know about this?"

Zhao Shanhe pointed to the villagers around him, who were holding hoes and hunting rifles, and said loudly and righteously, "Hundreds of people were lining up at the village entrance to sell hides. Every man in the village, young and old, can testify to that! I stayed in the forest farm behind the mountain all evening yesterday checking the accounts. I didn't even set foot near the village entrance!"

He looked down at Boss Huang, a subtle yet deadly smirk playing on his lips: "You're rich and foolish, spending 150,000 to buy a bunch of junk that others don't want. What does that have to do with me, Zhao Shanhe? What, you lost money in the business, and now you're bringing men with guns to my door, trying to pin the blame on me?"

"You're talking nonsense! It was you! You're the one who did it!"

"More than three thousand pieces of waste material. First, the sodium sulfate needs to be soaked in warm water, then those shriveled dead rat skins need to be stretched out one by one. Finally, the weather needs to be snowy, and the skins need to be frozen overnight into crisp ice, then packed into sacks and mixed with the best goods before being delivered."

As Boss Huang spoke, his thoughts became clearer and clearer. "This isn't a job that three or five people can do. It requires dozens of large vats, hundreds of people, and extremely meticulous coordination and planning!"

He abruptly turned his head, pointing at the villagers of Kaoshantun around him, dressed in tattered sheepskin coats and with weathered faces, his voice suddenly rising: "Tell me, these illiterate peasants who only know how to dig in the soil, how could they possibly understand what 'sodium sulfate swelling' means?! How could they possibly come up with such an intricately linked scheme?!"

Upon hearing this, Zhao Shanhe's smile slowly faded.

He put his hands back into the sleeves of his military overcoat, and from two meters away, his eyes instantly turned as cold and sharp as knives as he stared intently into Boss Huang's pupils.

"Boss Huang, since you know this stuff so well, even calculating the exact timing of soaking and freezing, you must have done your fair share of heartless things back in the South, like giving birth to a child without an anus, right?"

Zhao Shanhe took a step closer, his voice like shards of ice in the dead of winter: "I'm not like you. I, Zhao Shanhe, am a native of Kaoshantun, from three generations of poor farmers who earned our money honestly with our own two hands! You keep calling me a peasant and saying I can't read a single word. What, you, this big boss from the South in leather shoes, look down on us working people from the Northeast?!"

"Don't you dare try to pin this on me!"

This accusation of undermining class harmony struck Boss Huang so hard that a cold sweat broke out on his back. His finger trembled as he pointed at Zhao Shanhe: "I didn't mean that! I just said they weren't smart enough to set up a scheme!"

Zhao Shanhe gave him no chance to catch his breath, abruptly turning around and shouting loudly at the hundreds of villagers around him:

"Fellow villagers! Open your eyes and take a good look! In the middle of the night, several truckloads of shirtless thugs, armed with double-barreled shotguns, have come to our village, banging on doors and shouting insults, pointing guns at our heads!"

Zhao Shanhe suddenly pointed at Boss Huang, his voice booming like thunder: "Isn't this just like those tyrannical landlords before liberation, who brought their militias to collect rent and treat people like dirt?! This is the new China, the new era! Can we still allow these tyrannical bloodsuckers to ride on the necks of our people and shit on them?!"

"No! Beat him up!"

"Kill this bully!"

"Confiscate their guns!"

The villagers were already holding back their anger, and Zhao Shanhe's words, so full of contemporary relevance, stirred them up, causing their fury to explode.

The hammers of dozens of old foreign cannons were all brought down, and several hot-tempered men in the front row had even picked up hoes, ready to break Boss Huang's legs first.

Seeing that hundreds of people were about to swarm him and tear him apart alive, Boss Huang completely lost his temper.

"Stop it, all of you!"

Boss Huang's face contorted in agony, the veins on his neck throbbing wildly like earthworms, as he unleashed a bloodcurdling roar like a dying beast: "You, surnamed Zhao! Stop spouting nonsense! Are you even a man?! You dare to do it but not admit it, using these idiots as human shields for you?!"

Like a gambler who had lost everything, he suddenly turned his head, his bloodshot eyes fixed on the surrounding villagers, and roared with all his might:

"You bunch of penniless bastards are still working your ass off for him! Do you know how much real money I spent yesterday evening to buy that batch of junk? A full 150,000! 150,000!"

With trembling hands, Boss Huang pointed at Zhao Shanhe's calm face and let out a vicious laugh: "You all check your own pockets! Did your family only get thirty or fifty yuan? You're all grinning from ear to ear over taking a few dozen yuan, but do you know how much Zhao Shanhe pocketed all by himself?!"

"Let me tell you! Of that 150,000 yuan in cash, Zhao Shanhe alone took at least 70,000 or 80,000 yuan!"

boom!

The moment the figure of 70,000 to 80,000 was announced, the entire entrance to Kaoshantun Village fell into a deathly silence.

Even the howling north wind seemed to stop at that moment.

What was the concept of 70,000 to 80,000 yuan in the 1980s?

At that time, even if a regular employee of a state-owned factory in the city worked himself to the bone for a month, his salary would only be a little over thirty yuan.

At that time, even if someone had 10,000 yuan in their savings, they would be a "10,000-yuan household" who would be paraded through the streets with red flowers hanging on their head!

Seventy or eighty thousand!

This money is enough to buy a whole street of large tiled houses in the most prosperous part of the county town!

They went to the agricultural machinery station and drove back dozens of high-horsepower Dongfanghong tractors in one go!

Even if you sold the entire Kaoshantun village, including all the people and land, you still wouldn't be able to scrape together a fraction of this huge sum!

The villagers, who had been furious and about to charge forward, froze in place as if they had been frozen in place.

Everyone unconsciously lowered their hoes and shovels, which were raised in mid-air, by half a point.

Hundreds of eyes turned to Zhao Shanhe.

A very subtle commotion began to emerge in the crowd.

"My God... seventy or eighty thousand...!"

"Our whole village went into the mountains for two days to catch them, and we only earned a few hundred yuan... Shanhe did it all by himself..."

"No way... Shanhe isn't the kind of person who would keep everything to himself..."

A buzzing of whispers spread through the crowd. Even the most honest and simple farmers, when faced with such an enormous sum of money that could overwhelm anyone, inevitably began to experience the rampant growth of human greed, jealousy, and suspicion, like weeds.

Boss Huang keenly sensed the change in atmosphere, and a morbidly ecstatic smile finally appeared on his lips.

As long as these peasants start fighting amongst themselves, he can walk out alive today, and might even force them to tie up Zhao Shanhe and hand him over!

Old Yu stood at the very front, his pig-slaughtering knife drooping slightly.

He swallowed a mouthful of extremely dry saliva, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down several times.

Old Yu leaned closer to Zhao Shanhe, reached out and tugged at the cuff of his military overcoat, his voice extremely low, even carrying a tremor he himself didn't realize.

"Shanhe... tell your uncle the truth..."

Old Yu's cloudy eyes were fixed on Zhao Shanhe's face as he cautiously probed, "Is what this southern bumpkin said... true? You really have seventy or eighty thousand?"