Nominal: Hou Liangping blocking the door? He was slapped away!

Handong Military Region.

On the huge holographic tactical sand table, dozens of red warning coordinates flashed continuously on the map of Handong.

Shen Zhong stood in front of the sand table, pointing his finger at several of the most intense points of conflict.

"In order to force out the local authorities' true intentions, Chu Pingshan treated the entire Handong region as a breeding ground for poisonous insects. However, he overestimated the bottom line of local officials and underestimated the greed of the grassroots interest chain."

Qi Tongwei, dressed in a black special forces uniform, stood aside, ready to receive orders.

Zhou Weiguo pushed open the door and slammed a stack of recently intercepted local communications records onto the table.

"Sir, the communication channels of local public security and urban management departments are all messed up. In order to seize businesses and logistics, even police frequencies are starting to interfere with each other in different places."

Shen Zhong flipped through the communication records, quickly piecing together fragments of memories belonging to the transmigrator in his mind.

He knew all too well how many messy affairs were hidden in Handong. Although the Zhao family gang had fallen, those deeply entrenched local conglomerates and criminal forces still lurked in the shadows. Chu Pingshan's radical policy of eliminating the bottom performers was tantamount to handing these shady hands a legal butcher's knife.

"Do they really think they can boost GDP by attracting a few investors?"

Shen Zhong threw the call logs back onto the desktop.

"Activate the highest-level intelligence network of the military region and grant it full access."

"Weiguo, the Dragon Fang Special Forces will be broken up into smaller units and deployed to civilian clothes."

"Tongwei, take some men and investigate. I want to see what kind of monsters are hiding behind these local officials who are making the most noise."

Qi Tongwei stood at attention, saluted, turned around, and strode out of the command hall.

As night falls, on National Highway 104, which marks the border between Lincheng and Guzhou.

Several heavy trucks were forced to stop on the side of the road, their headlights shining on the barbed wire fence stretched across their front.

Seven or eight burly men wearing reflective vests and with their uniforms open were waving rubber batons around the truck.

The bald man leading the group knocked on the truck window and held up three fingers.

"The toll has gone up. If this truck and its cargo are to enter Lincheng, we need to come up with 30,000 yuan, otherwise the truck will be impounded for overloading."

The truck driver, sweating profusely, offered several packs of good cigarettes and repeatedly bowed and pleaded for leniency.

The bald man slapped the cigarette to the ground and raised his rubber baton to smash the windshield.

A blinding beam of light shone directly from behind, and several black SUVs without license plates slammed on their brakes in front of the roadblock.

The car doors opened in unison, and Qi Tongwei led more than a dozen fully armed special operations team members out.

The bald man shielded his eyes from the bright light and walked forward, cursing.

"Where did this car come from? Don't you know the rules? Lincheng Road Administration is enforcing the law here!"

Qi Tongwei didn't give the other party a chance to talk nonsense and kicked the bald man squarely in the chest.

The bald man screamed and flew backward, crashing heavily into the mud.

The special operations team pounced on them like wolves and tigers, quickly pinning the remaining burly men to the ground, binding their hands behind their backs and putting them in cable ties.

Qi Tongwei walked up to the bald man, stepped on his chest, and pulled the crumpled law enforcement ID out of his pocket.

"Road administration enforcement?"

Qi Tongwei tore the document to shreds and threw it at the bald man's face.

"You bunch of gangsters in uniform, using the province's GDP growth target as an excuse to set up roadblocks and extort money here. Do you really think nobody in Handong can control you?"

Special agents found several large boxes of cash and a thick ledger in a makeshift shack by the roadside.

Qi Tongwei opened the ledger, which was filled with detailed records of tolls paid by various caravans and profit sharing made to a local leader according to a set ratio.

"Take them all away and interrogate them overnight. Dig deep and expose all the protectors behind them."

The next morning, in the military region command hall.

Qi Tongwei piled a thick stack of case files and a bunch of storage disks on his heavy desk.

"Sir, the whole thing has been investigated thoroughly."

"The border checkpoint in Lincheng was contracted out to a local criminal gang, and they have the backing of the deputy director of the municipal bureau."

"The situation in Yantai is even more outrageous. In order to meet the investment targets, the municipal party secretary tacitly allowed a loan shark company to use violent debt collection tactics to forcibly acquire the assets of several local enterprises at low prices and repackage them as foreign investment projects to be reported to the province."

"The data that Chu Pingshan needs is all squeezed out by these people who trample on the bones of ordinary people."

Shen Zhong picked up several photos of the arrests at the scene, looked at the thugs and hooligans posing as law enforcement officers in the photos, and tapped his fingers on the table.

Chu Pingshan was a pure bureaucrat. He only cared whether the numbers on the reports were compliant, but he didn't care at all how those numbers were converted into cash at the grassroots level. This cold-blooded data-driven approach had been completely distorted by the local monsters and demons, becoming a huge breeding ground for new corruption.

Shen Zhong threw the photo into the shredder.

"Since Chu Pingshan likes to manage people with systems, then I will teach him that in China, a system that is detached from the grassroots is just a piece of paper."

Qi Tongwei stood up straight, awaiting the next instruction.

Shen Zhong pointed to the storage disk on the table.

"Film all the irrefutable evidence of violent robbery and illegal activities in these places onto CDs, and prepare one hundred copies."

"Wei Guo, in the name of the political commissar of the provincial military district, draft a 'Notice of Emergency Joint Military-Civilian Meeting'."

Zhou Weiguo immediately stepped forward to take notes.

Shen Zhong leaned back in his chair, his fingers interlaced.

"Notify the top leaders of all thirteen cities and prefectures in the province, as well as all members of the Provincial Party Committee Standing Committee. Tomorrow morning at eight o'clock, everyone must attend a meeting in the Military Region Auditorium."

Qi Tongwei was stunned for a moment.

"Sir, this bypasses the administrative procedures of the provincial party committee and the provincial government, and directly issues a mandatory order to local officials."

Shen Zhong stood up and straightened the collar of his pine-green military uniform.

"Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. The rules for Handong will now be set by the military region."

The Provincial Party Committee compound in Handong.

Sha Ruijin paced back and forth in his office, angrily slamming a notification stamped with the military's red seal onto the coffee table.

"What is Shen Zhong trying to do? Interfering in politics with military power! What authority does a military region political commissar have to bypass the provincial party committee and forcibly convene a meeting of all the top officials of the prefectures and cities in the province?"

Chu Pingshan sat on the sofa, holding the same notice in his hand, examining it carefully.

Sha Ruijin walked up to Chu Pingshan and put his hands on his hips.

"Pingshan, isn't the provincial government holding a meeting tomorrow to report on the progress of the province's economic reassessment? Immediately issue a counter-measure notice in the name of the provincial government, firmly rejecting the military region's unreasonable demands. Let's see if those municipal party secretaries listen to the provincial government or the military region!"

Chu Pingshan ignored Sha Ruijin's rage.

He laid the notification sheet flat on his lap, his fingers gently tracing the military seal at the bottom, which still smelled of gun oil.

He was not unaware of the chaos in the local area. But he needed this chaos to disrupt the existing power structure. As long as the final reports were compliant, he considered the sacrifices made in the process a necessary price to pay.

But he didn't expect that Shen Zhong would choose this moment to overturn the entire card table in such a domineering manner.

Chu Pingshan pushed up his glasses and looked up at Sha Ruijin.

"There's no escaping it. Let's go see what rules this General Shen wants to set for us."