“Wait a moment...” At that instant, Henry Clark seemed to suddenly think of something. “Your plan is good, but I think there’s still room for improvement.”

“Oh?” Samuel Bennett asked curiously, “What good idea did you come up with?”

Henry Clark’s small eyes darted around, and he revealed a sly grin: “Heh... I have a plan—swap families.”

===Chapter 8: Swapping Families to Break the Stronghold===

Zouma Stronghold was located in the mountains of Baijiling.

It wasn’t deep in the mountains, just in the hills.

If the mountains were too deep, it would be hard for horses to travel or carts to pass, making it inconvenient for the bandits to go out raiding or transport goods. That’s why most bandit strongholds wouldn’t choose places with extremely difficult access.

Zouma Stronghold was a typical small mountain stronghold, staking out a piece of land, building simple walls from stone and wood, and gathering dozens of bandits inside to rob and plunder.

A bandit stronghold was naturally different from an ordinary village. They didn’t need farming tools or production facilities. Simply put... there was no farming, no production, and no small business in the stronghold; all they needed were places to eat and sleep, stables and armories for their horses and weapons, and warehouses for their provisions. So the area it covered wasn’t very large.

When the supplies in the stronghold ran low, they’d go out to rob; if they needed women, they’d go out to snatch them too. Most of the women they captured would be abused for a few days and then die, and some would commit suicide the very same day. This was all commonplace. In any case, the bodies would be tossed into the mountains, and within half a day, wild animals would have picked them clean.

And Zouma Stronghold didn’t just harass Nanyuan Village alone. After all, there were more than fifty bandits in the stronghold, which meant more than fifty men who only ate, drank, and defecated but produced no wealth. A small village like Nanyuan couldn’t possibly support them all. In the Baijiling area, there were three other villages at varying distances, all of which were frequently robbed and bullied by them. It was just that Nanyuan Village, being the closest, suffered the most.

There were many reasons why Zouma Stronghold was so rampant.

First, they deliberately set up camp in a place where the authorities had no jurisdiction, which was quite clever.

Although the court during the Yongtai era wasn’t especially corrupt, there were certainly not many officials who truly cared for the people or hated evil as their own enemy. In the bureaucracy, where “if you can avoid meddling, you absolutely will,” few would take the initiative to deal with matters not clearly within their jurisdiction... Because even if you handled such things well, no one would praise you, but if you messed up, it could ruin your career.

Second, every time Zouma Stronghold went out to rob money, food, or women, they kept within certain “limits.” They knew exactly where the common people’s bottom line was, because most of them were originally local bullies and thugs from nearby villages. They understood that as long as you didn’t kill or rob too much at once, and gave the villagers some time to recover after each raid, the people wouldn’t rebel.

Occasionally, one or two families might go to report to the authorities, but it never caused much of a stir. Rural villagers couldn’t afford to hire legal advocates, nor could they write legal complaints. If they went to the yamen and beat the grievance drum, regardless of whether their grievance was real, they’d first be flogged forty times. Most people would be beaten to death before they could even file a complaint.

If the bandits went even further—kidnapping all the women and daughters of a family, and killing the husbands, elders, and children, wiping out the whole household—then there’d be no one left to report them.

Would the neighbors risk their lives to file a complaint for you? Impossible.

That’s human nature: as long as you’re still alive and the fire hasn’t reached your own house, some things can be endured.

So today, the people of Zouma Stronghold wouldn’t really wipe out all the villagers of Nanyuan. They wouldn’t dare. If they really did that, the authorities would have to act, whether they wanted to or not.

They just wanted to scare the villagers, and use yesterday’s incident—Wright being rescued by Henry Clark—as an excuse to rob more, and kill a few who dared to resist, to “set an example” and warn the rest.

…………

Just as agreed yesterday, as the hour of Wei was about to end, the stronghold chief Mark Smith gathered his men and prepared to set out.

As can be seen from earlier, this chief Mark Smith was quite a character.

He couldn’t be called a genius, but he did have some smarts. Zouma Stronghold had been able to run rampant here for years all thanks to his planning. Without him, the gang of local thugs below would have been wiped out long ago.

As for martial arts, Mark Smith was skilled as well. In his teens, he apprenticed under “Hui Prefecture’s Hundred-Catty Blade Paul Carter,” studying blade techniques for a full ten years and mastering Paul Carter’s true teachings. But his master never imagined that Mark Smith, a beast in human form, had long coveted the beauty of the Zhao family’s daughter. One night, Mark Smith snuck into the young lady’s room, tried to rape her, and when he failed, killed her in a fit of rage. After that, he went all the way—launching a night attack and slaughtering his master’s entire family of eight, burning all the evidence, and fleeing with the Zhao family’s valuables. He committed many more crimes in various places before arriving at Baijiling a few years ago, where he gathered a gang and became a bandit chief.

The bandits of Zouma Stronghold, after joining, all learned a trick or two from Mark Smith, so they basically all used blades. As for their fighting ability... it was about as Samuel Bennett had estimated—not especially strong, but definitely tougher than ordinary people with no martial training.

And so, forty-some bandits and twenty horses set out in a mighty procession toward Nanyuan Village.