Empire of Shadows

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Advanced chapter at /caleredhair. its already in chapter 380+

“Hey, Lance, it’s Bill.”

Bill wanted to create a very relaxed context because the matter to be discussed next was not easy to bring up, so his tone was cheerful, lacking the composure and aura of a gang boss.

Instead, it was very much in line with his previous job: a pimp.

“Hey, Bill, I’ve heard of you, if you’re the person I’ve heard about.”

“Yes, that’s the one, the Red Dog Gang.”

Bill’s tone was not aggressive; it might even make people feel it was a bit soft.

Heller’s death had softened the attitudes of many people towards Lance and the Lance family. They would no longer treat Lance and his group like a neighborhood family but as a gang of the same level.After all, Heller had proven this point himself, and he had paid for it with his life.

Lance opened a mahogany cigarette case and took out a cigarette. His finger pressed on the desktop lighter.

It was a desktop lighter in the shape of a Federation soldier in a half-kneeling position, about to shoot, with two indigenous people’s corpses lying beside him.

As Lance pressed the button on the lighter, some sparks shot out from the gun barrel, followed by a flame.

A high-end lighter with a certain dark humor. When buying this lighter, the shopkeeper had reminded Lance not to use it on the reservation, unless his scalp was feeling a bit itchy.

He didn’t buy this desktop lighter because he had some dark humor or a typical Fed mentality; he just hoped to use this lighter to remind himself.

If one day, he became satisfied with everything he had, then he would become the one lying down.

Only by constantly striving forward, by being the hunter, could he avoid the eventual fate of becoming the prey!

“Bill, we’re not very familiar with each other, and I can’t find much to talk to you about. To avoid making things awkward for both of us, just say what you want to say directly.”

Hearing this, Bill felt no dissatisfaction. On the contrary, he felt that Lance was actually a decent person, very straightforward.

“Then I’ll be direct. Recently, our bars have been affected by you, and sales have become very poor. So, I hope you can raise the price of your liquor, or stay a little further away from our bars.”

Perhaps to avoid a harsh tone, he even proactively brought up the current price of liquor. “Your liquor is too cheap. There’s absolutely no need to do this.”

“If you raise the price of your liquor, your income will be double what it is now, maybe even three or four times.”

“We’re all here to make money. There’s no need to have a problem with money, right?”

Lance laughed a couple of times. “I can’t do that.”

Bill was a little doubtful of what he heard. “I’m not asking you to give up your business. I’m just suggesting you raise the price. There’s no harm in it for you!”

“Even if you have fewer customers, you’ll still earn more than you do now!”

Lance waited for him to finish before replying, “I know, but I still refuse.”

Bill’s mind was a bit muddled. “Why?”

Lance didn’t answer directly. He needed to give Bill a little hint. “I heard you used to be a pimp, the best pimp in the Port District.”

Faced with Lance suddenly complimenting him, Bill, though very wary, couldn’t help but admit, “Haha, that’s right. As long as you want a girl, I can find one for you.”

“Then you must know that if another place’s girls are cheaper than yours, and the quality isn’t much different, you’ll be in a tough spot.”

Only then did Bill realize that Lance was using this method to tell him why he was unwilling to lower the price.

Because he had done similar things before. For the rich, a little more or a little less, they didn’t care.

But for the poor, they would always talk about cost-effectiveness.

They consider cost-effectiveness when buying a house, when buying furniture, when getting married, and even when spending money on pleasure, they consider cost-effectiveness!

They would rather walk an extra four kilometers just to save an amount of money that the rich couldn’t imagine—five cents, ten cents.

“You want to drive us out?” Then he felt a sense of shame and anger. “Are you trying to start a new war?”

Lance did not acknowledge this statement. “This is business competition. The Empire District is too crowded. I need to persuade you in turn, Bill.”

“The price of liquor is rising rapidly right now. This is a good opportunity to make money.”

“How much can one of your girls earn you in a day?”

“They are not those expensive golden retrievers from the Bay Area. You can’t sell them for the price of golden retrievers.”

“But think about it, a bottle of liquor, how much can it earn you!”

“Big Polly’s liquor has just been destroyed. The liquor market in the Port District is facing a semi-vacuum. Instead of focusing your attention on me, you should pull back your strength and go compete with Polly in the Port District.”

“He has no liquor, but you do. He can’t be your opponent.”

“I can guarantee that before you leave the Empire District, my liquor prices will not increase; instead, they will decrease. I will make sure you don’t earn a single cent.”

“If you want to go to war, we can give it a try, but I advise you not to.”

Although Bill was very angry, he was now trying to calm down.

He wasn’t the kind of leader who rose to power through fighting and killing. If it were Bing Polly, he would probably be slamming the table and yelling about killing Lance to teach him a lesson right now.

Pimping also requires some wisdom. He was thinking about the feasibility of what Lance had said.

The flesh trade in the Port District wasn’t very easy to do. Or rather, throughout the entire Federation, the flesh trade for the poor was not easy to do.

This referred to the very direct flesh trade, not the kind of work in strip clubs.

The five dollars spent in a strip club wasn’t just for oral sex; the dancer would also perform a hot dance for you for about thirty minutes, teasing you until every cell in your body was trembling, and then give you a good time, making you feel great.

Five dollars, forty minutes, this price was quite reasonable. A private space, better service and enjoyment—it was worth the money.

But for the direct flesh trade, on the street corner, in the alley, for two dollars—you can’t expect someone with a monthly income of only thirty-some dollars to spend a lot of money to solve a problem that can be solved with their hands.

Like some who did private gigs on their own, they were willing to do it for one dollar. Some of the older ones would do it as long as you gave them money.

And these girls themselves were here to make money. The Red Dog Gang was only responsible for their safety and helping them solicit customers. They could only take a portion of the profits, about forty to sixty percent, not all of it.

So far, there were almost no criminal organizations within the Federation that relied solely on running the low-level flesh trade for profit. It wasn’t that they weren’t smart enough to think of it, but that it really wasn’t very profitable.

Red High Heels didn’t count, because they weren’t running a simple flesh trade; they were actually in the human trafficking business, and they were doing business in the Bay Area.

“Think about it carefully. Once Bing Polly gets more liquor, your situation will become very bad.”

Lance hung up the phone directly, which left Bill in deep thought and also feeling very frustrated.

Although Heller was not a good person, from Bill’s perspective, he wasn’t actually bad.

A neighbor who had lost the desire to continue expanding was certainly better than another mad dog. But this new Lance who had appeared was not the old Heller; he had his own ideas.

Unify the Empire District. This thought appeared in Bill’s mind. He could guess Lance’s goal.

If a gang could unify an entire administrative district, then that gang would have reached the same level as the Five Families.

Even if he still lacked some foundation, in the underworld of Golden Port, he would become a rising star.

Bill felt a bit envious in his heart. After all, he was old too, and like Heller, he no longer had the drive to forge ahead.

But to just give up the territory in the Empire District to Lance for nothing, he was a bit unwilling.

He still needed to discuss it with others, but it was certain that the competition for liquor in the Empire District would become more and more intense…

After hanging up the phone, Lance shook his head slightly. Perhaps this was a true reflection of “those who establish themselves through violence are more ferocious the younger they are, but weaker the older they get.”

To put it bluntly, people with nothing to lose are always the most reckless. When they obtain the life they want through these actions, they will start to become afraid, afraid that one day they will suddenly die and no longer be able to enjoy the good life they have now!

Whether it was Heller or Bill, they were both “long-famous” gang leaders who had left their own glorious era in this city.

But look at them now, they were all getting old, no longer full of drive like they were when they were young.

On the contrary, it was the younger generation, for example, that group of young people from the Brotherhood, who were fierce and combative, and rarely compromised proactively. They were the stars on the stage of this new era.

From this, Lance was considering a question: the Five Families, did they still have the same absolute dominance over this city as they did in the past?

But now was not the time for him to consider this. He had paid a large amount of money to the Liji Group. He was out of money now, out of clean money. He had to get some money.

He called out for Hiram, who quickly came running and pushed open the door.

Hiram had lost some weight recently, which made his face look longer. It was said that he had a girl he liked and was passionately in love.

To those respectable gentlemen who wore decent clothes and moved in high society, gang members were just the lowest of the low.

But to some people at the bottom, gang members were the most impressive people!

No one dared to bully them casually. This was prestige!

“Boss?” he pushed open the door and poked his head in, looking confused.

Lance beckoned him to come in. “Do you have any work to do these next few days?”

Hiram shook his head. He had nothing to do these days. Ennio was out of prison and now wanted to perform proactively to make up for the guilt he felt for not being there.

The Lance family had gone through a trial of blood and fire, and because of his own stupidity, he couldn’t participate. He was in great pain inside and wanted to make up for something.

So no matter what work there was, he rushed to do it. Elvin’s opinion on this was to let him stay busy, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to vent his emotions and there would be problems.

“Perfect. We’re out of money. I plan to clear up the debt I got from Jobav. Go find two more people, and we’ll leave at any time.”

He turned and walked to the safe. This safe only contained a portion of the debts. He selected one from it.

A person named “Ted’s Firm” had borrowed twenty-five thousand dollars from him. According to the repayment date on it, the money should have been returned before September of last year.

But to this day, the other party had no intention of repaying the money.

The IOU had their phone number and name. Lance dialed the number directly.

Hiram, who had just gone out, had already returned, pulling two new recruits with him. He was very enthusiastic about bringing in new people. Lance, holding the phone in one hand, made a pressing motion with the other, gesturing for them to sit down. The three of them quietly walked to the sofa and sat down.

After about ten seconds, the call was connected.

“Is Mr. Ted available to take a call right now?”

“I’m his friend… Okay, no problem.”

After about another ten seconds, the voice in the receiver sounded again, but only Lance could hear it. “This is Ted, who are you?”

“Mr. Ted, in June of 1023 (the year before last), you borrowed a sum of twenty-five thousand dollars from Jinda Bank.”

“According to your IOU, you should have returned the principal of twenty-five thousand and the interest of three thousand seven hundred and fifty before September of last year, but you did not.”

The voice on the other end immediately became a bit aggressive. “Who. The. Fuck. Are. You?”

“Listen, either you have Jobav come find me, or stay out of this, understand?”

“This is not something a young man like you can handle. Don’t fucking call me again, or I’ll have someone beat you up!”

Before Lance could say anything, the phone was slammed onto its base with a click, and the sound of a dead line came from the receiver.

Lance looked at the phone in his hand, then at the three of them, and spread his hands slightly. “It seems he needs a little help. Once I find out the location of this firm, we’ll go give him a surprise.”

Lance dialed the telegraph office and had the operator look up the location of Ted’s Firm.

The telegraph office supported this service. At this time, they hadn’t even realized the value of “privacy.” In a public phone booth, you could look up a person’s phone number in a phone book full of advertisements.

Of course, you could also call the telegraph office directly. Soon, the address of Ted’s Firm was sent to Lance. The firm was right in Priliccia, not far from them.

The owner of Ted’s Firm was named Ted, and he ran a lumber company.

He had his own logging permit, and this was his “showroom.” His main job was to sell this wood to middle-class people who had their own needs for building houses.

This was a big business, and it could also… for Federation houses, especially single-family homes, some communities even required residents to use wood materials to build their houses.

On one hand, wood-frame houses had a two-hundred-year history in the Federation, and a whole set of operating standards had been developed.

The so-called “self-built house” was actually buying a super-large set of building blocks and assembling them according to the instructions, which could satisfy the middle class and some of the rich’s nostalgia for their ancestors’ establishment in the Federation.

Of course, the poor certainly wouldn’t have this sentiment, because even their ancestors might not have lived in such exquisite wooden houses back then; they might have slept in places like stables.

Short construction time, low cost, low difficulty of work, and many other advantages made people love this practice.

On the other hand, wooden houses had become “one of the spiritual symbols of the Federation people,” because it was tradition.

Although it was unclear why something that was only two hundred years old could be called “tradition,” the idea that only building wooden houses made you a Federation citizen was beginning to become a consensus in Federation society.

Just like they had many strange habits, even dividing food into “Federation meals” and “immigrant meals,” it was a bit bewildering.

But once it really became a social consensus, people actually didn’t have much choice but to comply and automatically become a part of this invisible barrier.

Not letting outsiders in, and not letting insiders out.

According to incomplete statistics, apart from buildings like apartments that had to use brick and concrete, almost ninety-seven percent of single-family homes were of wooden construction.

This gave the logging industry a profit that would never end, because wooden structures were prone to needing maintenance due to moisture, insect infestation, and the like, so they never worried about having no business.

In the hall of Ted’s Firm, there were many small models made of various kinds of wood. After customers came in, they could see more intuitively what the houses assembled from this wood would look like.

They could place orders with the firm based on these models, and then they would produce the corresponding materials and provide them to the customers.

Mr. Ted had just hung up the phone, cursing, and instructed the front desk to hang up immediately if this person called again.

He did indeed borrow twenty-five thousand dollars from Mr. Jobav, but fifteen thousand of that was taken by Arthur, and he only got ten thousand.

Mr. Jobav actually knew about this, so from the beginning, he had never considered recovering this money. He knew it couldn’t be recovered, so he simply packaged it all up and gave it to Lance to settle the account.

Mr. Ted didn’t know that this debt had now been packaged and sold. He still thought it was Mr. Jobav urging him.

If it were the man himself, he might have spoken nicely, but a young man was not qualified enough for him to speak nicely, even if Mr. Jobav had recently sided with the mayor.

The mayor was, after all, an “outsider” to this city, but Arthur family, the Five Families—these were the true masters of Golden Port!

Just as he was considering whether to release termites in some communities after spring arrived, a startled cry from the front desk came from the hall.

He was about to stand up to see what had happened when the office door was pushed open.

A young man who walked with a swagger came in from outside. He looked very familiar as he took off his hat, placed it on the corner of the desk, and sat directly opposite Ted.

He crossed his legs, took out a cigarette, and Hiram immediately lit it for him.

He took a drag of the cigarette and blew the smoke towards Mr. Ted. “What were you saying on the phone just now?”

“You were going to beat me up?”

(End of this chapter)

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Additional chapters: /caleredhair