Wang Donglu had become completely accustomed to his work overalls and working in a factory where the smell of machine oil permeated everything. With the expansion of trade between Soviet Russia and the Northeast, the scent of oil in the factory was heavier than before.

This meant the factory had a greater supply of oil; the lubrication and rust prevention for equipment and parts were no longer as stretched as they had been.

As a military representative and apprentice worker, Wang Donglu was attending a meeting. The factory director had brought out new products recently shipped back from Europe and the United States, and was discussing "reverse engineering" with the factory's technical staff.

Another, less precise name for reverse engineering was "copying." From a personal perspective, it was indeed somewhat embarrassing. From a national perspective, it merely proved that there was a huge gap between the Northeast's industrial strength and that of the established industrial powers.

However, in order to catch up with the world's advanced levels, to gain market share in the Chinese market, and to fill the Chinese market with Chinese goods as much as possible, reverse engineering was necessary and had to be vigorously promoted.

By the end of the meeting, the arrangements for how to reverse engineer these products had been determined. Wang Donglu was assigned to the mold group.

After work in the afternoon, Wang Donglu changed into another set of overalls, ate dinner in the cafeteria, and then hurried straight to night school.

From the day of its establishment, the Northeast Government's educational institutions had decided on a policy of "walking on two legs": not only striving to build full-time compulsory education but also building an adult re-education system. Night schools provided teaching for this adult re-education.

Initially, Wang Donglu himself had wanted to apply to Northeast University and had passed the entrance exam. However, the organization arranged for Wang Donglu to go down to the factories and participate in night school education.

Night school education carried the same academic certification as full-time education. Even though Wang Donglu felt he didn't like it, he obeyed the organization's arrangement. Moreover, Wang Donglu gradually felt that night school education was actually quite good; after all, he accumulated many questions during his day job, and the theoretical parts of the night school curriculum often gave him a sense of sudden enlightenment.

Just as he arrived at the night school entrance, he saw several familiar faces. They were colleagues Wang Donglu had known during his brief stint in the Security Bureau. At this moment, they were not wearing uniforms but were in plain clothes, lingering around the night school entrance and nearby areas.

Wang Donglu decided to pretend he hadn't seen them, but he felt uncomfortable inside. Was the Security Bureau going to carry out some operation at the night school?

Even his brief experience in the Security Bureau had made Wang Donglu understand the scope of its business. The main work of the Security Bureau was actually not fighting and killing; it was a department with considerable technical content. It analyzed, understood, and judged people and things that were harmful to the Northeast Government, and formulated preventive measures against these threats.

Wang Donglu's initial contact with the Security Bureau was when he, as a member of the Beijing Student Union during the May Fourth Movement, came to the Northeast to link up with students from various universities to seek to launch demonstrations together, expressing a strong desire to recover rights in the Northeast.

However, in the eyes of the Northeast Government, outsiders inciting mass activities in the Northeast threatened the social order. Naturally, this had to be nipped in the bud. This had nothing to do with whether what Wang Donglu wanted to do was right or wrong; the Northeast Government considered social stability first. As long as society was stable, when to hold anti-Japanese demonstrations and how many to hold was not an issue.

So Wang Donglu did not continue to dwell on this issue. What he had to do now was to quickly complete his apprenticeship as a skilled worker and complete university courses including mathematics, physics, and basic chemistry as soon as possible. To become a member of the Aircraft Design Institute, one not only had to understand the basic knowledge required for aircraft design but also had to have practical processing experience. Working in the factory had indeed taught Wang Donglu too much.

The next afternoon, Wang Donglu suddenly received an order to wait for a talk. The factory naturally had offices. Seeing the personnel who arrived, Wang Donglu was stunned. The three people looked like they were from the Organization Department. Although they looked calm, the underlying coldness and vigilance were truly unsettling. Especially the younger one among the three, whose expression held a sense of danger. That was an attitude of struggle.

Similar to previous political vetting, after asking a few basic questions about his family and personal information, the young cadre from the Organization Department asked, "Mr. Wang Donglu, according to your experience at Tsinghua School, you have always wanted to study in Europe or America."

Wang Donglu immediately replied, "There are already relevant schools in China, I no longer need to go to Europe or America."

The young cadre's sharp gaze flashed. "By saying this, can we understand that if you encounter a more suitable opportunity, you would still choose to study abroad in Europe or America?"

Wang Donglu was stunned; this question was somewhat condemning. And this content... obviously used the method of logic. Logic only cares whether the logic is valid; propositions only care whether the proposition is a proposition, not whether the content is correct. This was something he had learned in the basic training of the Security Bureau, and it was also mentioned in the "Subject Logic" at the beginning of every university course later.

Since the other party spoke like this, even though Wang Donglu was very unhappy, he thought for a moment and replied, "My goal is to achieve success in the aircraft industry, and then serve China's aircraft industry."

The young cadre continued to ask, "To become an aircraft industry expert, how much are you willing to pay?"

Wang Donglu was momentarily unsure what the other party wanted to ask. Things seemed to have started entering a dangerous situation, so Wang Donglu simply asked, "May I ask what has happened?"

The other party did not answer the question but just looked at Wang Donglu silently. Wang Donglu knew that the matter must not be simple, so he replied, "My goal is to let China produce the best aircraft in the world; this is my ideal..."

Speaking of this, Wang Donglu suddenly had a realization and continued, "In terms of academic studies, I obey the organization's arrangements."

It was clear that this sentence hit the mark. The older Organization Department cadre, who had not spoken until now, finally opened his mouth. "Comrade Wang Donglu, it is good that you can understand this point. Now there may be some people who will make suggestions to you, for example, that you can go to study in Europe or America."

Wang Donglu was stunned. He really hadn't thought such a possibility existed before. Who would suggest that Wang Donglu go to study in Europe or America? Studying abroad was a very expensive affair and had many relevant restrictions.

...If someone proposed such conditions to Wang Donglu, he would truly have some expectations.

"I will obey the organization's arrangements," Wang Donglu replied.

After the meeting ended, the three Organization Department cadres remained in the conference room, communicating in low voices. "Wang Donglu still has expectations for studying abroad, but his social connections have little contact with Japan."

"Looking at his current situation, no one has attempted to contact him yet."

"There is basically no overlap between Wang Donglu's social connections and Japan."

These cadres did not evaluate Wang Donglu himself but analyzed the people Wang Donglu might contact based on the intelligence collected during the talk.

After the analysis, a summary of this talk was written down: *Wang Donglu's foreign connections are not numerous; his relatives already studying abroad have not contacted him intensively. He can be temporarily classified as a non-dangerous person.*

Wang Donglu was temporarily classified as a non-dangerous person, but there were always people who would be classified as dangerous. For instance, the accessories factory where Wang Donglu worked mainly produced bearings, and among them were figures with relatively deep overseas connections.

In the subsequent interviews, some people were very dissatisfied with those sharp questions, and the hostile sentiment in the dialogue was relatively high.

Not only the bearing factory, but state-owned enterprises across the Northeast were all undergoing such a series of interviews. For foreign-funded enterprises, they didn't do it this way. But members of foreign-funded enterprises had all been classified as "personnel requiring investigation."

The lead for this operation was not the Organization Department, but the National Security Bureau (NSB). The reports had to be sent to the NSB. Because Wang Donglu had worked in the NSB, his report was picked out and put together with the group of personnel requiring investigation. There were quite a few people like Wang Donglu; after all, the Northeast had recruited too many outsiders in recent years. Technical personnel from Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai came to the Northeast for employment. They already possessed certain professional capabilities before they came, and they had all obtained decent positions in the overall industrial development of the Northeast.

NSB Director Wang Bin's once chubby face had thinned recently, thinned a lot. With one year left before the war against Japan, the NSB had a truly massive amount of work. Once the war started, Japanese nationals in the Northeast had to be arrested and sent to concentration camps.

This was not something only the Northeast would do; Japan would do the same.

In addition, there were many factories opened by Japanese in the Northeast. These factories had to be taken over immediately. In order for the factories to continue operating well during the war, the personnel in the factories also had to be screened.

There were many Japanese in the Northeast, some of whom had very unusual relationships with Japan. Among this group, a batch would be placed under house arrest, or even sent to special labor camps for controlled labor.

Wang Bin knew this was unreasonable, even cruel. No one dared to say victory was certain, and the interests involved in the war were too vast. Compared to the unexpected losses in the war, this bit of cruelty was a necessary evil.

The first to move was not the Security Bureau; the Security Bureau also had to wait for the Ministry of Civil Affairs' Northeast population census to operate before it could collect so much information.

Wang Bin was a bit tired. He stood up and walked out. In the courtyard, a machine from some department was making a continuous noise. This sound reminded Wang Bin of the resident population data sorting.

Every person had a file in their place of household registration, and among the many files was a search card. There wasn't much content written on the card, just information like name and date of birth.

These cards had holes in various different positions. Initially, Wang Bin didn't understand this latest equipment. It wasn't until he went to the sorting center and found that a rather ingenious machine could pick out cards with a hole in a certain fixed position from a batch of cards in batches. Every time he remembered this process, Wang Bin felt very shocked.

Originally mixed cards represented personnel from different residential areas. Just by looking, one really couldn't see any difference. When many cards were stacked together, there wasn't a completely identical hole. So it just looked like a thick stack of cards, only with some holes on the left side of the first one.

But as the machine ran non-stop, a large number of different cards went through automatic sorting, and on the stack of cards that finally came out, there were holes in a certain position. A long metal rod passed through the holes, as if stringing together a deck of cards organized to extreme regularity.

This was the work the Northeast Government had now completed in household registration management. Wang Bin had once thought that selecting people with certain characteristics from among nearly 40 million people was an incredibly tedious job. It would require countless manpower to sort; anyway, the Security Bureau could absolutely not have the manpower to complete such work.

Now Wang Bin finally understood that there were capable people in the government. What Wang Bin could think of, others had also thought of. What Wang Bin couldn't solve, others had already solved.

Moreover, this equipment used metal parts, and the cards were stuck between the metal parts. Unless a force capable of destroying the metal parts appeared, the cards could be used repeatedly within a certain limit. Processing these metal parts was itself a huge workload. The files of 40 million people—really, just thinking about it made Wang Bin's head swell.

But the fact before him was that such difficult work had been completed. What Wang Bin and the comrades of the Security Bureau had to do was to make full use of these screened results to improve the probability of victory in the war.

When his energy had recovered somewhat, Wang Bin walked back to the office building but didn't return to his office. Another task of the Security Bureau was to crack down on illegal Japanese surveying personnel. Japan had obtained many privileges in a series of treaties. Intelligence gathering in modern warfare was extremely important, so Japan sent many people to conduct surveying in the Northeast.

The Security Bureau certainly couldn't allow Japanese outside the concessions to act at will. Besides arresting illegal Japanese surveyors upon sight, they also had to determine the assembly points of these guys based on the actions of the arrested and collected illegal Japanese surveyors.

Recently, this work had begun to enter a new stage. The Security Bureau had not only circled several locations but also circled a batch of "unsafe" people.

Most of these were Northeast people who had dealings with the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu). As the saying goes, "those living on a mountain live off the mountain, those living near water live off the water"; this group of people earned benefits from this cooperative relationship.

Therefore, in the "dangerous personnel" list formulated by the Security Bureau, this group accounted for a considerable proportion. Once the war started, this group had to be arrested in full before the war, and their families also needed to be controlled first.

As soon as Wang Bin came in, he asked about the progress of the investigation targeting this group. Unexpectedly, a Security Bureau staff member immediately said, "Director Wang, we have also discovered a loophole. That is, the drug traffickers smuggling controlled items have dealings with the old upper class in Shenyang."

"Oh?" Wang Bin hadn't expected this.

The Security Bureau comrade asked, "Director Wang, how should we contact the anti-narcotics department?"

Wang Bin thought for a moment and replied, "We won't contact them. I'll find other departments."

So Wang Bin returned to his office, picked up the phone, and called the Military Commission directly.

It was already close to the "Year's Beginning" (Sui Shou). In the Northeast, especially for the people who had lived in the Northeast before He Rui arrived, they were already very used to this term. Everyone's only doubt about this term was why "Year's Beginning" wasn't called "New Year."

After all, New Year's Eve was also called "Shou Sui" (Guarding the Year).

So the Northeast newspapers took this opportunity to carry out a round of terminology propaganda, and incidentally introduced astronomical knowledge such as the Earth, and the application of astronomy in the calendar.

On December 29, 1921, the *Northeast Daily* published an article on the front page: "Drug Smuggling Resurges, Foreign Drug Traffickers Engage in Gunfight with Our Border Defense Forces at the Border."

The Northeast had spent tremendous effort on drug prohibition in the past few years, with remarkable results. The public hadn't seen news about drug trafficking for two years. Moreover, not only the *Northeast Daily*, but also the *Northeast Military Daily* and *Northeast Business Daily* covered it for three consecutive days.

Because the living standards of the people in the Northeast had generally improved in recent years, local drug traffickers in the Northeast had been executed cleanly. Foreign drug traffickers knew that the Northeast Government was ruthless in its drug prohibition methods and didn't dare to risk their lives.

However, there are always people willing to do a business that costs one's head, but no one does a business that loses money. Foreign drug traffickers began to try to penetrate the Northeast one after another, wanting to make a big profit from the Northeast.

As the major anti-narcotics campaign in the Northeast ended, the people ceased paying attention to anti-narcotics actions, so the drug traffickers caught and executed in the past two years hadn't really made the newspapers.

However, in the news, this action was very intense. Some Japanese drug traffickers crossed the border and entered the Northeast. The border defense forces originally thought these people were just smugglers. If smugglers were caught, at most their smuggled goods would be confiscated; it was far from a situation worth risking their lives.

Unexpectedly, this group of Japanese smugglers suddenly pulled out weapons and attacked the approaching border defense forces, and a battle broke out between the two sides. Although the border defense forces eventually wiped out ten smugglers, capturing seven and killing three, the border defense forces also suffered losses of one serious injury and two minor injuries.

Checking the seized smuggled goods, it was discovered that they had hidden a lot of morphine among the smuggled goods. This matter turned from a strict cross-border smuggling case into armed drug trafficking.

Even if it wasn't armed drug trafficking, just smuggling drugs—trafficking more than 50 grams of morphine or 150 grams of opium was already enough for the death penalty. Once it involved armed drug trafficking, there was no other result but death.

So the newspapers began to discuss "which drug addicts are still unable to quit drugs and have to rely on drugs to continue their trash-like lives."

After reading this report, Security Bureau Director Wang Bin praised the comrades of the Military Commission in his heart for a job well done!

Although this suggestion was also provided by the Security Bureau, the action of the Military Commission comrades was so clean and neat, proving that everyone's execution ability was truly reassuring.

All the questions in the newspaper were correct and reasonable. However, such propaganda was indeed "Xiang Zhuang performing the sword dance with his mind on Pei Gong" (having an ulterior motive).

Arresting and shooting drug traffickers was as normal and simple as breathing in the Northeast. But raising the question "who is still continuing to take drugs" was a very normal question, yet also an extremely targeted one.

Even with the improved living standards of the Northeast people, drugs were an expense that ordinary families could absolutely not afford.

The Northeast Government actually also imported opium, and even set up production factories specifically in South America, purchasing coca leaves locally in South American countries to produce cocaine.

But these controlled chemicals were all used in the medical field; for instance, cocaine itself was a very good anesthetic in the field of anesthesia. It was needed when pulling teeth.

So the price of these drugs was actually not high. Because the Northeast Government had never intended to use these controlled drugs for profit.

But the drug traffickers didn't think so. And the fellows who had the money to take drugs mostly had inextricable links with the old upper class of the Northeast. And this group of people had close relationships with the Japanese. At least in the eyes of the Security Bureau, their relationship with Japan was "extremely ambiguous."