From the roads to transportation, and then to the sales channels, everything was connected; plus with the popularity of livestream selling these days, in just two years they managed to breathe new life into that whole operation.

The people on this list also leased a mountain in that area, planted fruit trees, and hired people to take care of them.

They struck it rich in these past two years—plus there really were quite a few folks around who made money from fruit orchards, so nobody thought much of it.

Who would have guessed, they weren't making money from fruit at all, but from selling corpses. And after raking in money, their greed grew—so did their guts. When there weren't enough bodies, they just made their own.

Sometimes, they'd even sell directly to ghosts, cut out the middlemen entirely. That led to all sorts of "fraudulent corpse" incidents—just this time, someone willing to spend managed to find Zhang Laoxi through their channels.

And Zhang Laoxi had just been reminded by his elders: if you take on a job, do it right. Taking money and botching the job, now that'd be a real disgrace for the people of Fuyu Mountain.

Really, the elders just didn't want Zhang Laoxi running all the way to Yu State just to bow and scrape—a pointless errand, just the usual "don't bother" kind of advice.

But Zhang Laoxi took it to heart. He started digging, determined to solve this wave of fake-corpse incidents once and for all.

He checked the ancestral burial feng shui, traced things all the way back—and the guy actually had some real skills, too.

That freaked out those guilty parties—they let something slip, and ended up leading Zhang Laoxi to that mountain earth temple, where everything else played out.

No wonder, those days, everyone saw Zhang Laoxi out late every night and back early every morning—he was caught up in all of this.

Wen Yan sent the list to Feng Yao; the arrest work didn't need his involvement, nor did the follow-up. The Scorching Sun Department had more than enough people for that sort of job.

He had to leave some opportunities for others to earn bonus money, after all.

But when he glanced over one person's records, he keenly noticed something was off.

This guy made his money in Nanwu County, but after returning to Luoyue County, his biggest expense wasn't building or renovating a house—it was a donation.

As it happened, this recipient account was actually registered with the Scorching Sun Department.

It was an account for collecting funds to build a temple.

These days, any such fundraising or accounts automatically get flagged and registered with the Scorching Sun Department.

Even building a clan shrine needs approval and registration, never mind constructing a temple. That's even more sensitive—under strict monitoring, and the paperwork is a nightmare.

It's not like the old days, where you could pool money in the village to put together an earth temple on your own.

Nowadays, who knows what might end up in one of these temples.

Any so-called unauthorized temple is just a little earthen shack, maybe one or two square meters—some are barely over a meter high, the whole thing.

In that scenario, even if a Water God from the West River system decided to show up, they'd just be a small-time wild spirit, nothing with real influence.

To go further, you need a proper, legitimate temple—and that part is absolutely locked down by the Scorching Sun Department.

And in this case, the money in this account was specifically set aside to build a Dragon King Temple.

Dragon King Temples are actually pretty common within the West River water system, even throughout the Divine Land—anywhere there's enough water, you see them everywhere.

But this particular one had never gotten approval, all because right now, somewhere in the West River system, an ancient Dragon God has actually awakened.

And apparently, this Dragon God can't quite keep itself in line. So, every new Dragon King Temple in the West River system gets a highly cautious review—and approval, basically, is out of the question.

It's always been neither a yes nor a no—just constant stalling.

Because anything with the water system is always a mess, and the Scorching Sun Department doesn't want a full-blown confrontation either.

Anyone can play push-the-blame: ask about it, and it's "pending approval." Ask again, and "the winds are shifting." Ask a third time—"too many submissions, the whole West River system needs healthy, sustainable development, we must file all the water gods properly first, then plan rationally," blah blah…

In short, everything is by the book, everything is for stability—the West River system is just too complicated—if we don't sort it out, rash action could shake everything up, and so on and so forth.

Frankly, in the Nanwu County Scorching Sun Department, there probably aren't many who could take a punch from Qin Kun and stay standing.

But if you're looking for someone who can look busy, play by the rules, and drag this out for ten years or more—they've probably got enough to fill a train car, and that's being conservative.

So, obviously, this application has just been stalled all this time.

Wen Yan kept digging and realized he'd actually underestimated these people's connections. Because technically, this approval hasn't even reached the Scorching Sun Department's docket—it's stuck even earlier in the pipeline.

Turns out, it's still jammed up at other offices…

You need the land bureau to sign off on the site, and since it's riverside—and the levees get rebuilt every year—the water management authorities always get involved too.

Yup, right now it's deadlocked in the water department, official answer: "planning concerns," "levee issues," and so on and so forth.

And, hilariously, the public information office is currently bickering with the waterworks folks over this—things are so lively the argument has drifted away from the original issue entirely. Now they're off fighting about unrelated matters.

Wen Yan looked over the documents and couldn't help but sigh—these people are pros.

Look at those skills—even if you want to dump it all on the Scorching Sun Department, you can't, because they haven't even touched the case yet.

Maybe none of the staff handling this even know what's really going on.

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