The secret post arranged by the Fusi of Nanzhen in the city briefed Li Qingyang and others on the general situation of the Haihan people, and in the past two years, the business of the Haihan people in Guangzhou has become bigger and bigger, and it is not difficult for the intelligence agencies to collect some relevant information. After all, there are as many rich businessmen and magnates as many as dogs in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and it is not a big deal to be able to do business, but when Li Qingyang heard that the militia group formed by Haihan was actually stronger than the official army and equipped with powerful guns, he immediately put away his contempt.

Li Qingyang had seen the drills of the firearms battalion of the official army and knew very well the power of this firearm artillery, and if he wanted to say that the people of Yazhou, who did not, actually hid a private armed force that was better than the official army, he was of course skeptical of this statement. However, last year, the two major operations of the Haihan militia in Guangdong had already been widely known, one defeated several rogue bandits besieging the local area in Lijiazhuang, and killed Liao Dabi and several other gangster leaders and their subordinates who were wanted by the government, and after the war, they were also rewarded by Wang Zunde, the governor of Liangguang.

Another operation was a big battle at the end of the year at the mouth of the Pearl River with Liu Xiang's pirate gang at sea, in which some Ming maritime merchants were fortunate enough to witness the battle in Wanshan Port, and it is said that the warships of the Haihan people defeated Liu Xiang's fleet with an overwhelming advantage, and the pirate ships sank in Wanshan Harbor alone reached double digits. After this battle, Liu Xiang's pirate gang, which had always been arrogant, completely withdrew from the waters of Guangdong and gave up the Pearl River estuary, which seems to have become a strong evidence of this statement. Although the Ming Dynasty also had a naval camp in Xin'an County at the mouth of the Pearl River, he had always been blind to the existence of Liu Xiang's gang - or to put it bluntly, he was unwilling to take the initiative to cause this trouble, after all, the armed strength of this group of pirates was not much worse than that of the sailors. Compared with these two, it seems that it is not difficult to conclude that the surface troops of the Han people in the sea are also stronger than those of the Daming naval division.

And the Daming Naval Division stationed in Xin'an County also sensibly maintained restraint after the war and did not take hostile actions against another water armed force that appeared in its jurisdiction. The Haihan people were also knowledgeable and knowledgeable, and they did not try to expand their territory after fighting the pirates, and they still guarded their own Wanshan Port, so the two sides also tacitly maintained peace and quiet.

In Li Qingyang's view, this practice of the Guangdong Navy Division is incompetent, and it is within the Ming Sea Frontier. As for why he had allowed the existence of Liu Xiang's pirate gang before, Li Qingyang believed that this was a matter of ability, not of attitude. Those pirates are haunted at sea, and they have no fixed place to live, and it is normal that they cannot be caught, and the armed forces of the Haihan people are stationed on the small island outside the mouth of the Pearl River, but the sailors still ignore them. Isn't that a dereliction of duty?

Li Qingyang didn't believe in the fallacy that the Haihan was better than the Ming Dynasty in force, and thought that the Haihan people were just living in a corner of Yazhou. In his opinion, the biggest possibility is that the Haihan people have bribed some military personnel who neglected their duties with money, so that they can turn a blind eye to the storage of Wanshan Port. After all, the Haihan people are good at doing business, so a little money must not be a problem for them, and the corruption of the border army in recent years, Li Qingyang, as a Jinyi guard, also knows a little about it. He would not be surprised if there were people among them who were in the same stream as the Haihan people.

In fact, Nanzhen Fusi will be interested in the Haihan people in Yazhou, also because in the last year or so, the report from Qiongzhou has very few descriptions of the Haihan people, and the general banner stationed in Yazhou even claimed in the report that these people are only "three or five hundred people, who make a living from fishing and farming", but a lot of Haihan goods have appeared on the market in Nanjing last year. Could it be that the mirrors of tens or hundreds of taels of silver and all kinds of crystal clear glassware could have been made by a group of fishermen?

After all, Jinyiwei is the leading intelligence agency in the Far East in this era, and if you really want to investigate some things with peace of mind, you can't get past it just by relying on some deceptive means. Soon, Nanzhen Fusi learned that the Haihan people had not only made a huge glassware business in the Liangguang area, but also covered many aspects such as daily necessities, private salt, transportation, etc., and even had a certain scale of firearms manufacturing capacity. A large number of standard guns were sold to the local private armed forces in the Liangguang area, and their performance is said to be no less than that of the weapons equipped with the firearms battalions of the Ming Dynasty.

Privately making firearms, which is absolutely forbidden in the Ming Dynasty, so Nanzhen Fusi has one more reason to investigate Haihan. However, considering that some of the personnel of the Jinyiwei branch in Guangdong may have been bought by Haihan, Nanzhen Fusi decided to bypass the Jinyiwei agency in Liangguang and directly sent people to Qiong to find out the first-hand news. Moreover, it is not advisable to send too many personnel, and large-scale personnel transfers are easy to leak the news. This truth is still very clear to the officials in charge of the Nanzhen Fu Division. However, what they didn't expect was that under the rule of Yin and Yang, Nanzhen Fusi's plan to investigate Haihan was still known by someone with a heart, and it was sold to Haihan's Guangzhou Office at a high price, so Li Qingyang and others had already been targeted by the object they wanted to investigate before they arrived in Guangzhou.

When Li Qingyang and the others arrived outside Guangzhou, they also strictly followed the plan in advance, and did not rush to get in touch with the Jinyi Wei Yamen in Guangzhou, and only after lurking outside the city for a day did they enter the city and go to the direct stronghold of Fusi in Nanzhen. It's just that they didn't expect that the opponent had already guessed this in advance, and a surveillance circle had been set up around the wine shop. With mental calculations or unintentional calculations, no matter how cautious and cautious Li Qingyang and the others are, it will be difficult to escape Haihan's calculations.

Li Qingyang received instructions from the local responsible person in the liquor store, and there were only three ways for them to disguise their travels and go to the Sanya area controlled by the Haihan people on Qiongzhou Island: one was to pretend to be a maritime merchant who went to trade and drive there by himself; second, to pretend to be an immigrant who defected to the Haihan and the Haihan people organized a boat to go there; and third, to join the ship and go to the place as an ordinary sailor.

The first method is the least risky, but it is also the most difficult, not only do they have to buy their own ships and goods, prepare the money they need to trade, but they also have to hire a group of sailors who are familiar with the Pearl River estuary-Sanya shipping route. After such a toss, no matter how smooth it was, it would have taken ten days and a half of work, and the time limit given to Li Qingyang was not enough to allow them to slowly complete these preparations in Guangzhou. Moreover, there are too many relationships involved in doing these things, and the possibility of revealing his identity will also be greatly increased, Li Qingyang didn't want to be discovered before he left Guangzhou, so he took the lead in denying this method.

The second way is undoubtedly the simplest and easiest way, just go directly to the immigration recruitment points set up by the Haihan people in and around Guangzhou, and young people like them will undoubtedly become the objects that the Haihan people are happy to recruit. But the problem is that the Haihan people will conduct strict physical examinations on the immigrants they recruit, and the luggage they carry with them is no exception. And several of them carried silver taels, gold leaves, identity cards, wound medicine, special weapons, etc., these things are not what poor immigrants should have, and any search for them will reveal their identities, so this road is probably not feasible either.

Due to the increasingly frequent trade activities between Guangzhou and Sanya, there are chambers of commerce, shipping companies and other institutions near the Pearl River Wharf to recruit sailors, and there are many opportunities to go to Sanya. Fortunately, Li Qingyang and others grew up in the Jianghuai area. It's okay to be water-based, but even if you can't sail a boat, you still have two strengths. Being a handyman on a ship can also be competent, and after sneaking into Sanya to complete the investigation, this identity can also leave the local area in the most reasonable way to avoid arousing the suspicion of the Haihan people. So after exploring several ways to enter Sanya, Li Qingyang decisively chose the last one.

Later, Li Qingyang and others also saw the Haihan recruitment point mentioned by the local person in charge in Guangzhou City, and the intensity of the recruitment was simply beyond their expectations -- of course, the situation they saw was indeed a temporary measure, and they did not usually set up stalls on the streets to solicit immigrants with such fanfare.

Li Qingyang and others also went to several different booths to inquire about immigration-related information, and compared them with the situation provided by the local person in charge, and it was basically true. However, such a scale of solicitation also led Li Qingyang to conclude that Yazhou Jinyiwei's report must have been mixed with too much water -- according to what he saw, the Haihan people recruited more than 1,000 immigrants in Guangdong every month, not to mention the 3,500 people mentioned in the report. And Li Qingyang did not believe that so many people from the mainland were recruited from the mainland to go to Sanya every month to do what they called land reclamation. He suspects that these so-called Haihan people are in fact human traffickers, and that the immigrants recruited will be sold as piglets to slave labor in Manila, Batavia, Manraka and other areas controlled by the Westerners, which was not uncommon in the past.

After basically "confirming" another bad deed of the Haihan people. Li Qingyang still decided to apply for a crew member's job, so the five of them found the job they hoped for at the Pearl River Wharf in the south of Guangzhou. One of them is a shipping company, specializing in freight business between Guangzhou and Sanya, and a fleet of ships is sent from Guangzhou to Sanya on the 15th day of each month, and it happens that the next day is April 15th, and you can leave immediately after joining. So three of them joined the ship under the guise of applying for sailors.

And Li Qingyang and another companion went to invest in another firm for the sake of safety. The firm recruited traders based in Sanya, ranging from shopkeepers, warehouse managers, and handymen to bookkeepers, stewards, and some unknown position called "business representative," with varying levels of salary. But even the lowest handyman was paid as much as thirty taels of silver every year. It also includes food and accommodation, which greatly exceeds the local employment treatment that Li Qingyang knows. As for the highest-level "business representatives", the basic salary alone is as high as 800 taels per year, plus a variety of subsidies, bonuses, commissions, performance income, etc., it can easily exceed 1,000 taels, and there is no upper limit.

The master who recruited workers heard that Li Qingyang could read and settle accounts, and his appearance was also upright, and his eyebrows were full of leanness, so he intended to let him apply for this senior position, and also gave examples to persuade him: "The shopkeeper Li of our firm only worked in the Yacheng branch a few years ago, and he can only make a deal of four or five thousand taels in a year. Since the Haihan people came, Yazhou's business has become prosperous, Li's shopkeeper's income has risen with the tide, and now a month to buy ** in the past year more, it is said that last year, the big boss of the general cabinet sent him a red envelope of two thousand taels, and also bought a house built by the Haihan people in the local area, and plans to retire next year to settle in Sanya. Brother, if you go and work for a year or two, I'm afraid that in the future, your achievements will be above that of Shopkeeper Li. ”

Although Li Qingyang has a task in his body, he can't help but feel a little excited after listening to this propaganda. Their remuneration and income are far better than those of ordinary public officials, but their annual income can only be calculated in the form of 100 taels, and the level of 1,000 taels can only be enjoyed by officials with more than 1,000 households. If you want to compare horizontally, Li Qingyang's position is the same as Luo Shengdong before he was promoted to general, he is a military attaché of the sixth grade, and the basic treatment is similar, of course, the actual income cannot be compared, after all, Luo Shengdong's side business is indeed too easy to make money, and the income of one month is probably as good as Li Qingyang's work for a year.

Li Qingyang can also be regarded as a relatively determined person, but after being slightly moved, he quickly retracted his thoughts. As an official of the imperial court, he should put the emperor's favor first, so how can he forget his own mission because of the gold, silver, and wealth? When the charges are verified in the future, and the inheritance of this Haihan people is accepted, then he will be promoted to an official and make a fortune, and naturally he will not be able to get a share of the benefits he deserves.

In order not to attract too much attention, Li Qingyang only applied for a position in the account office, and asked his companion to apply for a warehouse manager. Although the master in charge of recruitment felt a little pity, he still did the same and wrote a letter of appointment for them. After the two signed and drew the pledge, the master advised: "The two of you will find a place to live nearby today, and then come here early tomorrow morning to report." The ship of the comptoir will depart for Sanya tomorrow, and if you miss this ship, you will have to wait for more than ten days, remember to remember!"

Li Qingyang thought that this was convenient, and the other three would also leave tomorrow, and everyone would take different boats to Sanya, and they could take care of each other after diving into the local area. Immediately, he and his companions found a hotel outside the city to stay, and after nightfall, they quietly contacted the other three people and agreed on the contact information after arriving at the destination.

The next day, the two boats on which the five Jinyi Wei were on set off from the Pearl River Wharf half an hour apart and headed south. Li Qingyang's ship was a little late because of the loading of goods, but he was not in a hurry to wait for a while, and he could just observe what kind of goods were being sold to Sanya by Guangdong merchants on the ship.