Chapter 28: The Occupation of Mexico

The Viceroy’s Palace in Mexico had lost the splendor and restlessness of former days. Every military and civil official was busy packing and burning intelligence concerning the British Empire. An air of despair filled the entire palace. The moment the Mexican viceroy was defeated, the whole region of Mexico lost both the means and the confidence to resist Sun Li.

Originally, some of the great slave owners, after learning of the Song Kingdom’s system for classifying citizens, had organized their guards, slave-catching squads, and other forces into an army numbering tens of thousands. They intended to have a proper discussion with Sun Li’s army. But after the diplomatic envoys sent to negotiate were beaten and thrown out of Sun Li’s gate, the enormous mercenary army assembled by Mexico’s wealthy elite marched straight toward Sun Li’s forces, which were expanding in every direction.

After defeating the Mexican viceroy, Sun Li divided his troops and sent them to attack the various gold mines, making it easier and faster to take control of those resources. He also dispatched peasants to establish town centers in Guatemala’s key military strongholds. The gold extracted from every mine was immediately invested into the town centers to replenish their resources. Then he recruited line infantry from the barracks to replace his earlier losses.

As a result, Sun Li’s army of forty thousand not only failed to shrink after repeated battles but even continued to grow slowly.

The wealthy people of the Mexican colonies had planned to take advantage of the Song army’s dispersal and defeat its forces one by one. Instead, when their mercenary army of more than forty thousand encountered fewer than ten thousand Song troops, it was shattered again and again by volleys and grenades, and pursued for miles.

When the battle reports arrived, all the great magnates of the Mexican colonies fell silent. No one mentioned resistance anymore. For a time, tickets for ships returning to the British homeland and tickets for trains bound for another British colony rose steadily in price.

The major ports of Mexico were packed with wealthy merchants waving gold drafts, all desperate to board ships home as soon as possible.

The roads leading to the other colony were filled with fleeing caravans. One magnate after another dragged his entire family along, carrying his wealth toward a safer place. At least two or three tens of thousands of British regular troops were stationed there—far more than in Mexico.

Fortunately, Sun Li was busy occupying gold mines and slaughtering rebels. He also had no navy or cavalry, which left him unable to capture the port cities defended by naval forces.

Watching the ports evacuate great numbers of wealthy men every day, Sun Li felt that it was a terrible waste. Gold mines were useful, but mining took a great deal of time. How could that compare with robbing the rich? That was much faster.

To build a navy as quickly as possible, he needed to accumulate as many points as he could.

Thus, an order came from Sun Li’s headquarters: slaughter anyone who refused to cooperate with humanity.

The order was simple. Anyone who failed to surrender two-thirds of his property would be sentenced to death.

This overbearing decree immediately provoked rebellions among the human colonists of Mexico, who had previously been ready to surrender at the first sign of trouble. The poor did not care much; they had only a few coins to begin with, and the Song army confiscated only gold, not food or other necessities.

But the middle class and the wealthy were furious. This was no different from demanding their very lives.

Barely had Sun Li occupied the Viceroy’s Palace when a series of grand uprisings erupted throughout Mexico. These rebellions were completely different from those of the wood elves, whose enemies possessed weapons generations ahead of them. Most of the human colonists in the colonies carried flintlock firearms.

When Sun Li received word that the British immigrants had risen in revolt across the entire region, he was not angry in the least. Instead, he laughed and said, “Now killing them will yield even more points. Ha! My ironclad warships are almost within reach!”

With his wood-elf allies serving as guides, Sun Li scattered all his troops throughout the region, leaving more than five thousand soldiers stationed only at the Guatemalan stronghold where supplies were stockpiled. Even his personal guard at the Viceroy’s Palace was reduced to little more than a hundred men.

The human rebels, convinced that an opportunity had presented itself, gathered several thousand troops and besieged Sun Li’s headquarters. Sun Li then activated his unrivaled battle-aura mode and happily began harvesting points.

No matter how many of these mobs assembled, Sun Li could use guerrilla tactics to kill them all. The only thing that might affect his killing efficiency was whether his stamina could keep up. But that was a minor problem. Whenever he grew tired, he would find somewhere to rest for a while, then continue killing.

After nearly ten thousand deaths, the rebels finally understood the terror of a force at the level of a grand knight. No wonder even the regular armies were unwilling to face such monsters. Against Sun Li, the rebel mobs were nothing more than participants in a massacre game.

A game in which one man slaughtered thousands.

There were many, many rebels in Mexico—far more than the Song Kingdom’s army of forty thousand. But the Song Kingdom still had its wood-elf allies.

After the Song Kingdom established its supremacy over Mexico, it immediately issued a decree abolishing the status of all wood-elf slaves. Many Britons were struck from behind by their own slaves because of that decree, then arrested by the Song army alongside those who had refused to obey. Whether they were executed or fined depended entirely on their attitude.

When Su Yunyun, the haughty wood-elf queen, heard the order personally signed by Sun Li, she excitedly planted a kiss on him. Seeing the stunned expression on his face, she covered her flushed cheeks and ran all the way back to her bedroom.

Sun Li touched the spot where she had kissed him and sighed inwardly.

This was a breakthrough of historic proportions.

With his utterly shameless nature, Sun Li naturally refused to let such an opportunity to raise their affection go to waste. Every few days, he went to take Su Yunyun on a date. During the period of the Mexican uprising, Sun Li’s life consisted of two things: killing and courting women.

Holding the tiny hands of Su Yunyun and Su Lulu, one in each of his own, Sun Li watched the number of points on the system interface increase day after day and thought to himself:

This was the life.

And so, after more than a month of suppression, the human rebel forces in Mexico were reduced to a river of blood. At last, those human colonists who had been obsessed with wealth understood which mattered more: life or gold.

Some people were simply like that. They would not shed a tear until they saw the coffin, and unless they were beaten into complete submission, they would never understand what was truly important to them.

As the human population of the Mexican colonies rapidly declined, public security throughout the region steadily improved.

The alliance between the wood elves and the Song Kingdom also grew much closer. The milestone marking this relationship came one month after Sun Li had completely crushed the rebellion, when he was about to marry Su Yunyun, the leader of the wood elves in Mexico, and her younger sister, Su Lulu.

A grand wedding was held atop the bones of the human colonists of Mexico. To ensure that nothing went wrong, Sun Li deployed a full thirty thousand troops to supervise every layer of the Viceroy’s Palace, inside and out.

The facts proved that after such bloody lessons, the colonists of Mexico no longer dared to defy any decree issued by the Song Kingdom. Those willing to risk their lives had all become points for Sun Li. The survivors were people who valued life more highly—so-called cowards afraid of death.

Sun Li was very satisfied with how the wedding proceeded. His main reason for being satisfied was that, that very night, he finally achieved his long-held wish of spending the night with both sisters at once.

And they were twins.

The next day at noon, Sun Li looked refreshed and did not become too immersed in the pleasures of the bedroom. He returned to the construction of the army and government.

The two wood-elf sisters were still sleeping sweetly. As a grand knight, Sun Li was extraordinary in certain respects. After a battle against two opponents, he had emerged completely victorious.

Once the Song Kingdom had officially stabilized the situation in Mexico, the entire interior of the continent was declared recovered, except for the coastal regions controlled by the British navy.

For the wood elves, that was what liberation meant.

The Song Kingdom stationed only ten thousand soldiers along Mexico’s northern border, yet the British army did not dare take even one step beyond it. The Song Kingdom’s successive victories had thoroughly intimidated the British forces on the continent of Jinzhou.

After the wedding, Sun Li formally placed Su Yunyun upon the throne of the wood-elves’ queen. From that moment onward, the wood-elves became full vassals of the Song Kingdom.

Yet the wood elves were delighted to accept this status. Even as vassals, they were better off than the colonists whom the Song Kingdom regarded as second-class citizens. The wood elves had once been human slaves; now they had risen to become masters in their own land. How could they not support Song rule?

Besides, their queen was the wife of the Song emperor.

After the imperial system, as though suffering from a bug, dispatched a group of minor officials, Mexico’s political structure was initially established. But in order to better serve the war effort, Sun Li continued to govern the region under military administration. In any case, there were hardly any Song civilians in Mexico.

The Embroidered Uniform Guard system also emerged in full force. A strict police regime was imposed throughout Mexico, and through secret agents and violence, the government firmly seized control of the region.

The unfortunate colonists who had not managed to flee could only respond miserably to the Song Kingdom’s call and serve as laborers in the gold mines. They received no wages at all, being paid only in food and clothing. Still, they were at least fed and clothed.

Those who demanded more, or refused compulsory labor while loudly proclaiming the slogans of freedom and equality, were arrested without hesitation by Sun Li’s army. Once again, they contributed a fraction to Sun Li’s rapidly swelling store of points.

At last, the colonists thoroughly understood the true face of the Song rulers.

Damn it, they simply did not regard the common people of a defeated country as human beings.

However, so long as one obeyed the Song government’s orders and contributed even a little to the great construction of the Song Kingdom, Sun Li was quite reasonable. Not only would one’s life be spared, but one would also be given enough food and clothing. Those who made outstanding contributions—by reporting groups dissatisfied with the government, for example—could even receive special rewards.

Unsurprisingly, Sun Li cultivated a large number of traitors among the colonists of Mexico.

No, that was not quite right.

They should be called white traitors.

In the fourth month after landing in Mexico, Sun Li finally accumulated enough points.

“Little White, exchange ten ironclad warships for me! I’m going to send the entire British colonial fleet that keeps showing off around me to the bottom of the sea!”

With a grand sweep of his hand, Sun Li directly recruited the ten most powerful warships in the world.