Gotham’s Longzhong Plan (Part 2)

Develop tourism in Gotham?

If someone had said that to Bruce before, he would have suggested they go to Arkham Asylum and get their head checked.

Who in their right mind would dare come to Gotham as a tourist?

If someone really did come, they might as well buy a one-way ticket. They would not need a return trip anyway.

But to Bruce’s surprise, his friends seemed neither shocked by this nor opposed to it. Quite a few of them even supported the idea.

"Gotham’s natural conditions are actually pretty good, right? We’re not at a high latitude, so it isn’t that cold. We have a humid subtropical monsoon climate, no natural disasters like tornadoes, and a golden beach whose quality ranks among the best on the East Coast…"

"Of course, of course. I know the gambling industry isn’t exactly clean either. Gamblers aren’t any nobler than addicts, but it’s still better than drug trafficking, arms dealing, and smuggling dangerous goods, isn’t it?"

Harvey took a sip of his drink and patted Bruce on the shoulder. "You haven’t even graduated from college yet, so maybe you think the world is black and white. If Gotham is going to get better, then it has to get better all at once…"

"But realistically, that’s impossible. Looking at things now, it’s even impossible for Gotham to become completely better. It can either be rotten or even more rotten."

"Still, casinos can provide a huge number of jobs. That will reduce unemployment. When more legitimate jobs appear, the chances of violent gang conflicts will decrease, and things will become more stable."

"That’s a good thing for any city. Though I don’t think Gotham could ever become a normal city like Imperial City, it would at least be much better than it is now…"

"But…"

Bruce understood all the reasoning. He was a genius, so of course he could see the benefits that industrial transformation and upgrading would bring. Even the Wayne Family would benefit from it.

But he still found the whole thing utterly absurd.

Bruce had always been quite pessimistic about Gotham. More than anyone else, he knew just how rotten the city was. He had never expected it to develop in any positive direction.

But now, Gotham did not seem to be heading in a good direction. It had merely switched to a different bad road—like changing from a dead end to a road that led straight to death. After a series of adjustments, black had become a riotously colorful black, and the original City of Crime had turned into a gaudily decorated City of Crime.

Just the connection between Gotham and Chicago had already brought some changes to the city.

As everyone knew, smuggled goods needed warehouses for storage. Cooperation with Chicago had greatly expanded smuggling routes. As the volume of smuggled goods rose, more warehouses were needed to store them.

To build warehouses, they needed land. Everyone wanted a larger slice of the growing pie, so the Twelve Families began frantically snatching up land. The price of land in Gotham’s outskirts had been driven up to twice its original value.

And simply buying land was not enough. Warehouses did not appear out of thin air.

To build warehouses, they needed designers to draw plans, construction crews to build them, inspectors to inspect them, movers to carry goods inside, and transport workers to deliver them. Just like that, at least several thousand jobs had appeared out of nowhere.

Some more dangerous chemical contraband also needed special warehouses, such as cold-storage facilities.

Victor had never imagined that he would receive eighty-nine job offers in a single week. Every one of them offered a salary dazzling enough to blind him. Added together, they were enough to keep his wife frozen until the next century.

When he stayed up for several days doing side jobs until he collapsed from exhaustion, and finally had no choice but to call his classmates and tell them to come to Gotham to make big money, even he wondered if he had gone insane.

The sudden expansion of smuggling routes was like an enormous cake, and the rule for dividing it was simple: the quick got it, the slow got nothing. If they wanted to grab the biggest slice, they had to build all kinds of supporting infrastructure ahead of everyone else. Once gang leaders realized this, they began scrambling to build supporting facilities before other industries had even started cooperating.

Gotham’s docks, which had not been renovated in decades, once again became crowded construction sites. To accommodate larger ships, they had to consider raising funds for a deepwater port. To make dock transfers faster, land reclamation projects were also put on the agenda.

And if they wanted to trade with sources of goods around the world, they needed airplanes. The moment the mayor’s office showed even the slightest sign of interest, nearly every major gang caught wind of it and declared that building Gotham was everyone’s responsibility, so why not let them handle the airport project?

They quickly discovered that air freight had enormous potential compared to shipping. Bulk goods were naturally better transported by cargo ship, but delicate small equipment and instruments could be shipped by air faster and more safely.

Air freight required larger airports, more warehouses, and faster internal logistics systems. That meant more land, more warehouse builders, more professional managers, and more skilled workers.

Gotham’s local workforce was limited, and most of them were already members of various gangs. Gotham was gradually reaching the point where jobs were waiting for people.

Then people realized that the reason there were so many jobs and too few workers was not actually because Gotham lacked people, but because they were not skilled enough.

Even laborers needed to learn proper lifting techniques. Otherwise, they would work all morning and collapse from exhaustion, leaving no one able to work in the afternoon.

Because Gotham lacked basic educational facilities, most people spent their childhoods wandering the streets. It could be said that they could do nothing properly and learn nothing well.

The gang bosses realized this batch of people was probably beyond saving, so they had to start with the next generation. If they needed truck drivers, they would find a way to open a driving school. If they needed tower controllers, they would find a way to open an aviation technical training school. Even the docks needed laborers; after two classes, they could be dragged straight to work.

Every minor over fourteen and under eighteen needed to stop wandering the streets all day and get to class. Did they not know there was a labor shortage?

And strangely enough, in a hellhole like Gotham, using gang methods to spread education was remarkably effective. In a family of three, at least one member was a gang member, and in most cases, two were.

When your immediate superior told you there were plenty of jobs waiting for people to earn money, while your kid was still roaming the streets every day and causing trouble everywhere, the overwhelming majority of gang parents chose to drag their child home, beat them up, and throw them into some technical training. Even if they could not learn it, it was still better than causing trouble outside.

Of course, this school model basically consisted of finding an empty lot and someone who knew the trade, then having them explain while gesturing. How much students understood depended entirely on their own talent, while actual application depended mostly on practical experience. It could not even be considered the prototype of a school. At best, it had only just escaped the medieval education model of oral transmission, but something was still better than nothing.

The more farsighted members of the Twelve Families had already started thinking. If they could establish schools belonging solely to their own families, train batches of professionals exclusive to their families, and have them serve only their families, would that not put them an entire era ahead of the other families?

As long as they paid high salaries to hire better teachers and trained stronger professional managers, their industries would become stronger than everyone else’s, and they would receive bigger slices when the pie was divided.

This idea was not immediately put into practice, because Gotham’s culture of living at the mercy of fate had persisted for decades. Gothamites had no habit of educating or being educated, and their investment in education was practically zero. For the moment, no one dared take the risk.

But as this industrial model gradually developed, they would discover that education was the foundation of everything. They would realize that if the huge sums currently spent hiring skilled workers from elsewhere were invested in training local residents and their own direct subordinates, they would gain not only professional technicians, but also tremendous prestige and benefits.

The powerful figures of the previous generation, including Falcone, had already seen the future in this model. The twenty-first century would belong to talent development. In the end, every competition came down to who could cultivate more and stronger talent.

Once this relatively advanced model was introduced, intelligent people whose vision had been limited by their era would quickly handle everything that followed. So it was hardly surprising that Old Godfather Falcone was the first to take the lead in establishing a family school.

Of course, this school was not intended for commoners. It was for the descendants of Falcone family members, who would study a wide range of elite courses there so they could better manage the Falcone family’s resources in the future.

Naturally, every member of the Falcone family wanted their child to enter this school. Once they entered, it meant they had entered the Godfather’s sight. If they achieved outstanding results, they would likely be assigned better positions and rise higher and farther.

The Godfather’s little maneuver naturally could not be hidden from the other families. Although the school currently had only seven students and held classes in a reception room at Falcone Estate, the other Twelve Families might not have learned much over the years, but they had learned one thing: copy it.

The remarkable results of the Gotham’s Longzhong Plan, proposed by Schiller, improved by Falcone, and jointly carried out by all of Gotham’s gangs, stunned everyone in its early stages.

People did not resist reform because they resisted the benefits reform could bring. They resisted excessively drastic changes in how benefits were distributed and how they lived.

When a reform did not actually change people’s way of life much—gangs were still gangs, and no one wanted to eliminate them; the Twelve Families were still the Twelve Families, and no one wanted to destroy them—but instead brought everyone together to exchange small investments for the chance to claim a bigger slice of the pie, everyone would see reform as merely a way to seize greater benefits.

Those who benefited from it would then be swept onward, using the profits they had already gained to invest even more into the reform, hoping to secure an even larger slice of the pie.

More importantly, the first step of Gotham’s Longzhong Plan proved one thing to everyone in Gotham—gold could still be found in a mud pit. The point of panning for gold in shit was not the shit. As long as the gold was real gold, that was enough.

They might be rotten, but making money was nothing to be ashamed of.

Today’s ten-thousand-word update is here! Please vote!