RBCT Chapter 11: Blocked Channels
Chapter 11: Blocked Channels
[Today's intelligence update complete (4/4)]
[Intelligence 1 (Resource Category): In the nearshore Reef No. 3 area, due to tidal changes, a group of sea bass, weighing approximately 40 catties, has gathered. A common commercial fish, of moderate value.]
[Intelligence 2 (Resource Type): ... (Worthless)]
[Intelligence 3 (Opportunity Category): ... (None of value)]
[Intelligence 4 (Early Warning): ... (Of no value)]
Today's news was rather dull; no large yellow croaker, no schools of grouper, just one piece of information about sea bass, which is a consolation prize.
Lin Chen, on the contrary, breathed a sigh of relief.
For him, this stable daily income is what he needs most right now.
Getting rich overnight is certainly exciting, but a steady, long-term income is the foundation for his continued success.
After having breakfast, he took the most basic tools and went to Reef No. 3.
Thanks to the system's accurate positioning, he only spent a little over an hour catching most of the sea bass, weighing more than forty pounds.
He packed the fish into a styrofoam box, got on his beat-up tricycle, and headed straight for the Fisherman's Song Restaurant in town.
Su Jianming was directing the staff to clean the store when he saw Lin Chen carrying a full box of fish. He immediately greeted him with a smile.
"Kobayashi, what good stuff have you got today?"
"Brother Su, I got some fresh sea bass, what do you think?"
Lin Chen opened the box.
The sea bass in the box were still lively and jumping around, their bodies silvery and shiny, clearly fresh catches that had just been taken out of the water.
"Excellent, excellent! Very good quality!"
Su Jianming nodded in satisfaction, weighed the item on the spot, and calculated the price: "Forty catties, I'll charge you thirty-one catties, that'll be a total of one thousand two hundred."
The money arrived quickly.
Lin Chen felt a little relieved as he saw another sum of money in his account.
He was about to leave when Su Jianming called him back.
"Xiaolin, don't go yet, I need to tell you something."
"Have you offended anyone recently?"
Lin Chen's heart skipped a beat, but he didn't show it on his face and asked:
"Brother Su, what do you mean by that?"
"Sigh," Su Jianming sighed, took out a cigarette from his pocket and handed one to Lin Chen, "I went to the wholesale market in town yesterday to buy some dried goods and heard some rumors."
"Zhang Tiejun has made his statement in the market."
Zhang Tiejun!
He had heard this name from his mother; Zhang Meng's cousin, one of the biggest seafood wholesalers in town, who controlled the purchase of fish from several villages around Huangni Village.
"What did he say?"
"He said that from now on, anyone who dares to accept goods from a man named Lin Chen in Huangni Village can forget about getting a single pound of fish or a single shrimp from the Zhang family!"
Su Jianming repeated each word carefully, his face grim, "He's trying to completely block your path!"
Lin Chen's heart sank.
He expected Zhang Meng to retaliate, but he didn't expect the other party to be so ruthless, throwing out a bombshell right from the start, blocking him from the upstream channels!
The pressure shifted from the personal violence of Zhang Meng, the village bully, to the commercial strangulation of Zhang Tiejun, a town-level distributor!
"Kobayashi."
"My little restaurant has its own connections, so I'm not afraid of Zhang Tiejun. But... I heard that Haiweiju gets a lot of their frozen products and high-end ingredients from Zhang Tiejun's channels. They might have some concerns about your situation."
Su Jianming's words extinguished Lin Chen's newly ignited hope.
The two top clients of the three-tiered supply network he painstakingly built—Haiweiju and Xianzhidao—might abandon their cooperation with him because of Zhang Tiejun's words.
Ultimately, compared to him, a small, upstart supplier, Zhang Tiejun's stable and extensive supply chain was the lifeblood of their business.
"I understand, Brother Su, thank you for telling me."
"Sigh, you'd better be careful. Zhang Tiejun has a lot of connections in town, both in the legitimate and underworld circles, he's not someone to mess with."
Su Jianming patted him on the shoulder, full of sympathy.
On his way back to the village on his tricycle, Lin Chen considered countless possibilities for Zhang Meng's revenge: fighting, intimidation, smashing things...
But to his utter surprise, the other party resorted to such a drastic measure, using business tactics to deal with him.
This is no longer a brawl between thugs; it's a war without gunfire.
In this war, he was in a completely disadvantaged position.
As the three-wheeled motorcycle crossed the dock, he subconsciously slowed down.
Several fishermen he recognized were squatting on the rocks by the shore, smoking pipes and sighing, their faces full of sorrow and helplessness.
"Damn it, another day of work for nothing! Went out to sea early this morning, caught over thirty pounds of fish, and in the end, it all went to Zhang Tiejun and his bastards!"
A dark-skinned man slammed his cigarette butt to the ground, cursing under his breath.
"Who can argue with that?"
An older fisherman nearby sighed.
"Before, at least we could sell to a few more vendors and compare prices. Now, Zhang Tiejun has practically monopolized the entire wholesale market in the town."
"If we don't sell our fish to him, we'll just have to watch them rot on the boat! The price he offers gets lower every year, now it's down to 60% of the wholesale price! This is highway robbery!"
"What can we do? They hold our lifeline in their hands. A couple of days ago, Old Wang's family didn't want to sell to him and wanted to take the fish to the city to sell themselves, but their tires were punctured on the way, and the whole truckload of fish went bad. They lost everything."
"I can't live like this anymore..."
An atmosphere of despair hung in the air.
They live off the sea, yet they cannot determine the value of their labor.
Lin Chen listened quietly.
These words rekindled a fire in his heart.
He suddenly understood.
He wasn't the only one being bullied.
The entire Huangni Village, and even all the fishermen in the surrounding area who make a living by fishing, are struggling to survive under Zhang Tiejun's monopoly on distribution channels.
The things he encountered before—the fish basket that Uncle Li kicked over, the threats his father received, and the blacklist he is now facing—are all just shadows within this massive monopolistic system.
Back home, Lin Chen sat alone in the yard from dusk until late at night.
I went through everything from beginning to end.
Zhang Meng was just a bully at the platform, a knife he used to intimidate people and commit violence.
The real problem, however, lies with Zhang Tiejun, who stands behind him and controls the entire sales channel.
All my previous efforts, whether it was catching the king of abalone or securing orders from Yuge Restaurant and Haiweiju, were just finding loopholes in the rules set by Zhang Tiejun.
As long as this rule remains unchanged, and as long as the distribution channels remain monopolized by Zhang Tiejun, I will never truly be able to stand up.
If he can shut down Haiweiju today, he can shut down Xianzhidao tomorrow.
I felt like a moth trapped in a spider web; no matter how hard I struggled, I couldn't escape that invisible net.
Thinking of this, Lin Chen finally realized that the person he really needed to deal with was not Zhang Meng, this brute, but Zhang Tiejun, this business tycoon who had been entrenched in the town and was sucking the blood and sweat of countless fishermen.
To solve the problem, we can't just target Zhang Meng.
We must... we must build a sales channel that completely bypasses Zhang Tiejun and belongs to the fishermen themselves!
The moment this thought came to mind, it instantly illuminated all his ideas.
The focus has shifted from "how to make money" to "how to break the channel monopoly".
At the very top of the page, write eight large characters:
Break the monopoly and rebuild the distribution channels!