Chapter 291: Chapter 206: If Kou Can Go, So Can I! (Third Update)
Adjacent to the Beautiful Country, the terrain here featured sparse vegetation with the earth showing hues of yellow and brown, gullies and woodlands resembling the wrinkles of an elderly man.
A gust of wind blew, lifting dust and sand into the sky.
Amidst the swirling dust, a building encompassing over a dozen acres stood resilient against the sandy storm.
This was a border checkpoint of the Beautiful Country, surrounded by a multitude of ragged individuals who roamed aimlessly like soulless husks, utterly devoid of vitality.
Due to the border wall and wire fencing, a significant number of illegal immigrants lingered here every day.
These illegal immigrants hoped to infiltrate the Beautiful Country by any means, to breathe in the air of freedom and sweetness.
Unfortunately, the border wall cut off their passage, and now they could only wander on the Mexican side, constantly devising ways to sneak across.
As the saying goes, where there’s demand, there’s opportunity.
Some gangs from Mexico and the Beautiful Country set their sights on this business, earning commissions by smuggling people across the border.
Each serpent has its path; each rat has its route. These local snakes were well-acquainted with the terrain, often knowing where to smoothly slip between the borders of the two countries.
These smuggling heads were joyously raking in the extra cash.
However, during this period, the situation began to change.
The local snakes discovered an even more profitable business—smuggling Tianyuan Hair Growth Liquid.
What’s the money in poor illegal immigrants? The wealthy don’t need to smuggle their way in; they’ve long since immigrated legally and aboveboard.
But Tianyuan Hair Growth Liquid was different—it was a tiny commodity priced at three hundred US Dollars a bottle, extremely popular within the Beautiful Country, selling out instantly. Those suffering from hair loss who used it once found it hard to ever go without this miraculous shampoo.
All they needed to do was obtain their supply from the Tijuana Group, bring it into the Beautiful Country, and they could reap astonishing profits.
A single small bottle of Tianyuan Hair Growth Liquid could garner a profit of sixty to seventy US Dollars.
Light in weight and small in volume, a person could easily carry dozens or even hundreds of bottles, earning several thousand US Dollars from a single run.
Some more diligent ones could make two trips a day.
As a result, the local snakes ingeniously devised a new method for transporting goods.
That was to have the people they were smuggling also carry a box of Tianyuan Hair Growth Liquid, foregoing the smuggling fee and instead secretly bringing them into the Beautiful Country.
This tactic also caused the border police of the Beautiful Country significant distress and anger.
In the past they dealt with body smuggling of drugs, but now, keeping up with the times, they used the same method to transport Tianyuan Hair Growth Liquid, which was utterly despicable.
Within the border checkpoint, Lares Petrovich tugged at his stifling hot uniform and with a quick snap of his belt, whipped it fiercely across a smuggler, adding a new bloody welt to their body.
“I don’t know, please stop hitting me, I really don’t know.”
The beaten smuggler was a Latin American woman in her thirties, her cries and screams already hoarse.
“Tell me where’s the meeting place with the Tijuana Group, where do they distribute the goods to you?”
Lares bellowed, his face a shade of heated red, his stubbled beard trembling as if he were an enraged lion.
“I don’t have any, I don’t know. The snake head has already run away. What Tijuana Group? I’ve never heard of it. I just carried a box in as instructed by the snake head.”
The Latin American woman cried miserably, and it was fortunate that no media reporters were present, otherwise this would have surely become headline news in the Beautiful Country.
“Fuck, do you even know what you’re carrying, you just do whatever they tell you to do?”
Lares looked annoyed. Ever since Tianyuan Hair Growth Liquid was banned in the Beautiful Country, it had caused a series of problems, and smuggling had become increasingly severe.
Initially, the Tijuana Group personally handled the transportation of Tianyuan Hair Growth Liquid, but as the Beautiful Country clamped down with a heavy hand, deploying police dogs, helicopters, and military scouts.
They also infiltrated and bribed to gather intelligence, destroying many of the Tijuana Group’s smuggling tunnels used exclusively at the border.
Later on, the Tijuana Group began to lay low, but this did not reduce the amount of smuggling.
Instead, they distributed the profits among other gangs and the public, involving them in the smuggling.
Although smuggling without the tunnels didn’t match previous volumes, a single spark can start a prairie fire—the number of smugglers and the amount smuggled were too vast.
The Beautiful Country was at a loss, unable to detain these people for long, as many were illegal immigrants and smugglers, possessing nothing.
To this day, the Tijuana Group remained a thorn in the side of these border officers.
The emergence of Tianyuan Hair Growth Liquid had significantly increased their anti-smuggling pressure, with endless tasks day and night.
The Latin American woman who was beaten and yelled at offered no response; she lowered her head, and Lares’s expression changed. He reached to check for breath and felt nothing.
This smuggler, already weakened by the long journey and the recent beating, had not survived.
Lares spat out and prepared to have the body taken away for burial; as for resuscitation? There was no need—it would have been a futile waste of medical resources.
It’s common knowledge how expensive medical care is in the Beautiful Country. An uninsured smuggler hoping for medical treatment was nothing but trouble.
Moreover, smugglers here have no one to rely on. Even if they die, nobody cares.
Whether smuggling Tianyuan Hair Growth Liquid or before its time, the Beautiful Country’s police had never regarded these smugglers as human beings.