Chapter 1
"Lei Huang, what are you doing? Hurry up and catch up." In the team, a man with a heroic beard shouted at the guy who was lagging behind.

The young man named Lei Huang responded, stuffed the notebook and the charcoal stick pen in his arms, and hurried up in three steps.

This group of people are the "students" who have been trained at Thunder Cliff for several months, and this Lei Huang is even the best among the students. These students originally didn't understand why they were drawn from various different industries. Some of these people have been working in the Tan family's industry for several generations, and the history of some families can even be traced back to the time when the Tan family became the lord of Dongping and was just a warlord. The loyalty of these people is beyond doubt.

The Tan family is a very good host, kind to others. Even the lowest tenant in the royal manor can receive basic education for their children. Those with talents will be further cultivated in the Tan family's special academy, and they will work in the various businesses gradually expanded by the Tan family, or in the departments directly under the royal family. As long as they are of good character, even if they are useless, they can find a job in the Tan family's various industries to support themselves and their families.

And these selected people are naturally not the kind of guys who simply support themselves. They all have relatively prominent performances in at least one or several aspects before they can be favored by the Tan family's stewards in various places. When this group of people gathered together, no one understood what it was for. Only later were they told that they would be "trained" by Prince Consort Ye Tao, and then some of them would be selected to go to Xiling... Those selected from the internal affairs guards need not say, although they know that this mission is different from the previous ones of collecting evidence, stalking, lurking, assassinating, and searching, they were originally die-hard loyalists who put life and death aside, only seeking to complete the mission. And those who were transferred from various industries without this kind of mental preparation have complicated feelings. Some are extremely excited, some don't care, some are worried and scared, and some are doubtful and anxious... But these people have one thing in common, that is, they unconditionally obey the orders of the Dongping royal family, the Tan family. Even if they were asked to die, they would not hesitate, without asking why, let alone just listening to the orders of Prince Consort Ye Tao, accepting training and assessment.

As they followed Ye Tao's guards and the authentic officials of the Road and Bridge Department to Thunder Cliff and began to receive various training courses, they became even more unclear about what they were going to do in the future. Things like fighting, martial arts, physical fitness, Xiling history, and overviews of the situation in various places are easy to understand, but the various propaganda skills, communication methods, methods of judging a person's personality tendencies and backgrounds, speaking and questioning skills, basic psychology and psychological suggestion skills, etc., personally taught by the prince consort, completely confused them. But some of them vaguely realized that Prince Consort Ye Tao was planning an earth-shattering conspiracy. After feeling this, everyone became more receptive to the various techniques in the training for making others believe what they said, whether true or false, and to those debate skills.

And when the internship courses started in batches, everyone really started to have a headache. And through the internship, those who were not very eloquent, if they did not have other special skills, were basically excluded from the next phase of training. Some of them persuaded an official of the Road and Bridge Department to empty his last penny to buy a useless stone, and some made an old herdsman who had been grazing for decades believe that bulls can produce milk and calves... Such strange things made them unable to help but find a place to hold their stomachs and laugh enough after returning to the camp.

And Lei Huang did something unbelievable. He actually persuaded the students who had received the same training, making many people believe that their mission was to form a suicide squad to assassinate Jiang Xujing, the commander of the Zhenbei Army Division of Xiling. He even organized these guys who firmly believed in this and formed a small brotherhood-type organization, secretly sneaking out of the camp after everyone was asleep every day to conduct various trainings...

When it was finally announced that Lei Huang had excellent results, and that the assassination operation was just a task he had drawn with bad luck, the brotherhood he organized almost wanted to bury him alive. If he hadn't been serving in the Tan family's industry all the time, Lei Huang would probably have been a very successful swindler in this era. And Lei Huang was very interested in other people's subjects in addition to completing his own internship subjects. In his spare time, he actually took the initiative to collect various folk songs. After learning about his actions, Ye Tao privately chatted with him and then equipped him with the first generation of pencils and notebooks.

After two phases of training, when the first batch of personnel was sent to Xiling, they had already learned that their mission was to create a religion to weaken the credibility and influence of the Daoming Sect in Xiling, to prepare for Dongping's future conquest war, and even to have them organize the theocratic army that the Daoming Sect had already organized to launch a vigorous "peasant uprising"... Some of them did have the idea of ​​awe of ghosts and gods, but that immature thought quickly melted into Ye Tao's powerful atheism and scientific explanation, and melted into the young people's ambition for future development and their yearning for interesting things. Of course, after they calmed down, they couldn't help but recall the situation at the time, combined with the training they had received, whether what Prince Consort Ye Tao said was true or he was just fooling them, they were not sure, but they no longer had any psychological barriers to becoming the spokesperson of God.

Although Lei Huang was severely punished for deceiving his companions, this kind of fooling companions who were also trained to fool people, this talent was too rare. And the name Lei Huang is more like some kind of "divine revelation" to this group of trained swindlers. Lei Huang's eloquence, his ability to instigate, and his talent for organizing secret operations that he has now begun to show, make it very likely that he will become the Grand High Priest of the Leiyin Demon Sect in the future... a top-notch swindler.

What I didn't expect was that, although they had undergone rigorous doctrinal training, and although they could not say that they had completely mastered the entire system, at least they had no problem reciting it, the first batch of people actually encountered a lot of trouble in the process of quietly developing believers. According to Prince Consort's statement, the first batch of people sent out were completely uninterested in the creation of gods, and were probably more determined atheists in this era, so they had no religious feelings, and those who came from business apprentices and farm bookkeeping lacked the absolute confidence that "what I say is the truth."

Everyone actually opposed Ye Tao's team "internship." Even if the promotion of the Leiyin Demon Sect is not so smooth, as long as the general direction is correct, the specific strategy can naturally be gradually adjusted towards a good direction through continuous practice and improvement. Conquering Xiling and unifying the continent is a distant goal, and there is no rush. But Ye Tao had a completely different view on this. Ye Tao realized that although he had set up an extremely large integrated marketing communication project, he had missed a very important point: audience analysis.

Ye Tao will never forget the thick audience analysis reports he used to get when designing products: who are the products to be sold to, what is the age range of these people, what is their income level, what is their education level, what is the nature of their work, and what are their family and social relationships... Through some data and statements, how a group of people lives, together with the social experience of the person reading the report, establishes a rough impression. And how to impress the vague figure in this rough impression, how to turn them into concrete consumers, and contribute sales to customers is what designers care about.

Ye Tao felt that when he was writing the integrated marketing communication plan to promote the "Leiyin Demon Sect," the visual identification images and the virtual theological system that jumped in his mind were too obvious and strong, so he actually forgot to do audience analysis. Or rather, he took it for granted that the ordinary people of Xiling were the same as the people of Dongping. Perhaps this is not the main reason, but Ye Tao has no doubt that this must be one of the reasons. And Ye Tao felt that it was better for him to solve the mistakes he had made.

The trip to Xiling is naturally dangerous. And the best way to avoid danger is not to let others notice you. They carefully arranged different identities, acted as different people, and entered Xiling through different channels, and then met in Shunyi City, an important city in northeastern Xiling. The first batch to set off was Zhou Rui, who commanded the older ones among the guards that Ye Tao had selected from the Jianghu people. They had rich Jianghu experience and were very good at arranging things including safety, foothold, contact, etc., and Zhou Rui's magical perception of various strange situations allowed them to avoid the attention of those who were interested. Disguised as an inconspicuous spice caravan, they should have settled in Shunyi City now.

The second batch to set off was Ye Tao himself. Due to the large number of people, they had to choose a different route. They first went southwest to the place where Yunzhou, Dongping, and Xiling meet, and from there turned northwest and entered Xiling from Senshan Pass, which faces Dongping and Yunzhou. The terrain of Senshan Pass is more dangerous than Huanshan Pass, but it is not a military stronghold. The main reason is that behind Senshan Pass is a vast mountain. The road behind Senshan Pass that leads directly to the hinterland of Xiling has a history longer than Xiling itself. After generations of excavation, it can now only accommodate two cars to pass side by side tightly. Thanks to the emergence of various imitations of the four-wheeled carriages of Ye's Workshop in recent years, this road has been able to pass through a considerable amount, and Senshan Pass has been slightly strengthened. Dongping set up three stone forts that form an equilateral triangle fifty miles away and stationed two sentries of border troops. Just a few years ago, the Senshan Pass garrison had problems with its own supplies.

Why would the Senshan Pass garrison let Ye Tao and the others pass through? In name, this "caravan" has absolutely nothing to do with Dongping. But in fact, the Senshan Pass garrison is from the Internal Affairs Guard. In the past, when Senshan Pass had supply problems, the Internal Affairs Guards had the whim to let the Dongping border army secretly help them a few times. Although the officers above pretended to dislike each other, the soldiers below might have drunk and eaten meat together long ago. After Tong Bingwen's army attacked Dongping unsuccessfully, Tong Bingwen's faction was greatly attacked, and many positions of power in the army were cut off. Taking advantage of that trend, the several lines that the Internal Affairs Guards had arranged in Xiling were launched together, and they unknowingly took down the position of garrison of Senshan Pass and arranged their own people to go in. For Xiling, Senshan Pass is difficult to supply and maintain, but Dongping does not have this problem. Pretending to visit the Senshan Pass garrison, Ye Tao only needs to take out the very small jade token of the Prince Consort and the two sides will naturally complete the performance with great understanding...

And the third batch is these "students." They entered Xiling through the road that Zhuo Xianchen's troops secretly entered Xiling. They will use this path to send a batch of supplies to the Li family's castle, and by the way, learn about what it is like for them to secretly preach around, and what difficulties they have encountered. Afterwards, they will also go south and gradually enter the densely populated Xizhong Plain in Xiling and go to Shunyi City. Although the road is sparsely populated along the way, there are still some hiding caves and extremely simple shrines and extremely small temples dug by the people who used to avoid the war... Although these things existed long before the Dai family maintained this road, the Dai family retained all these things in order to maintain the original ecology of the road and prevent people from noticing the strangeness of the road. For folklore researchers, or for the current Lei Huang, these things are of great reference value. Especially the various distinctly styled decorations made of simple charcoal and clay slabs at the entrance and inside of those hiding caves, and the couplets that can only be seen by removing the thick accumulated dust, all made Lei Huang instinctively feel that they were useful things. Before fooling people with those "classmates" around Thunder Cliff, Ye Tao had clearly told them, although he had not demonstrated it himself: understanding the target's language, especially the dialect of the place of birth and the jargon of the work they do, is very helpful in quickly building a relationship.

And Lei Huang's various slang, dialect habits, trade jargon, and annotations that he has summarized in general have filled six large books. And these will allow him to play the role of a stranger very well...