After defeating the water bandits' lair, considering that this place is hidden and easy to defend and difficult to attack, it is very suitable for the future as a stronghold of the Thunderbolt Army, Huang Dagen thought of choosing a name. He heard that there was a large wild fruit forest in the nearby mountains, so he renamed the ravine where the bandits' lair was located Huaguo Mountain. Leaving Le Quan'an's naval army to deal with the follow-up matters of Huaguo Mountain, Huang Dagen took the teaching company and went straight to Gaojiagou, the largest village in Rootless Mountain. Huang Dagen led the army to set off from the morning, hurried along the way, and arrived at Gaojiagoukou at dusk, because the march in the rootless mountains was really a headache. In fact, although the road here is narrow and crooked, it can barely be passed. The main reason for the difficulty of marching is that the scenery in this mountain is similar and there are many forks, and outsiders are very easy to get lost. Although Huang Dagen and the others had the water bandits who surrendered to Cheng as their guides, they still took a lot of wrong paths. According to him, there are dozens of settlements in this mountain, with a total number of about 1,000 people, of which there are only a dozen people in the small villages, and the largest villages are only about 100 people, but there are tens of thousands of acres of cultivated land. Due to the Mongol invasion and the burning of the officials and soldiers, there was no handicraft workshop in this rootless mountain, and there was a shortage of various daily necessities except food, and the people's livelihood was also very difficult. Most of the food of the bandits was exchanged with the mountain people for fishing or looting, and salt, cloth, and iron farming tools were especially popular, and the exchange place was Gaojiagou in the middle of the rootless mountain.

Gaojiagou was silent at dusk, there was no sound of chickens and dogs inherent in rural villages, no curling smoke, not even a house in sight, let alone a single villager. This unusual situation puzzled everyone. At this time, Cheng Boss explained to Huang Dagen that in order to prevent the harassment and plundering of the Mongols and the official army, there were no houses in this Gaojiagou, and the shacks where the villagers lived were scattered in the forest hidden places on the hillside. Seeing that it was getting late, Huang Dagen ordered to set up camp, and asked two soldiers to accompany Cheng Boss to look for people at night and explain his intentions. Boss Cheng has come to exchange materials with Gao Jiagou many times, and he is also familiar with the patriarch Gao Xiuming. The trip brought with them a large number of seized daily necessities, which were to be used to exchange food with the villagers.

Early in the morning of the second day, as soon as Huang Dagen woke up and walked out of the tent, Boss Cheng and several old men in ragged clothes greeted him, and the old man with white hair was the patriarch Gao Xiuming. After greetings, Huang Dagen explained his intention and proposed to buy and sell at the market price, which made several old people overjoyed and made Cheng Boss a little embarrassed. Due to the frequent wars and bandits, which disrupted the normal trade of goods, even the most daring traders did not dare to set foot in the rootless mountains, resulting in high prices here. The water bandits took the opportunity to lower the price when trading, which was similar to half-buying and half-robbing with the exchange of materials, although the rootless mountaineers knew that they were trapped, but they were helpless. Although the exchange price proposed by Huang Dagen could make the Thunderbolt Army a lot of money, it was a great discount for the villagers of Gaojiagou.

Soon after starting the transaction, Huang Dagen discovered the problem - too few supplies were brought! Villagers surrounded the Thunderbolt camp, begging for cloth and iron farming tools. There is no shortage of salt for the time being, because they have just exchanged a little from the water bandits some time ago. But now that spring ploughing is imminent, iron farming tools are urgently needed to plough the ground, and the efficiency of homemade wooden tools is too low. As for the need for cloth, it can be seen from the clothing of the villagers - some of the clothes are good, most of them are made of hay, and some of the children are even naked, shivering in the early spring wind.

After only half a day of trading, the materials brought by the teaching company had been swept away, and Huang Dagen was surprised by the amount of food in exchange. In the eyes of the rootless mountain people, this transaction is so cost-effective that they have started the shopping mode, and even took out the spare grain for the disaster year. Although the climate of the rootless mountainous area is the same as that of the plain, the production conditions are really not as good as the plain irrigated by the Dujiangyan Water Conservancy Project. Huang Dagen saw that the materials he brought were all exchanged, but the villagers from nearby villages kept rushing to exchange them, so he had to send someone back to Hengyuan Town to report to Ouyang Xuan, asking for someone to send the materials and bring back the grain. Ouyang Xuan, who was supervising the construction of Hengyuan Fort, was overjoyed when he heard the news, and asked Yu Zhu to immediately organize people to go.

The iron farming tools produced by the Perak Army are of good quality and are very popular with the villagers. In particular, treadmills, which are suitable for farming in mountainous areas, are more sought after, but there are not many treadmills cast by industrial companies to ensure the steel required for military production and the construction of Yokohara Fort. The treadmill brought to Gaojiagou for sale became the hottest thing, and there were even quarrels between the villages over the purchase of this sharp tool for cultivating land. Yu Zhu had to distribute treadmills according to the population of each village, and registered the gap in demand for agricultural tools, promising to supply them for a long time in the future, so that the dispute was finally settled. According to the data reported by each village itself, the population of this rootless mountainous area is about 2,000, and there are 1,200 laborers. This data does not rule out that some villages have made false statements in order to buy more farm tools, but even if the water is squeezed out, it greatly exceeds the estimates of Yu Zhu and Huang Dagen.

After the iron farming tools were sold, the villagers set their sights on the cloth again. It's just that the Thunderbolt army itself is also short of fabrics, and it can't meet the needs of the villagers. However, the villagers didn't pay much attention to it, after all, the weather was getting warmer day by day, and they survived after a while. It took five full days for Yu Zhu to transport the grain back to Hengyuan Town. This time, a total of about 500,000 catties of grain were exchanged, which was enough for 1,000 people to eat for more than half a year, completely solving the food crisis of the Perak Army. Some of this grain was left in Hengyuan Town to build a fort, and most of it was transported back to Wanjiazhai.

Just when Yu Zhu and Huang Dagen led people to Hengyuan Town to transport grain, the water army led by Yu Laodui and Liao Loach also exterminated the water bandits. When they were first besieged, the bandits were extremely arrogant, not only turned a deaf ear to the shouts of the Thunderbolt army, but even came out to sneak attack at night, although they were bombarded back by firearms, but they felt that the officers and soldiers were nothing more than that, as long as they stayed in the Huang family, it would not be long before these officers and soldiers would retreat. It's just that the water bandits didn't expect that the Thunderbolt Army was determined to exterminate them and firmly block the waterway in and out of Huangjiadang. As time passed, the bandits who ran out of food had to catch small fish and shrimp to satisfy their hunger. It's just that the water is dry in winter, and I am exhausted but I can't catch a few small fish, so I am so hungry that I have to dig grass roots to fill my stomach, but I find that the more I eat, the more weak I become. Without food, the bandits found that the reed was not a shelter, but a large cage.

When the wives and children of the captured people in Wugen Mountain shouted outside the reeds, most of the water bandits finally couldn't resist anymore and sneaked out to surrender, leaving only more than a dozen bandits, including the leader of the water bandits, who refused to surrender. These bandits had blood on their hands, and it was they who repeatedly attacked the Thunderbolts, knowing that there would be no good fruit to eat if they surrendered, so they simply resisted to the end. However, the bandits did not last long, as the surrendered bandits and the Thunderbolts found their hiding place and killed them with grenades. Yu Laodui and Liao Loach, who were angry, didn't want to take any more prisoners at all, and the bandits were even more ruthless, mending the corpses of their former accomplices one by one, for fear of retaliating against them if they didn't die thoroughly.