Chapter 274: Raising Pigs

After losing their main force, the devils quickly entered the village.

The natives of the island naturally couldn't fire a kiln of green bricks to build a city, so the devils easily broke through the wooden stockade.

The next moment, women and children were dragged crying from the thatched huts; at the doorways lay the corpses of their husbands, spears still clutched in the dead men's hands.

Those who resisted were flogged, while the tribe's upper echelon were lined up and hanged on the newly erected gallows — including the chief's entire family, all the Elders, and the theologians. A black-robed Military Chaplain was presiding fervently before the gallows over the rite of purging heretics, exactly as their colleagues far away in the Theocracy do when roasting heretics.

Over sixty natives were captured by the Spanish. In truth, the several thousand natives who died in this war meant nothing to the Catholic Bishop — whether it was Legazpi's conquest of the Philippines or the later massacre of the Chinese, the death tolls far exceeded this tribal campaign.

All the natives were imprisoned, screened, and then the able-bodied men were "packaged" first.

The slave traders kept up with the times. When they discovered that every low-level person entering Dayuan had all the hair on their body shaved clean, this advanced packaging method was immediately applied by the traders to their counterfeits.

Shaving all the hair off the captives created a fish-eye-mixed-with-pearls effect — some originally gray-haired, half-old men could now be sold at a "genuine" price. After all, in this era, people were already full of wrinkles and had worn-down teeth by thirty, making it hard to discern their exact age.

After the surviving able-bodied men were "packaged," they were tied up in groups of ten and transported away one after another.

Two armed merchant ships that had already offloaded their supplies, loaded with a total of over 1,100 slaves, soon set sail straight for Dayuan. It was summer now, and if the slave ships sailed north with the wind, with luck they could reach their destination in five to seven days, so the traders crammed the holds as full of people as possible.

Among the remaining captives, all the wounded and the slow-moving elderly were singled out, then driven to the riverbank and hacked to death with long swords, their corpses washed into the sea — execution by firing squad was impossible; black powder and lead shot were precious assets in this era.

Two days later, another four armed merchant ships arrived. The first to land this time was a group of Tagalog. The bondservants' duty was to guard and serve as cannon fodder — there were still some large and small Moro people tribes on the island; after their masters had opened up the situation at the cost of over forty dead, the coming battles would have to rely on the bondservants.

One must understand, this was an era when white lives were precious.

The four ships also offloaded some red bricks produced by kilns run by Ming People outside Manila. A portion of the male slaves would build a small fort and dock at the river mouth area; these structures, combined with the original tribal stockade, would make an excellent slave-catching camp.

After this, another 1,800 women were shipped away.

By this point, the Moro people tribe could be considered utterly extinguished. Once the adult men and women vanished, the old, weak, sick, and disabled left behind would quickly be consumed and exhausted in heavy manual labor.

When the two slave ships that had departed first returned to Manila in mid-August, they brought back not only large quantities of goods but also Baron Juan and those fort soldiers from Taipei.

After the Baron returned in triumph, he immediately had an audience with the Governor-General and presented a special dossier brought from Dayuan. It was a survey report on the mineral resources of the Baguio region that the Transmigrators had previously promised.

The dossier not only marked in detail the precise coordinates and approximate reserves of several gold, silver, and copper deposits in the Baguio region, but also included a freebie — an accurate map of Baguio.

Overjoyed, the Spanish quickly dispatched an exploration ship — Baguio lay at the foot of the Cordillera Mountains, 300 kilometers north of Manila; going overland was clearly unreliable. Savages, dense jungle, malaria, and yellow fever would claim everyone's lives.

Setting out by ship from Manila, however, was much simpler — after landing at Lingayen Gulf to the north, the party only needed to cross a little over ten kilometers of coastal plain, and what they would face next were the mountains of Baguio.

Therefore, if the expedition could find any single gold, silver, or copper mine this time, the Spanish would only need to repeat the trick they had just used — land troops at Lingayen Gulf, capture the local Igolot people in droves, then build a fort and construct a slave camp. The road was all the same.

All in all, due to the disruption caused by a certain power base that should not have existed, the Spanish of this timeline had achieved a tremendous improvement in their strategic situation — with a virtuous trade cycle of slaves, industrial goods, and silver, the broad-faced men, originally huddled in a defensive posture, had overnight turned the slave trade into a booming business.

This situation, in turn, spurred Spanish expansion in both the north and south directions. One must know that historically, the Muslim Malay in the south fought on and off with the White-Skins for over three hundred years, not letting up even after Philippine independence.

In this timeline, however, once the Spanish discovered that fighting natives was a highly profitable business, the rolling tide of slave traders, adventurers, and scoundrels would naturally, with practiced ease, apply the same methods they had used in Africa — the Malay wouldn't have such an easy time of it anymore.

Additionally, the situation in the Baguio region remained constantly under the Transmigrators' attention.

In the most ideal scenario, if the Spanish worked efficiently, they should be able to develop several gold and silver mines within about three years.

This so-called "development" was extremely cruel — carving roads through Baguio's mountain rainforests, constructing mines, setting up guard posts, and then capturing slaves to refine minerals year-round using primitive techniques.

Whether White-Skins or natives, the death rate in such an environment would skyrocket. The meager native population of Baguio would be nowhere near enough to consume, so the Spanish would also keep frantically expanding the scope of their slave raids.

The hidden masterminds on Dayuan Island were very much looking forward to the broad-faced men's future performance; they could even sell some useful tools and weapons to the white mine owners, to fortify those men's confidence in developing nature and battling the land.

In short, until the day giant ships and cannons were shoved right up to Manila's doorstep, the Transmigration Nation would spare no effort in propping up the Spanish, letting them unleash themselves across the vast expanse of the Thousand Island Country, striving to open up more land under the Holy Light's shine, purify more heretics, and ease some of the pioneering pressure for those who came after.

After emerging from the Shang Hall on Dayuan Island, as Alonso and Juan strolled southward along the long coastline of Taijiang, Baron Juan recounted the interactions between Manila and Dayuan over the past few months in just this manner.

And after hearing all these stories, Alonso looked at Dayuan Island, which they had now walked to the end of, then looked at the smug, self-satisfied colleague beside him, and his heart could not help but fill with bitterness.