Chapter 504: Taipei (IV)

Young Master Huang Yusheng was a native of Sanming, Fujian.

Sanming is a mountainous region, so the Huang clan were a lineage that hailed from a backwater valley.

Earlier, battered by successive years of calamity, severe drought, and the increasingly ruthless extortion of the local authorities, the Huang clansmen, feeling life had truly become unbearable, hit upon the idea of a collective flight from famine.

Such collective famine flights were extremely common in ancient times. Especially in the northern regions, whenever years of great disaster and military chaos struck, large numbers of Han people would migrate south en masse — the Western Jin, Late Tang, Late Song, Late Ming, and Taiping Kingdom, these five great southward migrations of the Han people, gave rise to the Hakka communities scattered across the south in later generations.

But what set this time apart from the past was that, for this collective famine flight, the Huang clan had a new option: Tainan.

Fujian and Tainan are separated by a single strait, and coupled with Xiong Wencan's "reform and opening" stance, Fujian was the Great Ming province most deeply infiltrated by the Transmigrators.

The process of this migration for the Huang clan was very simple: they only needed to go to any coastal city, find the "Laborer Recruitment Point" that Grand Commandant Cao had set up in every bustling marketplace, consult with the clerk on the terms, and the entire clan could set off.

Once the refugees departed, as long as they held the certificate issued here, they could find a dedicated reception point in any county town along the way, with all food, drink, and lodging paid for by others.

And so the Huang clan arrived in Tainan just like that, so effortlessly it hardly felt like a famine flight at all, around the beginning of last year.

The treatment everyone received after that was also quite satisfactory. Not only did everyone get to live in handsome wooden apartments, there was also a mess hall where they could eat their fill.

Of course, the prerequisite for all this was working off their debt for Grand Commandant Cao.

Yet Huang Yusheng's family received differential treatment. One morning, half a month after arriving in Tainan, their family of four was singled out, ordered to pack their valuables, and without a word of explanation sent onto a ship bound for Taipei, without even a chance to bid farewell to their clansmen.

After the family arrived in Taipei in fear and trepidation, they were initially filled with dread. Father Huang in particular made a very firm judgment: their family was about to be turned on and completely devoured by that Cao fellow... after all, even a poor temple can have a rich abbot; the Huang family, being the clan leaders, had still brought quite a bit of silver in their valuables.

Although that silver had all been forcibly exchanged for currency earlier, the currency had by now thoroughly won people's trust, and everyone knew the stuff was equivalent in value to silver in Tainan.

As it turned out, Father Huang had overthought things. Though the environment in Taipei was a bit harsher, the social landscape was no different from Tainan; it was still in a period of rapid development, and no officials came to extort his family's silver.

The real reason, Father Huang learned not long after: this place was a dumping ground for people the clan leaders wanted exiled!

After learning that his neighbors in the simple dwellings all shared the same plight, Father Huang finally understood the true reason. But by then, any objections were far too late; information about Taipei flowed only one way, and outsiders had not the slightest inkling of conditions here.

And so, stripped back to square one, having lost the clansmen he once relied upon, Father Huang, accustomed to the trappings of power, could not bear the psychological letdown and soon fell ill and died.

As the saying goes, however: a single dragon sires nine sons, each different.

Huang Yusheng, the theoretical young clan leader, was by nature an optimist, quite unlike his father who had clung so fiercely to authority.

In Yusheng's view, since they had all already swallowed their pride and thrown in their lot with Grand Commandant Cao, their very lives were naturally in another's hands, let alone being dispersed and resettled.

Besides, given the situation they had witnessed in Tainan, their clansmen were surely living decently enough now too, so there was no need to fret over that; each family should just look after its own.

And so, after his old father the clan leader passed away, Yusheng Shaoye, now officially head of the household, promptly brought out the family savings and purchased a newly built two-story building facing the street in Sulfone Port Town.

At that time, because Sulfone Port Town was newly developed and the environment was harsh, many people were taking a wait-and-see attitude, and few were willing to spend their hard-earned capital on acquiring property.

Thus Huang Yusheng got a bargain: a brand-new brick-concrete structure building cost him only half of his family's savings.

With property secured, the family lived on the second floor, rented out two rooms on the side, and opened a general store on the first floor. In this way, Huang Yusheng settled his mother and younger sister.

As for himself, he signed up to work as a financial supervisor and overseer at the Second Construction Company, which was then on the rise in Sulfone Port Town.

These two choices of Huang Yusheng's, imperceptibly, happened to align perfectly with the "trend" of current development.

First, with the arrival of large quantities of resources and slaves, Sulfone Port Town grew more prosperous by the day. In just a single year, it had become utterly impossible to buy a building for that amount of money now.

Second, after working at the Second Construction Company, which was tantamount to a state-owned enterprise, Huang Yusheng gained access to information far beyond that of ordinary people. He gradually came to recognize the hidden strength of the Commander-in-Chief's Mansion and, through his daily work, slowly integrated into the new system. Add to that a young man's quickness to embrace new ideas, and by now, Yusheng Shaoye had become a qualified mid-to-low-level manager, the kind a rising new regime needed.

In the course of this, Yusheng also got to know quite a few figures, and the one who suited the young master's taste best of all was the rough-and-ready Wu Sanye.

Wu Sanye was, without a doubt, a man with a past. Moreover, on the danger-filled construction site, Wu Sanye had twice saved Yusheng Shaoye's life — a point not to be overlooked either.

And so these two men, of completely different origins, backgrounds, and status, formed a friendship despite the gap in their ages, struggling and striving together on this land where vitality and peril coexisted.

After the midday break, once Wu Sanye and the others had seen off the boat transporting the corpses, then taken turns washing up and eating, they remained on the construction site until dusk before organizing the crews to knock off work.

After several years of trial and error, the Transmigrators were now quite experienced in managing slave camps.

On this isolated island cut off from the world, overseers like Wu Sanye were, on the contrary, rather lax in their supervision of the slaves — if any wanted to escape, they were welcome to try; any runaway slave who could survive three days in the 17th-century primeval forests of Taipei would be considered truly capable.

So when the slaves knocked off, they all conscientiously formed ranks and, under the escort of armed guards, returned to the slave camp.

Because the construction route was constantly shifting, the so-called slave camp was in fact just an encampment of tents and temporary grass sheds.

Once here, the slaves' day's work was considered done. Great iron cauldrons billowing hot steam had already prepared enough calories to feed them.

The staples of the meals were brown rice and mixed small fish, later replaced by potatoes and fish. As for vegetables, in Taipei's mild climate they were no issue at all; casually opening up a few vegetable plots could guarantee the work section's dietary needs.

After eating, the slaves had a period of complete relaxation. Of course, before that, there was still one gate of hell to pass through: temperature checks.

Malaria was by no means the only disease capable of causing large-scale attrition. In this era of East-West convergence, there were at least several dozen other infectious diseases constantly threatening humans living in groups.

Thus temperature checks became the single most effective screening method: any slave showing signs of elevated body temperature would be isolated and placed under observation. If this person continued to run a fever over the next few days, then sorry, Wu Sanye's youthful sledgehammer would come crashing down... this applied even to a simple cold, because the slave camp had no medicine to treat colds, nor any way to determine if it was just a cold.

After one such grueling day had passed, that very evening, a company clerk, arriving panting at the slave camp, brought Wu Sanye, Yusheng, and the others a startling piece of news: a new department, the "Pioneer Army," was now drawing manpower from all quarters, and the Second Construction Company had also received the official dispatch.