Chapter 89: The Native Gongda

The Chikan New District across from Dayuan buzzed with voices and blazed with activity — a great host of laborers were hard at work on the construction site. After this stretch of grueling labor, a thirty-mu plot of land had been leveled on the Taijiang East Bank.

All debris had been cleared, shrub roots had been dug out, and the surrounding stagnant water, including some seasonal marshy hollows and wetlands, had all been filled in and buried; the core fort and the living quarters opposite it, along with the road and drainage channels between them, had already been laid out, and a small portion of the labor force was hardening the ground in the planned areas — crews of four, chanting work songs as they swung square stone blocks, smashing the earth tight with blow after blow.

A large body of manpower was building a simple dock on the Taijiang shore. For now, the Crossing Faction had no engineering machinery whatsoever and could not manage those grand, high-end constructions, so they had to make do by erecting a temporary timber-pile dock at the water's edge, using boats to ferry people and goods back and forth between the two banks.

With the arrival of the second batch of two sand ships, the already jam-packed Shanty Area at Shang Hall had burst completely at the seams. Given the dire situation at the time, with Dayuan facing many enemies and few friends, the two sand ships that came over with Cao Chuan had greatly increased their numbers of Ming laborers — each ship carried a hundred men.

The Transmigrators were thus forced to adopt an emergency mass-relocation plan: all the residents of the Japanese village were moved back to the Shanty Area at Shang Hall. Although these moon-heads were by nature guest merchants, they now had no choice but to stay temporarily in the Shanty Area; a handful of merchants like Dongye Shangche were allowed to lodge inside Shang Hall itself.

The Ming overseers, the Dutch, and the Bandanese were all relocated to the Japanese village, after which they frantically cut down assorted scrub trees and bamboo and threw up temporary shacks around the village. The wood had not been kiln-dried, so the shacks would warp and fall apart before long, but right now they could not afford to worry about that — having a shack to live in was good enough, and besides, the weather was warm.

This saved a great deal of transport capacity: when the laborers went to Chikan for work each day, they no longer needed to ferry across by boat; they only had to walk two li south from the Japanese village.

Left behind in Shang Hall were one part of the original Class B employees, who were responsible for daily odd jobs. In the barracks at Shang Hall, thirty more Naval Officer Cadets had appeared over the past two days: the Navy had the ready-made Chengfeng lying idle and desperately in need of a new master, so they got a bargain — Xia Xianze briskly approved the Navy's report on picking first.

That was just how fair-weather brothers were — they could not withstand a strength test: on the day the Navy picked its men, the Army was already turning hostile with them. Out of a total of fewer than three hundred Ming employees, twenty Officer Cadets had swept away all the youngest among them — for the last two, who did not even know how many years they had lived, the Navy men had to pry open their mouths and check their teeth to pick them out. Add in the ten original young Pirate underlings, and the Navy merrily took the whole crew out on the ship for a joyride.

Looking at the remaining "old fellows" — faces full of the marks of age, mouths full of yellow teeth, liable to kick the bucket any day — the Army bunch seethed with fury. When Han Bo sought an audience with the CEO, the reply he got was one cold sentence: "Wait for the ships to arrive, or negotiate with the Navy to have them give the men to you."

If not for the fact that the "Intimidation Style" incident two days ago had the military in a tail-tucking state lately, the fair-weather brothers would probably have had at least one mass brawl over this. See, when the power-holders really want to deal with you, they deal with you openly and righteously, without a sound.

Speaking of fair-weather brothers, Cai Feiming was the one among the Transmigrators who had the most dealings with fair-weather brothers: two days ago he had just settled things with the Dutch brothers, and today Japanese brothers came looking for him again.

This time, however, the Japanese brothers came with good intentions — a Native had shown his face. Hearing Dongye Shangche come running to report that a Native had come calling, Cai Feiming, who had been looking through materials in the Great Office, immediately rose and rushed with Dongye and his deputy to the dock, randomly boarded a sampan, and hurried toward the Japanese village.

Only on the way did Dongye begin to give a detailed account: the one who had come to the Japanese village today was a Native Village Chief from Xingang Society, named Gongda. Previously, people from this village had often come to the Japanese village to trade local products, but Gongda himself was rarely seen. Based on Dongye's guess, the Native had come to sound out the situation.

Ever since the day of the Shang Hall battle, when some Natives trading in the Shanty Area had fled back to the main island, the Natives had vanished without a trace for a time. It was not until the Transmigrators' large-scale slash-and-burn, with the line of fire pressing close to their homeland, that the Natives had been forced to strike back.

According to Cai Feiming and the others' speculation, the Natives had likely been frightened by the violent battle scenes at Shang Hall that day. After this, the black-clouds-massing-over-the-city slash-and-burn behavior could hardly be called friendly either: the Natives were not stupid; the bare, stripped earth let the outsiders spot them from very far away, and driven by instinct, the Natives would try to keep as far from the outsiders as possible.

Originally, a plan to deal with the Natives had already been put on the agenda these past two days: the upcoming construction of the Kiln District required large-scale dredging of Xingang Creek upstream and downstream, and the builders would also need to go deep into the mountains upstream to cut wood and mine ore, so the villages along the way had reached a point where they absolutely had to be dealt with.

Since a Native had thought things through and taken the initiative to stick his head out today, of course they could not let the chance slip by — the need to probe the truth was not the Natives' alone; the Transmigrators had it just as much, didn't they? Cai Feiming eagerly followed Dongye and hurried toward the Japanese village.

Village Chief Gongda naturally had no idea that his performance today would, to a great extent, influence the outsiders' future policy toward the Natives. As a branch of the Tainan Siraya Tribe, a village chief among the Xingang Society clans, Gongda possessed a political talent that exceeded that of ordinary tribesmen. This was also why he could keep being re-elected as Village Chief even though his own clan was not flourishing in numbers.

Ever since the clansman he had sent to the island to trade deerskins had come fleeing back in a daze, Gongda had questioned him in detail, then rushed overnight to other villages. By the time he had tracked down all three Xingang people who had fled back from Dayuan that day, Gongda had obtained the most detailed information about the Transmigrators.

Unlike those ignorant clansmen, Gongda had always maintained a keen interest in the outsiders. The Japanese who bought deerskins, the Red-Haired White People who had driven all the clansmen off the Big Island (Beixianwei Island) and erected a gallows before the castle gate, hanging clansmen for no reason at all — all of these had once filled him with deep worry.

The clansmen's lives had not worsened over the years; they had even improved somewhat through trading deerskins with the outsiders, but Gongda always had a premonition: those Red-Haired White People were very powerful and would sooner or later take actions harmful to the clansmen, and reality was gradually confirming his thoughts.

After the Shang Hall battle, Gongda very quickly discovered that those Red-Haired White People had been defeated by a group of even more powerful people — people with the same skin color as his own! This made Gongda overjoyed; after all, how much worse could things get? He had a premonition: these powerful outsiders were not the same as those red-haired ones.

The Transmigrators would never know that on the very second day after they arrived at Dayuan, when certain people were brandishing rocket launchers at the entrance of the Japanese village, a Native who was extremely interested in them was hiding in the distant underbrush... As of today, Gongda was the only Native who had a clear understanding of the Transmigrators' firepower.