Chapter 553 - Arrival of the Female Servants

When news broke that Ship A would require extensive, multi-year repairs, the frenzy of interest surrounding it evaporated. The Navy, the Long-Range Exploration Team, and the Special Reconnaissance Team—all of whom had been aggressively jockeying for ownership—quietly withdrew their claims.

With spring approaching, the machinery for "Project Giant" roared back to life, picking up where the General Assembly had left off. To ensure the ideological fortitude of the laborers and immigrants destined for the harsh southern frontier, the propaganda apparatus went into overdrive. The puppet theater troupe debuted a new production titled The Land of Bliss, designed to instill a pioneering spirit and a vision of a utopian homeland.

The script was a localized adaptation of the Soviet novel Virgin Soil Upturned, keeping the core narrative arc but transplanting the setting to the untamed wilds of Australia.

The Land of Bliss depicted a vast, fertile Australian wilderness where a group of destitute, landless farmers, guided by benevolent "Australian leaders," tamed the savage land. They battled the elements, established thriving collectives, harvested endless fields of golden wheat, and raised fat cattle, living happily ever after in a worker's paradise.

The play was populated by archetypes: the wise "Australian leader" who always pointed the way forward; the hesitant, selfish peasant; the obstinate elder focusing on the past; the fiery, idealistic youth; and the martyr who sacrificed everything for the collective. And, of course, the villains: saboteurs who destroyed dams and stole public grain, and insidious "class enemies" who whispered discontent in the shadows. The enemy was never explicitly named, but their puppets spoke in high official Mandarin and slipped in damning phrases like "My Lord" and "The Emperor."

Ding Ding, feeling that a diet of pure optimism was insufficient, mandated a rotating schedule: The Trial one day to remind them of the misery they had escaped, and The Land of Bliss the next to show them the paradise they were building.

The impact was profound. Most immigrants were simple farmers with little worldly experience but an infinite capacity for hardship. Land and stability were their twin gods. The promise of satisfying these primal needs ignited a fanatical enthusiasm that stunned even the propagandists.

While the propaganda department painted rosy pictures of the Southern Seas, the Planning Council was quietly drafting mortality schedules. These were cold, actuarial tables calculating "acceptable death quotas" based on weekly workload projections and environmental hazards.

These quotas were central to the logistical lattice of Project Giant: they determined how many fresh bodies needed to be shipped to Sanya each week to replace the fallen, how much grain and cloth to allocate to Yulin, and whether the quarantine camps in Lingao needed expansion. In the grand calculus of colonial development, human lives were merely integer values in a spreadsheet.

Parallel to the propaganda, internal security was tightened. The Political Security General Administration wove a web of informants throughout the labor camps, monitoring the pulse of the masses. "Defeatist elements"—those spreading rumors or panic about the Sanya expedition—were quietly disappeared. Zhou Dongtian presided over their interrogations, hunting for external handlers or organized conspiracies, a prospect that deeply worried Zhao Manxiong.

Zhao Manxiong doubted the Ming intelligence apparatus was sophisticated enough to infiltrate agents into the immigrant pool for complex agitation. His true fear was the organic formation of internal cliques. In a classified memorandum to the Sanya Development Leadership Group, he flagged this as a critical threat.

"Regionalism is the cancer of cohesion," he wrote. "Cliques bound by dialect and shared origin possess strong exclusivity. Once such a group reaches critical mass, it inevitably preys on the minority 'outsiders.' This has been the historical norm."

He warned that once these cliques cemented, "elders" or "big brothers" would emerge to control their fellow townsmen. Dialects would harden into secret codes, impenetrable to outsiders and authorities alike. This challenged the absolute authority of the Transmigrator Senate and created pockets of ungovernable instability.

In Lingao, under the iron grip of the administration, such tendencies were easily crushed. But Sanya would be a frontier town with looser controls. In that harsh environment, the instinct to "seek one's own kind" would be powerful.

Zhao Manxiong urged the Five Bosses of Sanya to be ruthless. "Suppress any formation of hometown associations immediately. If necessary, use physical elimination. We cannot tolerate a state within a state."

Accordingly, workers attempting to organize "fellowship societies" were arrested. Regardless of their actual intent, Zhao Manxiong stamped their files with a single sentence: Indefinite Labor Reform.

But the Political Security Bureau's workload was about to spike. At the end of January 1630, a convoy from Guangzhou arrived carrying the most anticipated "special cargo" of the year: women.

The procurement had been orchestrated by Zhang Xin through the channels of the Qiwei Escort Bureau. Sun Kecheng, the old bureau master, had initially balked at the commission. Buying women for the "Australians"—foreigners, in his eyes—felt sickeningly close to human trafficking, a violation of the traditional taboo against "separating flesh and blood."

Zhang Xin had to work hard to dismantle these scruples. "Manager Sun, these women are going to Lingao, not overseas to Australia. They remain on Chinese soil. And if their families wish to accompany them, we will resettle the entire household. There is no separation involved."

It took repeated assurances and a personal intervention by Zhou Shizhai to finally ease Sun Kecheng's conscience.

"Manager Zhang, please understand," Sun Kecheng had said, his face pained. "You gentlemen have come from afar to settle in this backwater. It is natural you need women to care for you. But to take a daughter ten thousand li across the ocean, never to see her kin again... that is a sin we dared not commit."

Zhang Xin privately found this moralizing quaint. Was selling a girl to a rich merchant in Beijing really so different? But he respected the old man's code. Men like Sun Kecheng would forfeit profit before honor. That made them difficult to work with, but impossible to buy off.

Sun Kecheng eventually agreed, with a caveat: his armed escorts would not handle the "cargo." The procurement and transport would be managed by the commercial clerks of the outer offices.

Zhang Xin laid out the criteria: "Respectable family background, unmarried, under 25, natural feet. No brothel girls or tooth-seller wares. Price cap of ten taels. An additional two taels resettlement fee for any family members."

Knowing the Australians favored "northern" aesthetics, Sun Kecheng instructed his agents to look for tall stature, long legs, slim waists, and large breasts.

The dragnet across Guangdong, Guangxi, and Jiangxi netted over four hundred candidates. This was the rough cut. A second, more rigorous screening took place in Guangzhou under the auspices of the "Female Servant Countermeasures Committee."

Chairman Wen Desi took a personal interest in the quality control. He commissioned specialized anthropometric tools: rigid height gauges set to 1.60m (Standard) and 1.55m (Reserve), soft tape measures for bust-waist-hip ratios, and a visual reference chart for body proportions.

The method was brutal but effective. Native staff could simply apply the gauges—pass or fail.

To the committee, the bar was ostensibly low: 1.60 meters and a B-cup. Skin color was a loose requirement for "fairness." Yet, to the staff on the ground, these standards felt impossibly high. In the nutrition-poor environment of the 17th century, finding women who met these modern aesthetic benchmarks was like searching for needles in a haystack.

"If we're going to do this, we do it right," Wen Desi insisted when his team wavered. "If we just wanted female bodies, we could pull them from the refugee camps. We are building a gene pool."

"But is there really enough supply..."

"China is vast," Wen Desi said dismissively. "The numbers are there."

Of the initial four hundred, only a hundred barely scraped past the committee's inspection. Desperate to fill the quota, the team applied the new standards to Guangzhou's refugee camps, culling another hundred candidates.

The final shipment to Lingao consisted of two hundred strictly vetted women, accompanied by over a hundred family members. The "rejects" were not discarded; they were simply reclassified as general labor immigrants and shipped out in the next batch.

The arrival was anti-climactic. After months of heated debate and anticipation, the actual event was met with a strange calmness. The endless arguments on the BBS had burned everyone out.

The women were quietly transferred to the custody of the General Affairs Office and housed in a special quarantine camp, hermetically sealed from the rest of the settlement. The real distribution would come later.