Zhan Gui only now understands why the Haihan people want to hold such a celebration ceremony for the launch of the new ship with great fanfare, this is really not for fun. This strange-looking sailing ship not only has extremely fast speed and flexible steering at sea, but is also equipped with powerful firepower output! Zhan Gui boasts that he has traveled south and north for many years, and has seen a lot of Ming naval warships, but he has never seen a gunboat with such powerful firepower.

Of course, with Zhan Gui's professional vision, it is not difficult to see that it is not difficult to transform this thorny gunship into a merchant ship, and it will have a greater cost advantage than a warship in terms of cost and construction speed. And the Haihan people attach so much importance to shipping, of course, they will not be unaware of this truth, maybe by this time next year, there will be such a fleet in the South China Sea between various commercial ports.

Luo Shengdong was already as calm as water at this time, and after witnessing the firepower display of the "Exploration", he had confirmed the difference in strength between the Ming army's sailors and the Haihan people. This kind of gap is so big that it can no longer be made up by simply relying on numerical superiority, at least relying on these dilapidated warships in Yazhou, which have a minimum service time of more than 15 years, there is definitely no hope. From now on, on the sea south of Qiongzhou, it is probably no longer the master of the Ming Dynasty.

As a professional soldier, Luo Shengdong of course knows very well how much of a threat this kind of gunboat of the Haihan people will pose to the Daming Sea Frontier, and the only way to put an end to this threat is to immediately inform his superiors and mobilize sailors from Guangdong to encircle and suppress Shengli Port, and completely extinguish this momentum while the Haihan people are fledgling. But Luo Shengdong also knew that this kind of idea was very unrealistic, not to mention how long it would take for the Guangdong Navy Division of the Labor Division to prepare, and whether he could defeat the fierce Haihan forces after coming to Shengli Port, just reporting to the army for troops would probably not be realized.

Now almost the entire Yazhou officialdom has been worn by the chain of interests of the Haihan, whether it is low-level officials such as Luo Shengdong and Wei Ping, or local officials at the level of staff general and Zhizhou, they do not take the benefits of the Haihan people on weekdays, and several high-ranking officials who are about to retire even hit the idea of pensions directly to the Haihan people. For these people, without the Haihan people, the personal income they lose every year will be in the amount of 1,000 taels, and Luo Shengdong will estimate to himself that his personal income next year will even be as high as 5,000 taels.

Such a big benefit, it is not said that it can be lost, there are at least hundreds of people in Yazhou City who live on the Haihan people, and a considerable number of them are "within the system", and even Jinyiwei and Dongchang Fanzi have the eyeliner of the Haihan people. Luo Shengdong can fully imagine that if anyone really plans to report to the army through regular channels, he is afraid that before the news leaves Yazhou, Shengli Port will already know about it. It is not very likely to rely on force to solve this problem, unless the Haihan people take the initiative to provoke or even rebel and attack the state city, which is less likely than the Yazhou Navy Division to single-handedly eliminate the Haihan people.

After a long period of contact, Luo Shengdong also knew very well that the Haihan people would not take a hostile attitude towards the Ming Dynasty lightly, and these people attached great importance to practical interests, so they even did not hesitate to "compromise and seek perfection", and in accordance with the instructions of the local government, Shengli Port was included in the rule of Yazhou, of course, the benefits they handed over to Yazhou did not even enter the treasury.

Luo Shengdong thinks that the old men in Yazhou are happy to receive red envelopes, but it is obvious that they do not know what kind of people live in Shengli Port, which is hundreds of miles away from Yazhou. The Haihan people are not lambs waiting to be slaughtered, but under their seemingly docile appearance, they are actually a group of hungry wolves with green eyes that are constantly devouring a qiē resource. When Luo Shengdong first met the Haihan people a few months ago, they were just a group of maritime merchants who had just landed in Shengli Port, and three to five hundred people lived in tents, which looked no different from the pirates who came ashore to plunder, but now the population they controlled was ten times that of the original, and they had laid a huge situation in Shengli Port, and even the unruly Li Miao mountain people nearby were working for them, which was not something that maritime merchants could do. But such a threat, the old men of Yazhou are not clear, and they will not be interested, as long as the Haihan people regularly offer benefits, let alone a victory port, they are even eager to let the Haihan people even occupy a few nearby towns.

In such an environment, Luo Shengdong also put out those restless thoughts early and did his own smuggling business with peace of mind. What's more, now the Haihan people also offered to help his father-in-law take the position, and strive to take over the position of Yazhou governor next year. At this time, if he comes up with any tricks, he doesn't need the Haihan people to do it, and his old man probably won't let him go.

Li Nai didn't think things as complicated as Luo Shengdong, he was listening intently to Tao Donglai's explanation, for this new ship, he realized that his visit to the shipyard a few days ago was just a scratch of the surface, and there were too many things he didn't understand. And Tao Donglai's explanation can just solve some of the questions in his mind at this time.

Tao Donglai said eloquently: "...... We will build a large number of these sailboats in the next two or three years, mainly for maritime transport tasks. As for the guns on board, you don't have to worry, we don't plan to build too many gunboats, because we don't plan to go to war with the outside world, and after so many guns are loaded on the ship, we can't load any more cargo, and we are not interested in spending manpower and material resources to send a large number of armed gunboats to patrol the seas, this kind of drudgery should be the work that General Luo and his sailors should do...... By the way, I think we will need to change our habits soon, and we will be called 'Mr. Luo Qian'. ”

Luo Shengdong suddenly came back to his senses from his contemplation, and he clenched his fists and said that he didn't dare. After the others heard about it, they also congratulated Luo Shengdong.

Luo Shengdong has been promoted from the small Bai General to the post of General Commander of the Seventh Rank Military Attaché, and it has only been half a year since then, so it stands to reason that it is unlikely that he will get a second chance of promotion in such a short period of time. However, since the executive committee intends to cultivate its own spokesperson in the Daming officialdom, it can naturally find a reasonable way to push him.

The opportunity to find this opportunity came from the Indochina Peninsula across the sea. A significant number of the first settlers organized by North Vietnam were prisoners of war from South Vietnam and North Vietnamese felons, who were put into the labor-intensive Tiandu Iron Mine as miners after a simple screening. Since the beginning of the reception of these people, the Executive Committee had no intention of making these people naturalized citizens in the future, so it was relatively thorough in its use, and within a month of their arrival in Hong Kong, one-tenth of the more than 500 people died from fatigue and various work accidents.

After these people died, the bodies were not wasted, and they were immediately sent to the medical department for autopsy. The medical department is currently training naturalized medical personnel, and the bodies of these prisoners are just in time to come in handy in the course. And the executive committee also took the opportunity to think of the reason why Luo Shengdong was promoted in the first place, which was because he brought a group of pirate heads back to Yazhou to report his merits.

So Luo Shengdong once again received the assistance of the Executive Committee, and with the record of "beheading more than 50 pirates, sinking two pirate ships, and seizing a number of swords and guns", his immediate boss General He Wenhui personally wrote a report and sent it to the capital of Qiongzhou to report his merits, and asked for the promotion of Luo Shengdong, who was "loyal and brave, and won many battles", as appropriate. Of course, what kind of swords, guns, flags and other things are also props prepared for him by the Victory Harbor side.

The elimination of invading pirate gangs twice in one year is unique in the entire province of Guangdong. Compared with the situation that the Fujian official army has been beaten by the "Eighteen Zhi" and cannot leave the port at all, Yazhou's "banditry" record can be called dazzling. Moreover, the heads sent to Qiongzhou Mansion for meritorious service all have obvious characteristics of the natives of the South China Sea, and they are not acts of killing good people and making meritorious deeds. Ho Wenhui believes that Luo Shengdong has the best hope of getting a second promotion within a year, from the general to the thousand. Although Yazhou Shuizhai does not currently have the position of a thousand generals, this is not a problem, the military attache position in this place has not been set up from the beginning, and the establishment of five hundred people is to set up a general, so it seems that it is not an unreasonable thing to add a thousand generals under the generals.

If it weren't for the rule that promotion needs to be progressive, the total number of seven products can only be mentioned at most six grades, and General He even has the heart to directly recommend Luo Shengdong to serve as a garrison or even a guerrilla position, anyway, the Haihan people have spread the word, Luo Shengdong will immediately give two thousand taels of silver as long as he is promoted to one level, and five thousand taels will be promoted to two levels, if He Wenhui has the ability to let Luo Shengdong directly take over his position as a general, then the Haihan people are willing to pay a five-figure reward for this.

This money does not include the cost of making joints upward, it is pure income for He Wenhui. But He Wenhui could only sigh that his influence was limited, and he could not meet the expectations of the Haihan people, and the appointment of generals was not something that a military attache of Luo Shengdong's level could participate in. But he can't get too much silver, He Wenhui thinks that he should have no problem at least letting Luo Shengdong be promoted to another level before he retires.

Luo Shengdong also has the same opinion on this, his promotion is only a matter of time, and it doesn't even have much to do with whether he is He Wenhui or not. The reason why Luo Shengdong is so sure is because of the support of the Haihan people behind him. Tao Donglai even said to him in private that if the credit this time is not enough for him to be promoted, then next time he will send a hundred heads to Qiongzhou Mansion to report his merits, and if it doesn't work, two hundred, three hundred, and so on until he is promoted, anyway, the war on the Vietnamese side continues, and it is not difficult to ask Zheng for some enemy heads. Luo Shengdong didn't know very well where the Haihan people went to get the heads of so many Nanhai natives, but there was no need to doubt the credibility of what Tao Donglai said, even if he accumulated military merits, he should be promoted to the rank of thousand generals soon.

But the excitement that this promotion function brought to Luo Shengdong was even worse than the previous time when he escaped death and returned to Yazhou. At that time, Luo Shengdong thought that his promotion to the top of his life would be regarded as the pinnacle of his life, but then he found that the height he could achieve was directly related to the strength of the support of the Haihan people behind him. Not to mention the current President Qian, even if he is a future general or even a general soldier, Luo Shengdong now feels that there is no hope of taking office. But no matter how high the position is, he still can't get rid of the control of the Haihan, if he has two hearts one day, presumably the Haihan people will also launch a "pirate attack" without fear, so that his naval officer will die directly somewhere. Luo Shengdong was even thinking that today the Haihan people specially invited themselves to go to sea to watch this performance, probably because of the elements of deterrence and warning themselves.

After watching the "Discovery" test gun, the "Lightning" they were on sailed back, leaving another catamaran "Speed" to continue to follow the "Discovery" as an escort. There will be many tests on the ship's extreme performance in the future, and the Executive Committee does not want every Qiē of the "Discovery" to be exposed to the outside world too soon, and a moderate show of force will suffice.

After returning to the port, Tao Donglai and others met with Zhan Gui alone and listened to his journey to Champa for trading.

As the Executive Committee had predicted in advance, the 5,000 catties of salt that Zhan Gui brought this time were sold to the locals smoothly. Due to the Great War of the North and South Peninsula, the important salt-producing areas of the Indochina Peninsula were completely shut down, and although there were some small salt farms in Champang, the output was completely insufficient to supply the people, and the shortage of salt was even worse than that in North Vietnam. According to what Zhan Gui learned from local businessmen, in the next year, there will be at least hundreds of thousands of catties of salt in the Zhancheng area.

In addition, Zhan Gui also inquired about another matter that the Executive Committee was concerned about. At present, the area around Cam Ranh Bay does belong to the name of the Champa State, and due to the geographical environment of the natural harbor, there are still many fishermen living in the local area. However, due to the decline of the Champa royal family in recent years, it has lost its actual jurisdiction in many places, and it is said that the same is true in Cam Ranh Bay, where there is no official management of the Champa city, just like the Shengli Port before the landing of the crossing group.

For this reason, Zhan Gui did not come into contact with the official agency that managed Cam Ranh Bay, but he believed that there was no need to contact the official Champa officials to set up a business inn in the local area, and the officials did not even care about their own people, so they could not control outsiders.

In addition, there is another incident reported by Zhan Gui that has attracted the attention of the Executive Committee. A considerable number of Portuguese and French missionaries had already appeared in the Champa area, and a certain number of arquebuses had been imported into the area. Moreover, it is said that some missionaries had already gone north of Champa a few months earlier, under the jurisdiction of the Nguyen clan in South Vietnam, and it is believed that they should have made contact with the Nguyen regime by this time.

The infiltration activities of Western forces in the Indochina Peninsula were specifically proposed when the Black Earth Port colonization operation was planned at the beginning, and it also attracted sufficient attention from the Executive Committee. The coastal area in the southern part of the Indochina Peninsula is the choke point of the shipping channel between Victory Port and the Strait of Malacca, and from the perspective of development, the crossing group must first control this sea artery in order to ensure the safety of its future entry into Malacca and even the Indian Ocean. The presence of Western forces on the ground is undoubtedly a hidden threat to the Crossing Group, and these white-skinned colonists will never coexist peacefully with other races on the planet, as the encounter between black Africans and American Indians has fully demonstrated.

The Executive Committee does not expect them to adopt a different approach after they come to Asia, after all, dogs can't change ****, and after a few hundred years, the methods of Western countries have not changed much from the colonial period, but they have added "democracy" and "freedom" decorations. The Executive Committee will not have the slightest mercy for these competitors who will pose a threat to the Crossing Regime in the future, and it is the best security guarantee for the Crossing Group to extinguish the Western forces on the Indochina Peninsula.

Of course, in order to take such a move, it is necessary to establish a certain amount of local influence or to reach some kind of cooperative relationship with the local authorities. And I am afraid that such cooperation will not be able to rely only on smuggling salt.

In order to repay the information provided by Zhan Gui, the Executive Committee specially approved 5 tons of salt and a small amount of glassware for Zhan Gui, and he could sell them wherever he went, as long as he did not sell them locally on Qiongzhou Island. And the valuable commodities such as ebony, ivory, and rhino horn that Zhan Gui brought back from Zhancheng this time were directly placed in Shengli Port, and he did not plan to transport them back to the mainland.

Although the Haihan people did not reveal any intention of buying these things, Zhan Gui believed that even if he did not sell them to the Haihan people, he could make a lot of money by selling these things to mainland merchants in Shengli Port. The reason is very simple, the Haihan people only charge one thousandth of the transaction amount to each side as a handling fee for the mutual transactions of foreign merchants in Shengli Port, and the setting of zero tariff will soon attract more mainland merchants to trade here with goods, because now the entire East Asia and South Asia will only implement the policy of zero tariff on foreign goods, whether it is Yuegang, Guangzhou, Macao, Geranza, Manila or Batavia, as long as the cargo ship entering the port is carrying goods, it will be charged tariff.

The current zero-tariff policy of Shengli Port is irresistibly attractive to merchants, because there is no tariff cost, and the transaction price of goods sold and purchased here will be lower than that of other commercial ports, and the more valuable the goods, the more cost-effective. Zhan Gui has even begun to plan to move his original roots near Guangzhou to Shengli Port in Yazhou, and will carry out activities around this in the future, and he will be able to save a considerable amount of money every year on various taxes alone.

After the last group of merchants who visited Shengli Port returned to Guangzhou with all kinds of goods and novelties, Shengli Port, a small port in the South China Sea, which was originally unknown, immediately attracted the attention of maritime merchants.