The fleet transporting the slaves arrived at the Weishan Commandery docks, and the news reached Luo Chong at once. Luo Chong quickly issued orders for their allocation.
The slaves brought back this time numbered more than thirty-one thousand six hundred. Among them were over twelve thousand able-bodied men. Of the nearly twenty thousand remaining, more than six thousand were women, over two thousand were old men, and the remaining ten thousand or so were underage youths, though most were already over ten years old.
As for the younger children, they did not venture out on their own, so Qu Bing had naturally had no chance to capture them. Most of the children under ten were still in the Cannibal Tribe's villages and had not come out.
According to the plan previously discussed with Lin Fei and Big Strength, their slave requirements had to be met first. Half of the Han Tribe's heavy industry had to be transferred south, and with the current workload of producing all kinds of engineering vehicles, the demand for skilled workers was growing by the day.
Lin Fei's idea was to transfer all the miners in Xingang Commandery to the basic factories as workers, such as the Steel Mill and Cement Plant. Then, all the current workers at the Steel Mill and Cement Plant would be sent to higher-level machinery plants for training and study. The vacated mining positions would temporarily be filled by slaves.
However, this was not a long-term solution. The Han Tribe's mining technology would eventually have to be upgraded. Once this batch of skilled workers had been trained, the research institute's machinery plants could expand production and mass-produce excavators and loaders. With these large machines, the slaves could be replaced again in the future.
As for how to settle the replaced slaves,