Industrial Layout

Year 19, February 19.

It had not been long since the Lantern Festival.

After more than ten days of training on the Calamian Islands, the soldier, Yang Tiancheng, had finally completed his training and become a qualified custom-made soldier.

He quickly took his bodyguards, who had all put on a few pounds, to Manila to catch a flight back to Borneo, Malaysia.

Meanwhile,

the Qingye Group's managers, led by Ma Chi, Liu Zhifan, and Yang Mengjiao, were also studying relevant subjects.

Ma Chi, in particular, had to impersonate Li Qingye. Although his appearance could be adjusted using Parasitic Artificial Skin, he still needed to learn certain professional knowledge and about Li Qingye's personal relationships.

They had spent the past few days studying and adapting.

Some of them also needed fake identities. Yang Mengjiao, for example, was being disguised as a Chinese Brazilian and was learning Portuguese and American English.

Fortunately, Biochips were constantly being upgraded, giving them increasingly powerful data-processing and storage capabilities. For managers and soldiers, learning a language was basically no challenge at all.

Yang Mengjiao could even speak Portuguese with an authentic Brazilian accent and knew Brazilian customs and culture inside out. Even Brazilians who spoke with her would have a hard time noticing anything unusual.

On the same day Yang Tiancheng returned to Malaysia,

Liu Zhifan, Ma Chi, and Yang Mengjiao each took a group of people and traveled in separate batches to Yangon, a southern coastal city in Hongsawad.

The Security Department also sent a deputy director to lead a team to secretly support the Qingye Group in Hongsawad.

Of course, the Security Department had its own mission as well: to infiltrate every part of Hongsawad. In areas where the Qingye Group established a presence, for instance, it would be best to turn the local powers into "one of their own," which would prevent a lot of trouble.

Limanan Bay, southern Luzon Island.

Of the 100,000 mu of sea farms that Haitian Agriculture had invested in earlier, around 60 percent were now ready for production. Some of the supporting extraction plants had also been completed, including the Carrageenan extraction plant.

With the company's cash flow increasing, the Fernando family now completely under its control, and the Lopez family mostly consolidated, the Homo sapiens Company once again increased its investment.

It planned to build 600,000 mu of sea farms in three bays in southern Luzon Island before the end of the year.

In addition, it planned to build three large-scale insect farms: one for crickets, one for locusts, and one for mealworms.

The reason for setting up insect farms was, naturally, to ensure Luzon's food supply.

After all, Luzon's population had already exceeded 100 million, and feeding so many people required an enormous amount of food.

Even with Luzon's tropical climate and the conditions for growing rice three times a year, the area under rice cultivation was tiny after ABCD had joined forces to cripple Luzon's agriculture. It was nowhere near enough to meet domestic demand.

This situation had little effect on the powerful families. They had their own plantations and the money to import food.

But ordinary people were out of luck. Whenever anything happened to international grain prices, food prices in Luzon fluctuated too—and by a huge margin.

Even Old Du could do nothing about it. He wanted to raise the rate of food self-sufficiency, but he had few cards to play.

Whenever Old Du tried to push through related policies, either the opposition stirred up trouble or ABCD flooded the market with cheap imports.

If he wanted to stand up to ABCD, there were only two options.

One was to buy large quantities of grain from other Southeast Asian countries to counter ABCD's monopoly on food in Luzon. This would treat the symptoms, but not the cause.

The other was to stockpile enough grain, then quickly shut the country's doors while sharply increasing subsidies for rice cultivation.

Clearly, these measures required considerable authority and sufficient financial reserves. Old Du simply lacked the means.

Although the Homo sapiens Company did not plan to confront ABCD head-on, it had no intention of sitting by and waiting for disaster, either.

Its earlier moves into Hongsawad were also intended to safeguard Luzon's food security. Hongsawad was a major rice exporter, making it a perfect complement to Luzon.

Meanwhile, Li Qingye also planned to use technological means to increase Luzon's food production.

One part of this plan was the insect-farming industry.

Of all the animals humans could raise, insects had the highest feed-conversion ratio.

For the same amount of feed used to produce protein, insects yielded roughly twelve times as much protein as beef cattle.

Insects also emitted far less methane and carbon dioxide than pigs, cattle, and sheep.

White-feathered chickens also had a good feed-conversion ratio, of course, but they came with two problems.

One was that their breeding stock was controlled by Western companies, leaving them vulnerable to being cut off. The other was that white-feathered chickens were extremely fragile. Antibiotics were almost unavoidable in their farming, and poultry were susceptible to many infectious diseases—some of which could wipe out an entire farm once they took hold.

Insects had none of these problems.

The Homo sapiens Company could breed its own stock. Insect farming basically required no antibiotics, cutting costs considerably.

In addition, insects did not require high-quality feed. Some could even digest cellulose and lignin, which pigs, cattle, and sheep struggled to digest.

This expanded the range of possible feed sources. Luzon might have little else, but it had no shortage of weeds and trees.

What was more, Li Qingye planned to modify certain algae and use genetically modified seaweed with a more complete nutritional profile as the main feed source for the insects. Combined with withered branches and leaves from Luzon's plantations, the insect farms could be entirely self-sufficient in feed.

The Homo sapiens Company was also setting up mushroom farms to supplement the food supply. Mushrooms could also serve as insect feed.

Garbage recycling plants and methane plants, meanwhile, could supply gas and some fermented fertilizer.

Insects would provide protein, seaweed would provide starch and sugar, mushrooms would replace some vegetables, and rice from Hongsawad would supplement Luzon's own crops and plantations. Together, they would be more than enough to meet Luzon's domestic needs.

Once the Homo sapiens Company completed its plans, what could ABCD do? At worst, it could keep fighting a price war.

Li Qingye was even preparing ways to turn the tables. If ABCD dared to resort to underhanded tactics, he wouldn't mind learning a thing or two from the DuPont family's signature playbook.

The sea farms, insect farms, mushroom farms, deep-processing plants, and methane plants planned in recent months were all part of the Homo sapiens Company's security strategy.

Through these interconnected industrial projects, the plan was to build them all over the next two years and create an industrial chain exclusive to the Homo sapiens Company.

As long as the company controlled its own food and energy supplies, even America could not shake its foothold in Luzon by conventional means.

Unless America planned to tear off the mask and openly turn against it. If so, Li Qingye would make Hongsawad his headquarters, then turn Luzon into a meat grinder and make America bleed its last drop of blood across the Luzon Archipelago.

Besides, he had more than one trump card.

If Li Qingye were pushed too far, he could always unleash an "Umbrella" scenario in North America.

He refrained from using those trump cards casually only because he still had certain limits. That did not stop him from researching such things; the more technology he had in reserve, the better.

Whether he used them was one thing. Whether he had them was another.