Chapter 1 The Feeling of Time and Space Dislocation

Ye Tao had been experiencing a sense of time and space dislocation these past few days. It wasn't just because he was now the Yunzhou Pacification Commissioner and required to play an important role in the Seven Seas Trading Company's operations, but also because the more the Seven Seas Trading Company developed, the closer it became to politics, and the higher the technical requirements became. When Ye Tao's center of activity was still Yicheng, when the Ye Family Workshop was still a small woodworking shop that also took on a lot of farm tool repair work, he had dabbled in things like threshers and winnowing machines as a hobby. It wasn't until he became the Yunzhou Pacification Commissioner and vigorously developed agriculture in southern Yunzhou that these things were dug out again by technicians in the workshop who had been there for a long time. The reason was simply that the area around Yicheng didn't lack manpower or animal power, but Yunzhou did. Being able to free a person from heavy, repetitive labor to do work that could generate greater value, all kinds of work that could greatly reduce labor intensity was necessary. And in Nanyang, labor was even scarcer. As long as something was efficient enough to be worth several people and its reliability was not an issue, the stewards of the Seven Seas Trading Company would not hesitate at all.

In addition, many of Ye Tao's ideas and suggestions on governance were being verified one by one in practice. Establishing a strong and complete security system for the immigrants was initially Ye Tao's suggestion. Ye Tao could restrain himself with humanitarian and other norms, but he did not impose his ideas on the stewards of the Seven Seas Trading Company. He proposed the concept of "total cost of ownership," and he found several stewards and accountants within the Seven Seas Trading Company who had handled some practical matters to create an economic model. This economic model compared the cost of establishing a strong and orderly security system with the cost of not having such a security system and needing to continuously recruit immigrants from the Central Plains and transport them to the area for resettlement. From the immediate perspective, establishing a security system might not be the most economical means, but if the Seven Seas Trading Company was really prepared to operate Nanyang well and develop it for a long time, establishing a security system for the immigrants would be more economical. And whether this system was established or not would make a big difference in attracting people when recruiting more immigrants.

When they saw those immigrants who hadn't been doing well in various places and had made up their minds to risk their lives, although they were still working hard to reclaim land, they had genuine smiles. Seeing that many people had even begun to feel a sense of belonging to this land in Nanyang that was imbued with their sweat, the stewards of the trading company felt a great sense of accomplishment.

Although Ye Tao felt that he already had a lot on his plate, he agreed to the trading company's request. On the one hand, this was because of Old Master Qi and the Qi family's relationship. In the early years in Yicheng, the Ye Family Workshop was able to grow and thrive thanks to Old Master Qi's care. For Old Master Qi, it was just a few words, but it could save the then-small Ye Family Workshop and Yijia Home Furnishings a lot of trouble. And from the time Ye Tao and Old Master Qi joined forces to establish the Tiansuo Watch Shop and made the Tiansuo brand a synonym for first-class timekeeping tools in this era, Old Master Qi always expressed his interest in whatever business Ye Tao wanted to do, and always helped in various ways, big and small. Even if none of this was mentioned, the Qi family had spent a lot of effort just on maintaining Ye Tao's studio for various experiments and collecting all kinds of materials, tools, and even strange objects for Ye Tao. It could be said that the Qi family and the Ye family had been firmly tied together since their cooperation on the Tiansuo Watch Shop.

And the current significance of the Seven Seas Trading Company was far more than just a merchant group. Ye Tao really had no reason not to contribute more. In fact, Old Master Qi had always wanted to deepen the relationship between the Qi family and the Ye family. Of course, Old Master Qi wasn't shameless enough to stuff his granddaughter to Ye Tao as a concubine (it was estimated that Old Master Qi also understood that in Ye Tao's strong lineup of wives and concubines, this probably wouldn't have much advantage), but it was said that Old Master Qi was considering letting this granddaughter serve Ye Laogeng... When this idea was finally dismissed because Ye Laogeng sternly refused, Old Master Qi finally placed the possibility of marriage between the two families on the next generation. Now, Old Master Qi was paying more attention to the bellies of Ye Tao's wives and concubines than Ye Tao or anyone else, just waiting for Ye Tao to have children, so he could directly send his youngest granddaughter, who was currently only three and a half months old, or the child of his granddaughter who had just married for half a year and was pregnant with what experienced midwives said would definitely be a boy, to Yunzhou to arrange a marriage with Ye Tao... As for seniority, it didn't matter anyway.

However, Ye Tao's agreement to contribute more to the management and decision-making of the Seven Seas Trading Company completely trapped him. The Seven Seas Trading Company's various preparations were indeed thorough, and the development and operation of various businesses were well-organized, with internal and external financial flow management that had the style of a modern enterprise. But this also meant that the Seven Seas Trading Company had become the commercial group with the most massive internal documents in this time and space. This time, coming to the meeting, just the various plans, accounts, implementation details, and feedback, as well as the files compiled from various after-sales and technical problems reported from various places, filled a whole Huya warship. In order to understand the current scale, characteristics, and possible problems of the Seven Seas Trading Company, Ye Tao had to at least roughly look at the more important things, right? And to be able to assist in making important decisions at this important meeting, he had to have a relatively in-depth understanding of the relevant content, right? So, these days, Ye Tao had been almost every day rotating in a process of reading documents, plenary meetings, internal small meetings, and sleeping. Oh, and also one cup after another of coffee. Coffee originally produced in the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, medium-roasted, incomparably fragrant.

Documents, meetings, coffee in a mug... nothing was more like Ye Tao's original time and space than these. In fact, Ye Tao was quite adapted to this work rhythm, and this work rhythm seemed to be necessary for the Ye family. In the meetings of the Seven Seas Trading Company, although it couldn't be said that there was no infighting at all, there were still some merchants, especially those who weren't very strong and worried that the large investment in Nanyang would affect their usual operations, or large merchants who felt that it was not good to attract too much attention, who were still making some small excuses, but overall, the efficiency was very high. It should be known that the various arrangements of the Seven Seas Trading Company in Nanyang now were even more complicated than the affairs of any state in Dongping and Chunnan other than Yunzhou, but everyone had actually discussed the general terms in just a few days. Not only that, but the Seven Seas Trading Company, while implementing various affairs in Nanyang, which was now Yazhou, also had to ensure the profitability of the entire trading company and its various members, because only by ensuring profitability could it continuously transfuse blood into the development of Yazhou, and could guarantee that everyone's financial resources wouldn't be exhausted due to the continuous investment in Yazhou over the years.

The Seven Seas Trading Company decided to divide the overall management organization of the trading company into two departments: the Southern Bureau and the Northern Bureau. The Southern Bureau mainly coordinated the construction and security of Yazhou, and would begin to secretly carry out military training and garrisoning matters, whether to provide assistance for the Samir family's war of national independence, or to consider attacking Chunnan from both sides in the future, full preparations had to be made. And the main work of the Northern Bureau was the original business operations, constantly expanding the current various product lines of the Seven Seas Trading Company, consolidating the various industries directly under the trading company or belonging to members of the trading company, researching new types of warships and other types of weapons, and actively recruiting people willing to immigrate to Yazhou. And at Ye Tao's request, the recruited refugees could also choose to go to Yunzhou.

Naturally, associated with such a scale of reorganization was bound to be the cleaning up of internal positions. In the past few years, many members of the trading company had chosen to convert their industries into shares of the trading company, that is, to choose to be acquired and become wholly-owned industries of the trading company. And such a choice, with the increasing growth of the trading company, now looked very wise, and many members of the trading company were considering this choice. Now, the Seven Seas Trading Company was increasingly resembling a modern joint-stock enterprise, and in this time and space, probably not the Fortune 500 or anything, it wouldn't be a big problem to say that the Seven Seas Trading Company was the world's number one purely commercial organization... After all, the Samir family was conducting a "management buyout" of the countries in their gulf region, and was transforming into a powerful group integrating politics and economics. And in order to coordinate internal decision-making and decision-making power issues, the Seven Seas Trading Company created a system where a scheme could only be implemented if both the share of equity and the number of voting members exceeded half, fully valuing the rights of minority shareholders, and also formulated a series of special voting rights, veto rights, and other systems to solve the possibility of minority shareholders rebelling.

The meeting continued until the tenth day, and Ye Tao was becoming more and more into the swing of things, behaving very much in line with his identity as the newly appointed Chief Steward of the Northern Bureau of the Seven Seas Trading Company. But Feng Zi, who had been assisting Ye Tao with various preparations all along, couldn't take it anymore.

"My lord, how can you treat me like this?... Were all your actions back then false?" One night, finally exhausted and overwhelmed, Feng Zi said to Ye Tao with tears in his eyes and an incomparably resentful tone.

"Don't! Don't be like this..." Ye Tao's first reaction was to look around, and only after seeing that there was no one around did he say with relief, "It's good that no one's here, or people would think I did something to you. Why are you talking like this? I remember... I remember you don't have any hobbies in that area, right?"

Feng Zi suddenly said angrily, "My lord, shouldn't these things not need to be rushed to be fully implemented in ten days or half a month? How big of a mess is this? It's good to have a plan, but you don't have to tire yourself out like this, right? On this island, I wouldn't dare to say there's nothing good to eat, but at least there's a boatload of good food and drink, and fresh fruits and vegetables are delivered every day, which is better than we live in Yunzhou. But we don't have time to sleep well every day, how can this be? When I followed you, my lord, what was I planning on as your strategist? Wasn't it just that everyone was lazy and comfortable, and we didn't have to be busy with those unnecessary things all day long? And you? You showed your true colors after tricking me into your hands..."

Uh... Ye Tao didn't know what to say, this Feng Zi was indeed crazy, his words were becoming more and more unreliable, and he even blurted out words that were so ambiguous to the extreme as "tricking him into his hands." However, Feng Zi's pretentious performance did indeed completely divert Ye Tao's attention from those documents.

"Okay, what exactly do you want to say?" Facing someone like Feng Zi, Ye Tao couldn't get angry no matter what.

Feng Zi rolled his eyes and sighed, "My lord, I'm here to tell you. The wind is picking up outside. An old helmsman on the ship said that it seems that this year's hurricane has come early. The old helmsman said that this kind of hurricane will only last for three to five days, so it's nothing to worry about. However, we probably won't be able to leave Jiaoyayu these days and return to Yuhang. Weren't you planning to finish the meeting the day after tomorrow? Now there are at least one or two more days, so take your time. My lord... it's nothing if you're a little tired, but I need to rest. Look at me, I haven't slept well for a few days, and my skin is rough."