Chapter 495
The group quickly returned to the council building.
With Chu Nan’s guidance, Jiang Chen came into the meeting room and sat at the head of the table.
Jiang Chen, Chu Nan, Zhao Gang, the ten council members, and fifteen industry representatives attended the meeting.
The meeting first started off with Chu Nan reporting the current work progress of the Sixth Street, and then Zhao Gang reported on the security of the city and the training progress of the Third Division. Following, Zhao Chenwu as the council representative summarized legislations that were passed in the last quarter and stats on Sixth Street’s population, production, and economy.
Reporting work was only a formality. The content was all handed to NAC logistics with the logistics head Wang Qin organizing the data into visuals and delivering them to Jiang Chen.
Although the dry content made Jiang Chen sleepy, he still pretended to be engaged. Since as the leader of the “country”, his attitude and authority was associated with the stability of the government system.
After the “formal” reporting ended, Jiang Chen coughed and picked up the hologram computer pen on the table and propped up the hologram screen. With the eyes in the room focused on him, he read the recruitment and military plan for the next quarter.
The focus of next quarter was on building the economy. Now that the internal and external threats were all removed, NAC won a period of a stable growth to consolidate their victory in Wanghai and Jia City.
The 2,000 recruitment target and the security tax remained unchanged.
The council members and industry representatives looked relieved when they heard the two keywords. When the decisions to increase the number of military contracts and the firearm reserves were announced, the military industry representative was delighted by the news. With the situation around Wanghai stabilizing, it may be good news for the other industries, but it was negative news for the military industry.
They were already satisfied that NAC didn’t decrease their order, but not only did they retained all existing orders, but they also increased their military spending which provided a positive boost to the military industry at the Sixth Street.
The reason why Jiang Chen introduced this decision was to make sure the military companies stayed alive and to adjust the Fishbone base’s production.
In the future, the military plant at the Fishbone base would gradually transition to focus on more advanced technology. For example, the combustion rockets used by “Fireball-1”, other than the key module and boosters, other parts would be outsourced to the Sixth Street military factory to produce. Not only would it increase the production of the rockets, but it could also decrease production cost which mutually benefited both parties.
The meeting took two hours before it was finally over. Everyone left the room with a smile on their face. At this meeting, they all more or less got what they wanted to gain.
“Are you not going to rest a bit?” Chu Nan looked at Jiang Chen drinking tea and asked.
“No need, I prefer to take care of everything all at once.”
The quarterly meeting ended, and there was still a meeting with merchants to discuss their partnership with NAC. It was something that could be done by Wang Qin, but since Jiang Chen was at the Sixth Street, he decided to take care of it.
‘Then I’ll arrange it. They are already in the waiting room,” Chu Nan said courteously and left the conference room.
“Don’t make them wait too long.”
…
A moment later, eight merchants followed Chu Nan into the conference room. They were mostly raw material suppliers in Wanghai with farms over 50 acreages in size. They were growing mutated fruits, tea, tobacco, and a recently introduced sweet pea that could not be directly ingested, but it could be used to produce sugar like sugar cane.
Before they used to produce Carm tree sap, but because of the mass scale production at Shenxiang and due to the saturation of the Sixth Street’s plastic and rubber supply, they decreased the production in that area and became the industrial raw suppliers for NAC.
With the NAC food “production” ramping up, the demand of nutrient supply also took a big hit. With one of its ingredients mutated fruit decreasing in demand, the farm owners all suffered financially.
Right now around the conference table, the eight merchants anxious exchanged eye contact with each other as they were uncertain about what Jiang Chen was going to say.
“I believe all of you should know that I plan to discuss a partnership opportunity.”
“What kind of partnership?” A merchant stood up and questioned somewhat tensely.
“No need to stand up, this is only a casual meeting, just sit.” Jiang Chen signaled him to sit down and then tapped his own shoulder gently. A hologram image appeared on the conference table, “We are discussing an opportunity in livestock.”
“This is?” Looking at the image on the table, the merchants had a variety of expressions.
Some were shocked, some were intrigued, and some were contempt…
Without bothering with the expression on the merchants’ faces, Jiang Chen looked at the creature on the hologram similar to a wild boar and introduced,
“Long Haired Pig, an artificially created mutant designed by my research institute through genetic engineering.”
“Artificially created mutant?” The expressions on the merchants’ faces were interesting.
“The fur could be used to produce clothes, and meat is consumable. Most importantly, its brain could form crystals without the consequence of hostility.” Jiang Chen smiled.
To Jiang Chen’s surprise, the merchants didn’t look interested at all. Instead, they looked troubled.
“Mutant as livestock? We attempted this before, but the higher amount of crystals contained in the mutants, the higher the food they ingested. And right now, crystals are not worth the money. If it is just about producing meat, the doubled-headed cows raised are more than enough.”
“What’s the meat quality compared to the mutated cow,” a merchant rushed to ask a more critical question.
The Double-headed Cow’s meat texture was terrible and tasted like chewing on sand. But to the typical people that could not afford fresh meat, the meat of the double-head cow was not a bad choice.
Jiang Chen waited for the merchants to bring up their questions and put up three fingers.
“I will summarize your questions with three points.”
“First, the Long Haired Pig is easy to raise. The feed mostly consists of mutated fruits, as well as an appropriate amount of catalyst.
“Second, there is no need to worry about crystal output. A three-month growth cycle with a single pig producing 70-80 crystals.
“Third, although the meat quality is not comparable to the pre-war livestock raised by NAC, compared to the mutated cow, it is much better.”
When Jiang Chen said these four sentences, only fervor was left on the faces of the merchants.
Could be fed with mutated fruits.
To the farm owners on the brink of bankruptcy, the only thing they didn’t lack was mutated fruits!