445: Chapter 445: Leave 15%, may Mazu bless you.

Below the signature line, two empty spaces were left. One for Malaysia, and one for Indonesia.

"This initiative requires the three countries—and potentially five in the future—to jointly manage the Strait of Malacca. The management rights will not belong to any single party. However, the premise is: the management model must abolish the old agreement signed between the British colonial government and the Federation of Malaya in 1948. At the same time, Chinese and Tamil must be included as official languages for the Strait region. In Penang and Malacca, Chinese maritime schools must be re-established. They will use Chinese textbooks and teach navigation and maritime law degrees."

"Chinese maritime schools?" Tunku's eyebrows nearly jumped when he heard those words.

"Your fishermen have been driven away by the British and rammed by Malaysian patrol boats for the past hundred years. Why don't they leave? Because their ancestral halls are in Penang, their ancestral graves are in Malacca, and their Mazu temples face the Strait. When they sing boat-mending songs in Hokkien—your port authority only uses English forms to issue fishing boat licenses. How do you expect them to fill them out?"

Zhang Cheng flipped the joint management initiative to the fourth page, Article 13—all official documents within the scope of this agreement must be published in Malay, English, Chinese, and Tamil simultaneously, with the Chinese version serving as the authentic text of equal validity.

"Do you dare to sign this?" The legal advisor from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Malaysia raised his glasses, his voice laced with thorns.

"I don't need you to sign it." Zhang Cheng looked into his eyes. "Your constitution has never stated that English is the sole official language—that was an administrative order from the colonial era, not the constitution. I'm just helping you change that administrative order. You don't have to accept it—but your ship won't be using the Strait of Malacca then. Go around. The Sunda Strait. I can't even be bothered to jam the navigation charts for the reefs there."

Tunku pushed his chair back, the legs scraping out a sharp sound.

"Mr. President, your proposal is equivalent to asking Malaysia to abandon the nation-building model of the past one hundred and twenty years."

"Mr. Tunku. You say 'abandon'—may I ask, in what year was your country established? 1957. Who built it for you? The British. The British signed two pieces of paper in London. The first acknowledged your independence. The second locked the Strait of Malacca in a safe, with the combination kept in a Whitehall strongroom."

He emphasized the last word—"Your 'nation' has been incomplete since day one. Today, I am simply placing the missing piece in front of you. The choice is yours."

The holographic projection cut out for three seconds after this sentence. Zhang Cheng's image vanished from across the conference table, leaving only the situational map flickering on the screen. The initiative document in front of Tunku remained on page thirteen, where the article number was Article 21—regarding the distribution ratio of joint law enforcement power in the Strait region: the Federation of Myanmar holds 45 percent, the ASEAN joint law enforcement fleet holds 40 percent, and 15 percent is reserved as an autonomous share for indigenous community patrol vessels.

This 15 percent was left for the fishermen.

Tunku looked at the number, his Adam's apple bobbing again.

The door to the conference room behind him was pushed open. Wu Zhiming walked in wearing a navy blue mayor's uniform, carrying a tea tray—a purple clay teapot with five cups, the tea a deep red Pu'er. He placed the tray on the conference table, poured tea into each cup, and then placed a slip of paper next to the fourth cup.

On the slip of paper were four handwritten Chinese characters, the ink just dried: "May Mazu Bless Us."

"Mayor Wu—what does this mean?" Tunku stared at the slip of paper.

Wu Zhiming placed the purple clay teapot back on the tray and looked up. His voice was not loud, devoid of emotion, as if answering a routine inquiry at a customs window:

"My adoptive father's mother took a fishing boat from Xiamen to Penang in 1938. When the boat reached the middle of the Strait, it encountered a storm, and the whole boat nearly capsized. She knelt on the deck, shouting for Mazu toward the pitch-black sky. Then the storm stopped. When she reached the shore, she only had three silver dollars and a piece of paper with her name written on it in her pocket—'Lin Xiuying.' In 1965, her son was thrown into Changi Prison in Singapore on charges of illegal assembly. The theme of the assembly was—Chinese is not a dialect. Her name was the last Chinese name written on that paper from the boat that the Malaysian immigration bureau could accept. Later, everyone forced her to change it to an English one. She refused. She said Mazu knew her Chinese name; if she changed it, Mazu wouldn't be able to find her."

Tunku lowered his head. The Pu'er tea in the purple clay cup in front of him was still steaming. The slip of paper next to the cup, inscribed with "May Mazu Bless Us," was lifted slightly at one corner by the air conditioning.

"Please tell Mr. President—" Tunku's voice was very slow, as if every word was squeezed out from between his ribs, "I will take the joint management initiative back to Putrajaya. I cannot guarantee that Parliament will pass it. But I guarantee—this document will be read in its entirety on the debate floor. Word for word."

Wu Zhiming pushed the last cup toward Zhang Taiwen. After putting the cup down, he withdrew his hand and said one last sentence, not to the Malaysian representative, but to the lingering aroma of Pu'er in the air—

"I never met my grandmother. She died in the detention center of Changi Prison. The person who collected her body said she was clutching a piece of paper, and on it were written just these four characters."

He turned and walked out of the conference room. The door closed behind him, and the three holographic screens hovering on the ceiling of Conference Room B07 simultaneously went dark.

Three seconds later, a sentence lit up on the screens again—the meteorological data pulled by the system from the clouds above the Strait of Malacca had been replaced. What was displayed there now was not wind speed or wave height, but an old photograph.

1948, off the port of Penang. The fishing boats rammed and capsized by a British gunboat.

The negotiations at Longcheng Base continued for another hour. The point-by-point debate regarding the distribution ratio of law enforcement power was repeatedly pulled back by Tunku to the clause: "15 percent reserved as an autonomous share for indigenous community patrol vessels." Zhang Cheng did not concede.

At 5:40 PM, the holographic projection cut off. Zhang Cheng stood up from his seat in the Naypyidaw office, walked behind his desk, and facing another screen, issued the executive order that would formally take effect at 6:15 PM—"Memorandum on Navigation Rights in the Historical Waters of the Strait of Malacca."

He pressed his finger onto the command issuance line for biometric authentication. Within 0.4 seconds, the system completed a triple verification of iris, fingerprint, and voiceprint, then pushed this order to all connected nodes of the Shuguang Cloud.

At 6:45 PM that day, the twilight at Longcheng Base spread over from the direction of Changi Village, coating the three nuclear-powered aircraft carriers at Berth 03 in a dim golden light. Cranes were still unloading the last batch of supplies, and the shadows of the crane booms slanted across the concrete ground like a row of gun barrels turning.