You were made to farm, and now you're the emperor of an empire?

Chapter 54 Agatha

Roman had originally planned to boil water so that the slaves could wash themselves and change their clothes.

However, the town of Sige was so poor that it couldn't afford clothes for two hundred people.

The farmers here also grow flax, but the yield is only enough to mend their own tattered clothes.

A linen garment is worth about one copper coin, a coat and trousers are worth two copper coins, and all the slaves together are worth four gold coins.

Of course, it would be much cheaper to buy linen and process it into clothes yourself, but you can't do that in a short time.

Roman had no choice but to postpone the matter.

He just couldn't stand them no matter what, and he was going to teach them a lesson sooner or later.

The important thing now is to cover these thatches with grass.

Roman and Aaron Green worked together to compact the bundles of thatch, finally completing the last step.

Looking at the fully completed building, Roman felt a strong sense of accomplishment welling up inside him.

These livestock will play an immeasurable and enormous role in the future of Sige Town.

More than a month has passed since sowing, and the lush green wheat seedlings have long since sprouted from the soil, forming a vast, verdant expanse that stretches as far as the eye can see.

This dense planting method filled Barlow with both immense excitement and dread.

He felt that this land must be crazy, or he himself must be crazy, that clumps of lush green seedlings could grow from the soil.

It could be a curse from the devil, or a miracle from the gods.

Those rows, columns, furrows, and ridges were all filled with thriving wheat seedlings, almost as numerous as weeds and pasture grass. The sheer number of them was unsettling, several times denser than in the past.

Through his calculations on a cluster of wheat seedlings, he was astonished to discover that almost every single seed Roman planted had sprouted!
This discovery nearly made him faint; his common sense was shattered. He feared that the land was cursed and had sought out Roman several times for this reason.

Roman went over to take a look and found that the wheat seedlings were growing vigorously and in good condition, growing with all their might, so he applied a top dressing.

An additional 60-70 jin of fertilizer was added to each mu of land. The tillering rate of spring wheat is very low, but there is still a chance that it will tiller - one grain of wheat can grow into two ears of wheat.

Therefore, the more nutrients, the better.

To ensure utilization, topdressing is also done by trench application.

Use wooden farm tools to make a deep trench between the rows of wheat seedlings, sprinkle humus fertilizer into it, and then cover it with soil.

This ensures that most nutrients are absorbed by the wheat roots.

This step is actually quite simple.

There were 100 laborers working on the farmland, each with an average of 20 mu (approximately 3.3 hectares) of land. Even so, it took nearly ten days.

Intensive farming doesn't mean pushing people to their limits, but rather using more scientific and rational planting methods.

Therefore, compared to road construction and mining, the workload on the farmland is not heavy. They even have the capacity to continue composting. Although the composting efficiency is not high, they have still managed to compost more than ten tons of fertilizer intermittently over the past few days.

Because of the topdressing, all the fermented fertilizer was completely consumed.

Before the summer harvest, they need to pile up more fertilizer, and the additional animal power will plow out large areas of land.

The biggest problem now is the lack of iron, as both mining and tilling require a large amount of iron tools.

Roman found an iron ore deposit, but mining an open-pit salt mine was already so difficult, so he could forget about iron ore for the time being. Mining and smelting iron required hundreds of people.

Currently, we still have to rely on purchasing finished iron ingots from outside sources.

He told Morey about it, and Morey promised to bring him a considerable number of iron ingots the next time he came to Skye.

Iron does not take up cabin space. The reason he did not bring it last time was that iron ingots are difficult to acquire and are not always available. He needed to communicate with certain iron-producing lords in advance.

As long as we have steel and livestock.

These additional laborers will also play their respective roles.

The slaves of today know nothing about this.

While Roman was thatching the roof, they were wolfing down their food.

Roman did not intend to assign work to the slaves immediately. Instead, he allowed them to rest for three days until they had recovered. After that, he would assign them different jobs.

These slaves, displaced and having moved many times, were already starving.

The slave traders and the Daken could not possibly feed them anything good; they were given only inferior bread, coarse grains, and vegetable scraps.

Even so, these people still need at least four or five copper coins a day just to maintain their basic food rations.

If a slave is kept for one or two years, there is basically no room for resale; the food rations used to feed him are worth that much.

This is also why slave traders were eager to get rid of their slaves.

Every extra day of maintenance means an increase in sunk costs, and in the end, not only will you not make money, but you may even lose money.

Therefore, this meal is now a rare and luxurious treat for these slaves.

……

The way all the slaves ate was extremely gruesome.

They had been starving for too long and hadn't had a decent meal in a while.

The same applies to Agatha.

She followed the slave traders into the Black Iron Kingdom, and it has been half a month since she left Wan Dong's homeland.

In this unfamiliar land, her white hair stood out somewhat from her fellow countrymen.

Most people in Wandong have gray hair.

As a pure-blooded Winterborn, Agatha's hair had very few other colors, as pure as the snow and ice of the northern lands. But snow and ice cannot sustain a person.

The people of Wandong eked out a living on that vast land, struggling through thousands of years.

Their bodies and souls were nailed to that bitter, cold land when they were conceived.

The saying "People who endure winter cannot escape the northern lands" has existed since ancient times.

Only the guardian deity can withstand the blizzards from the far north and fight against the curse of the god of wind and snow.

The first King of Winter was a descendant of the guardian deity and considered himself the protector of the northern lands, but he later lost his divine power.

Even the modern-day king of winter's end is powerless when faced with the vast lands of the entire kingdom.

His decrees could not be transmitted beyond his directly controlled territories.

The powerful Duke of Wandong turned a blind eye to the King of Wandong, and most of the country was in a state of chaos with warlordism and numerous nobles.

They fought and waged war against each other, as if there was never an end to the war.

The god who controls the blizzard must have been too fond of that ancient land, so much so that he cast some kind of terrible curse upon it!

Only the Frostfolk can bear this divine favor.

That race claims to be descendants of ancient giants, born tall and brave.

In that ancient era, too ancient to be described in words, the true giants had vanished.

The descendants of giants once fought against some inhuman creature on the more distant northern ice plains, but later they migrated south, and it has been more than a hundred years since then.

That ancient tribe was conservative and stubborn, living a rather closed and barbaric life during their migrations, and their lifestyle was very different from that of humans.

They believed that the northern land had a soul and a will, and they worshipped certain ancient behemoths, regarding them as the guardians of their people.

From the perspective of the church, which believes in gods, it belongs to paganism and heresy.

The war broke out a month ago.

Agata still remembers what happened back then.

A group of fifty black-armored knights, riding tall, armored horses, swept through her village like a whirlwind.

The village priests claimed that the knights were demon hunters from the Papacy, who had come to the northern lands specifically to vanquish evil spirits.

The Church has been preaching in the northern lands for over two hundred years, but the Papacy knights have never ventured deep into this harsh and cold region.

But things have changed now.

Fifty demon hunters, led by a knight clad in silver armor and wielding a golden sword, charged toward the Frost Tribe.

The demon-hunting operation, which should have been a resounding success, was dealt a heavy blow.

The Frostfolk are not without the power to resist.

This ancient and mysterious race was more resilient than anyone else; they fought a small-scale war head-on against the church knights with their flesh and blood.

A witch named Shasta descended from the sky and nearly killed the dazzling Dawn Knight in the chaos of the battlefield.

The demon hunters' campaign, the frost people's counterattack, and the witches' entry into the war.

That war destroyed the entire camp, and it is said that the land remains frozen to this day, never to melt.

She had only heard about it; she didn't understand the situation, but her village had been affected.

To meet the supply needs of the demon hunters, the village priests announced that they would levy an additional demon hunter tax.

As a result, the already fragile family collapsed completely.

All their planted and stored grain was taken away by the church.

The husband pleaded desperately, but was knocked to the ground. Before he died, his bloodshot eyes were wide open, and he held her hand tightly.

Agatha, Agatha, with our children...

Run away, go find the guardian spirit of winter...

Escape from this land...

……

The King of Winter has lost the power of his guardian deity.

Only by escaping, only by finding a new guardian, can Wan Dongren have a chance to survive.

But they had no money, and it was impossible for them to cross that cold and vast land alone.

She and the other villagers were forced to sell themselves for free to slave traders and follow their caravans to the Black Iron Kingdom.

She had only heard that the Black Iron Lands were a kingdom founded by the conquerors 150 years ago.

Today, it is the richest and most powerful kingdom on the entire land.

If they came to such a land, they might not starve to death, and they might be able to survive.

But she felt completely lost about how to survive.

The furthest she had ever gone from home in her life was to work on the lord's estate.

Now, however, she has to survive in a distant foreign land with her newborn child.

During this time, she prayed day and night to the gods of the northern land.

She earnestly prayed that the noble lord who purchased them was kind and compassionate, and would be able to accommodate her and her children.

Will this prayer be fulfilled?
(End of this chapter)