I, the prince in distress, send money

Chapter 61 Production

Chris is busy.

He was busy planning the water conservancy of Beach Town, formulating the consumption of the big pot meal, promoting a new mayor, and formulating food consumption and replenishment plans.

The population of Bichi Town is not large, with only 2,729 permanent residents. There are three natural villages nearby, each with about 100 to 200 residents, which is almost negligible compared to the town.

However, it seems impossible to really ignore them, because according to reports from players who have visited these three villages, the villagers in these three villages get their daily food from hunting in addition to farming.

Among the three villages with a population of more than 300 people, there are more than 150 young and middle-aged people, and among these young and middle-aged people there are more than 100 hunters who are good at using hunting bows and traps.

They are all natural mountain infantrymen.

The proportion of young and middle-aged people in the three villages is frighteningly high, just like in Biqi Town.

If you want to know why it is so high... During famine, the first people to starve to death are the elderly who have lost most of their ability to work, followed by women with weak labor force, then children, and finally men.

Chris has arranged for people to recapture them.

This is easy. These villagers have also suffered from the passage of the Republic's grain collection team. Although they can hunt, in the spring season, there are not only few wild animals, but also very thin.

No matter how hard the hunters tried, they could not hunt enough food to feed the entire village.

As a result, food was in dire straits in these hunter villages. Even a bandit gang near Bichi Town fled the famine and surrendered to the Bichi Town militia to beg for food.

These bandits were originally hiding well. Although they lacked food and clothing, they could barely survive. They also knew that life down in the mountains was extremely poor.

Therefore, these twenty or so bandits planned to hide in the mountains for a spring and then come down to rob the valley in the summer.

As a result, they were attacked one night after hiding well.

Chris originally thought that players attacked them because there were many players hanging around in the mountains near Beach Town recently.

What are they going to do?
They went hunting, catching pheasants, rabbits, and even caught an unlucky tiger.

Players are so active, so it is normal to run into bandits... However, it was not them who did it.

It was the work of the defeated soldiers who attacked the bandits hiding in the cave at night and took away their stored food.

As a result, if the more than 20 surviving bandits did not want to starve to death in the mountains or eat the corpses of their companions, they had no choice but to run down and surrender.

Some of them were originally from Bichi Town, so these bandits now knew the situation in Bichi Town and knew that this was the only way to survive.

As for where this group of defeated soldiers fled to... several interested players have already chased them.

Chris didn't have time to care about where a group of stray dogs went, as long as they didn't cause trouble for him.

He is really busy now.

Isaac had taken twenty old friends, ten horses, two hundred kilograms of brown sugar, and some miscellaneous but valuable industrial products to climb the mountain, preparing to return to the El Province of the Bohemian Empire.

What are you going back for?
Go back and settle the dividends from smuggling arms with your partners.

Chris needed gunpowder, specifically, saltpeter.

The task Chris gave to Isaac was to find a way to buy enough saltpeter in Bohemia without endangering himself.

The imperial nobleman named Popoli is a good path and should be maintained.

There is no shortage of charcoal here, and as for sulfur, Chris asked the locals, and they knew that there was sulfur at the bottom of a volcanic lake on the top of a high mountain five kilometers away.

Chris sent players to climb the mountain to take a look. Although the sulfur purity was not very good and it was difficult to mine, it was still a mine.

Chris has arranged for two players to take dozens of townspeople, carrying food, masks, shovels and other tools, to climb the mountain and mine.

Sulfur mining is a tough job. Long-term exposure to sulfur can cause irreversible damage to the miners' bodies. Therefore, Chris treated the miners well. They received twenty silver dollars and two food coupons a month, two days off a week, and a daily diet of rice and a certain amount of canned meat and eggs. Fresh vegetables were difficult to deliver, so they ate dehydrated vegetables at will.

Food stamps are a kind of grain purchase certificate invented by Chris. Only with this thing can the townspeople buy food in the supply and marketing cooperative.

If you only have silver dollars but no food coupons, you can buy other things, such as daily necessities and clothes, but you cannot buy food.

The reason why Chris did this was simple: food was scarce.

The player's recharge amount is limited, and when Chris buys grains from the Internet and then sells them to the townspeople at the price of one silver dollar for five kilograms, this price is actually a loss.

This is equivalent to Chris using his own money to subsidize food prices and forcibly raise the monetary value of the silver dollar.

Therefore, Chris really cannot relax the restrictions and allow townspeople and players to buy food at will.

If there is a smart guy among them who hoards food and resells it, Chris will lose a lot of money.

Therefore, the trade of food must be restricted, otherwise Chris will not be able to fill this huge hole by himself.

At present, the entire Beach Town and three hunter villages have been combined by Chris to form two production brigades and three production squadrons.

The first brigade, led by several players skilled in civil engineering, was using hoes and shovels to dig canals and build small reservoirs.

The second brigade went to reclaim wasteland and plant famine-stricken crops such as potatoes and sweet potatoes.

Chris bought their seeds from an online shopping platform. Although this is only a temporary solution and does not address the root cause, potatoes and sweet potatoes can only be grown for a few seasons before their yields are massively reduced due to excessive accumulation of toxins in the roots.

I heard that there are ways to detoxify potatoes and sweet potatoes to solve the problem of reduced production, but this is not something Chris needs to consider now.

Farming is a very hard job, especially when Chris was unable to provide livestock such as cattle and horses for the Second Production Brigade, and they could only rely on their own hands to open up the wasteland, which became even more difficult.

However, no matter how difficult it is, the farmers in Biqi Town have to work. Those who are lazy will have no food to eat and can only eat porridge.

The big pot meal does not mean that everyone eats the same thing. Those who work well and are in a good position eat rice, with some minced meat and vegetable soup at every meal, while those who are lazy drink porridge as long as they are not starving.

Chris doesn't keep idlers.

As for the three production teams, one team went to climb mountains and dig sulfur, and the second team went to burn charcoal. They all had food and accommodation, as well as food coupons.

The third squadron was the hunter squadron. They were responsible for hunting in the mountains to hunt furs and meat for Chris.

Hunting in the spring is definitely against hunting rules on ordinary days, but now it is a time of famine and people are starving to death, so Chris doesn't care too much.

Apart from asking hunters to avoid hunting pregnant wild animals and small animals, other concerns can be put aside for the time being.

Hunting always yields some meat, which can offset some of Chris's food expenses.

Chris tried his best to discover talents among the players. You know what, there are quite a few players with special skills.

Some of them were once top students at an agricultural university, and Chris entrusted them to be agricultural technical officers of the production brigade, allowing them to go in and use their talents and take charge of everyone's business.

Feces and urine, if collected and fermented, are natural fertilizers, and a certain amount of saltpeter can also be obtained by doing so.

So, the town of Beach had public toilets for the first time in its history.

Some elderly people, women, and disabled people who are unable to perform high-intensity labor have become toilet managers, specifically responsible for supervising the places where townspeople discharge feces and urine, including the buttocks of livestock such as chickens, ducks, dogs, cows, and horses.

Although the pressure was great, Chris did his best to provide everyone with work and enough food to eat.

At this moment, bad news was brought back by players who were out exploring.

(End of this chapter)