There can't be a Harvest Moon in the RimWorld.

When they arrived at the tavern in Sabre Bay, it was already full of slaves rescued from the ship.

In their eyes, even a tavern without doors was incredibly peaceful and comfortable. They lay in a row using blankets and bedding left behind by the pirates, but kept their eyes closed, as if they needed to slowly adjust to even the faint light of the torches.

Just like how they adapted to their sudden freedom.

There's so much to do at Sabre Bay right now, it's like squeezing a toad out of a brain tonic. These little bosses are even busier.

Old Six's team found several batteries inside the spaceship and are trying to disassemble them. Anyway, this spaceship is a Frankenstein's monster, so I'll just let them do whatever they want with it.

Zero Lion's squad was in the tavern, distributing water and food, but progress was slow because the children inside were still gripped by fear. So Lion tried to soothe the young children among the slaves by telling them a fairy tale about a hundred princes pursuing one princess.

The story's style is normal at the beginning, but when he mentions that the rule of the competition is "whoever loses has to marry Princess Ayitu Bie," the plot becomes suspicious.

...If you had to pick one unlucky person out of a hundred, the scene would be quite tragic.

"Which of these are from the Brownpool tribe?" I asked the lion in charge of looking after the captives.

Surrounded by children, the lion was about to pull out a box of counterfeit chess pieces from his robes when he heard the question. He quickly stuffed the box back into his robes and replied, "Sir! You...you've come here!"

"Can't I come? Wherever there's copyright infringement, there's my lawyer's letter. You should understand that, right? Instead of fighting the war properly, you have time to develop board games? Looks like the training isn't going to be thorough enough..."

With a mournful face, the lion grabbed several dusty children from inside. "Sir, are you looking for the Brownpool tribe? There are over seventy in total this time, but they are all children. According to Commander Eaton's guess, they were probably captured and prepared to be trained as space pirates. Look, these are the oldest ones we rescued."

I get a headache just looking at these kids, the oldest no more than ten years old. I'm really not good at dealing with children...

Finally, I decided to ask the child who looked the tallest.

I shoved a rice cake into his hand. "You're from the Brown Pond tribe, right? Do you know someone named Jay? Tell me and I'll give you some!"

"Sister Jay! Do you know her?"

…………

What followed was an hour of inefficient, arrhythmic, chaotic, and embellished descriptions. I felt the workload was no less than rewriting the entire Epic of King Gesar!

...Hopefully, there's no element of children's artistic reinterpretation in it.

Finally, I managed to piece together the sequence of events the children were telling me.

As I discovered, this planet does indeed harbor my allies, but the situation is dire.

The story probably begins on the day she left my ranch and returned to the tribe.

After concluding his visit to Mineral Town, Jay returned to the Brownpool tribe with a large quantity of medicine and seeds, and recounted his miraculous experience to the tribe's elders.

The tribal elders didn't quite believe her story, but they couldn't explain what she brought back, probably thinking she had discovered an ancient refuge.

At Jay's insistence, it was finally decided to conduct a pilot planting project according to her ideas to prove her claims.

The experiment resulted in the tribe's first bumper harvest.

In the memories of these children, their tribe, who had always survived the spring famine by enduring hunger, were surprised to find that they had eaten a round, yellowish-brown fruit for the first time ever. After feeding the entire tribe, there was even a surplus that filled warehouses and cellars.

From that day on, the jay's status changed from a relatively inexperienced fire keeper and a candidate for tribal elder to a formal shaman in charge of agriculture and animal husbandry, thus acquiring a very high status.

What these children knew was that from that day on, their jay sister had her own tall tent, and whenever they went there to play, they could eat fresh, hot roasted potatoes.

However, after the bumper potato harvest, the planting of crops such as pineapples stalled due to the poor soil and failed to bear fruit as she had described.

In the children's memories, it seems that Jay had suggested my method to the Elder.

However, the idea of ​​migrating to distant lands with abundant water and lush vegetation, suitable for cultivation, was directly rejected—the Brown Pond tribe was undergoing a seasonal migration, and interrupting it without cause was considered a great disrespect to their ancestors.

As for my advice to widely distribute crop seeds and to win over tribal alliance members to avoid being targeted by possessing valuable resources, it was only partially implemented. The Brownpool tribe's unique fire-passing method meant that they stopped at sending fire keepers and engaging in diplomacy with neighboring tribes to find reliable allies before offering the magical crop seeds as a gift.

Such behavior cannot be said to be wrong, but it does carry some risks...

The seasonal migrations of these tribes are a collective activity for these gentle tribes. Many tribes will gather together to complete the long journey and prevent the grassland from being depleted.

The Brown Pond tribe has a group of relatively reliable allies thanks to their generosity in providing planting techniques and their long-term friendly exchanges. For more than a year, everyone has been well-fed and clothed and living happily together.

However, a sudden cloud of toxic dust enveloped the lake-blue hermit crab grassland.

In the children's memories, pale green, toxic dust came from the depths of the northern desert with black storms, gradually crossing the entire grassland. Wherever it went, animals died, vegetation withered, crops died, and water sources were polluted. Those who ventured outdoors to hunt would gradually suffer from skin ulceration, vomit blood, and eventually die a gruesome death.

After the toxic dust cleared, the drawbacks of the Brown Pool tribe moving with the main force became fully apparent.

The food shortage caused former allies to repeatedly come to ask for supplies. The children said that the transport cattle and horses would appear from morning to night, like insatiable mosquitoes and flies swarming around the bison.

Before long, the Brownpool tribe was running out of food. At this point, the jay finally had the opportunity to once again travel through the tribe, urging everyone to go to the tribe's sacred site—Mount Corillo!

To make her story more convincing, she kept emphasizing that the miracles she had witnessed took place in the Kolori Mountains and that salvation could only be found there!

Finally, one night, the Brownpool tribe quietly escaped their wolf-infested environment and migrated as a whole to the Kolori Mountains, searching for hope of survival.

However, the fertile Hateo Plains near Mount Kolori were the territory of a savage tribe. They learned of the deeds of the Brownpool tribe and launched a full-scale attack, killing many of their people and capturing the children, who were then sold to passing space pirates in exchange for resources.

So until the very end, they couldn't say for sure whether the jay had escaped or not.

During these barbaric tribal attacks, they also spotted many familiar faces from allied tribes, only this time they were on horseback, expressing "goodwill" with clubs and bows and arrows.

And all of these things happened because of that one time I flapped my wings.

Chapter 480 Dawn

"What did your jay sister say at the end?" I asked the little boy who was eating his biscuit with his head down.

The children from the Brown Pool tribe scratched their heads and whispered, "It seems like they told everyone to run into the mountains..."

In a completely accidental journey, I ended up in the place where Jay lived, which truly amazed me... Could this be the legendary fate? No wonder she's my first ally!

Unfortunately, their tribe, due to improper management, found themselves in a situation where they were enemies from all sides. If they had followed my initial advice and instead played it safe, developing their strength in the wilderness, accumulating resources and delaying their claim to the throne, waiting for their allies to be loyal and for their interests to be aligned, they could have leveraged the benefits of their early development to maintain a dominant position and possess an irreplaceable advantage.

As for fighting a war... with enough food and manpower, why worry about not being able to recruit soldiers?

This is similar to what I'm doing now. Compared to my booming success and dominance, the Hechi tribe can be described as declining and on the verge of collapse.

Hey, is that clever little thing alright? How can I get there to rescue her?

"Lions, are you confident that you can march with me for thirty days and cross the Blue Lake Hermit Crab Grassland?" I asked.

Zero Lion, his face contorted in a mournful expression, said, "My lord, you don't need to be so subtle if you want to kill me..."

Pshaw, it's useless.

"Your team can stay here for now, repair the houses near the port and move in. I'll have the Oasis Free Trade Zone come to help with the rest."

It's also important to secure this territory; as is customary, troops should be stationed there first before construction begins.

The war is nearing its end, and my territory is now overflowing with artisans in surplus production and merchants eager to invest. As the undisputed hegemon of the wasteland, I have no doubt that they'll take the bait once I tell them about this business plan!

These children are a headache for me. Raising them is too costly, and they can't be turned into labor. But I can't live with myself if I don't take care of them. They are children from the Jay Tribe, and they might even be related to me. I can't just abandon them.

Am I supposed to open a martial arts and literature school to train them into talents?

...My system isn't called Liu Laoliu, and it's impossible for me to bring in fifty-four heroes to be my teachers!

"What are the backgrounds of these adults inside? Do they have any skills?" I continued to ask the lion.

Among these prisoners were a dozen or so emaciated adults, slumped against the wall, slowly chewing barley cakes with water, their faces completely obscured.

"My lord, they are technicians from the pirate raids, but they are all historians, philosophers and other theoretical scholars. According to them, they have been locked in the barn until now because the market is bad and they have not been able to be sold as slaves."

...Is it really that realistic? I'm glad I didn't become an architect in Shining City.

I asked the lion, "Are these people reliable? I'm planning to set up a school for the rescued children to train them into useful members of society. Do you think they would be suitable to be teachers?"

The lion said, puzzled, "I'm not quite sure about that, sir. But being a teacher shouldn't be a problem, right?"

At that moment, Eaton and two soldiers came in from outside, struggling to carry a hard clod of earth, carefully protecting the soil from crumbling with each step.

These soldiers were ordered to pry up the map that Old Man Hook had drawn on the ground and take it to the tavern for safekeeping and copying. It seems they went to great lengths to complete the task.

I grabbed Eton and asked, "What do you think about building a school where these experts teach the children?"

Eaton didn't deny it, immediately expressing his admiration for knowledge with a firm attitude: "Not so much, sir!"

"Oh, you think so too... Wait, what did you just say?" I thought I misheard.

Eaton repeated, “I’m saying this idea is terrible! Unless you want to see a whole bunch of young scholars in the territory, including 8-year-old tacticians, 10-year-old historians, 12-year-old philosophers, and 14-year-old sociologists, vying to discuss their academic views and distorting your governing principles…”

Holy crap, what he said makes so much sense!

I can't help but imagine a group of young experts emerging from my own domain, talking like some kind of bizarre online commentary, criticizing this and attacking that, advocating sliding tackles, and encouraging everyone to drop an oxygen destroyer into the battlefield of Godzilla vs. Ghidorah...

The benefit of freedom of speech is that it allows for the exchange of ideas and promotes development; the drawback is that there are no regulations prohibiting the use of profanity during such exchanges. This phenomenon is strikingly similar to the "Hundred Flowers Campaign" of yesteryear, so let's tentatively call it "overgrown weeds."

"...How do you know so much?" I asked Eaton.

Eaton gave a wry smile. "Your idea was also tried by the loader's leader, but the final result..."

He smiled meaningfully.

"Then what do you suggest we do?" I countered.

Eaton said in a low voice, "Later we found that deploying them in military camps had an excellent effect..."

Understood!

“Do as you say! Leave these kids at the Reverse Lightning Legion base. They need to rest for a while, so let these kids go to summer camp for military training. Select twenty or thirty well-behaved veterans and have each of them take on three kids to try it out.”

I happen to want to reorganize the troops, so I can take this opportunity to break up the original structure and give full play to the role of veterans. For example, I think a configuration of one Jonin leading three Genin is very reasonable!

I continued, “Now that our economic development has caught up, I think it’s time to implement a military rank system! All members of the Reverse Lightning Legion who survived this battle will be promoted to sergeant, and the captains, deputy captains, and supervisors will be promoted to sergeant first class. Those kids will be treated like corporals for now… I will have Burnett come up with a salary plan, and then we will start recruiting in the free trade zone to replenish our manpower.”

Eaton was initially stunned and instinctively wanted to object to the plan to turn the army into a nursery, but when I talked about ranks, salaries, and recruitment plans, he finally shut his mouth and nodded firmly.

That's right, I've decided to officially put the new army training that this guy has been longing for on the agenda.

We can select some promising children to nurture from a young age, and the free trade zone has a sufficient workforce to recruit. If this continues to develop steadily, the Reverse Lightning Legion may truly have the opportunity to become a legitimate army!

With this foundational experience, I'm not worried about producing someone who only talks big. Their overall perspective might be lacking, but their micro-management skills are at least at the level of a leader, second only to the principal.

After all, the Führer's micro-management skills are clearly a level below the Principal's—the Führer is good at micro-managing a non-existent army, while the Principal can always micro-manage an army to the point of non-existence.

"Find me two camels, and then you can carefully consider the next steps. I'm going on another expedition to carry out that lord's plan, so I'm entrusting everything to you!"

"Yes sir!"

…………

As on every day before, the brilliant sunlight shines into the upper atmosphere and is scattered by atmospheric molecules, and a faint light begins to appear in the sky. At this moment, a ray of dawn suddenly appears on the horizon, and the morning light finally illuminates this land.

Burnett yawned in the morning breeze, pushed open the tavern door, and was about to hang the newly carved labor market sign at the tavern entrance before going to survey this thriving land of freedom, when he suddenly noticed the animals in the open space at the entrance becoming restless and suddenly running off into the distance.

Soon, two camels, some of which had lost their hair, arrived, riding the cool breeze. They walked briskly on the sand, their faces full of leisure.