Peat and Salt

Peat and Salt

After the sun set, the forest began to stir again.

A large herd of elk galloped past the bushes where Lynn was hiding, each elk pressing its head against the tail of the one ahead, while dead branches cracked beneath their hooves.

Under cover of night, the elk ran toward the swamp, where precious water awaited.

Then a group of wild boars of varying sizes hurried onto the grassland, snorting as they went. They had clearly caught the sweet scent of honey.

When two piglets found the honey smeared on the tree trunk and squealed excitedly, Lynn and Second Brother sprang up and loosed their arrows.

The arrows flew like thunder, striking their heads dead on. The two piglets fell at once, killed on the spot.

Yet the remaining boars did not scatter immediately. One curious piglet even ran over and sniffed at its companions' corpses.

Only when Lynn and Second Brother stepped out of the bushes did the boars, which had never suffered a beating from terrifying upright apes, flee in all directions.

"There really is plenty of game in this forest. Looks like the serfs of White Bear Territory have been quite obedient and haven't been poaching."

Lynn glanced at the [Hunting Experience +1] floating across his panel and chuckled as he lifted a piglet by its hind leg.

At this time, a lord naturally owned all the forests within his territory.

If serfs dared enter the forest to hunt without permission, they would be fined at best and whipped to death at worst.

There were many reasons for forbidding serfs from hunting, one of which was to protect the forest's wildlife resources.

More precisely, it was for the hides on those animals.

According to the list in Lynn's hands, over the past decade or so, White Bear Territory had exported five to six hundred animal pelts every year, mainly deer hides, fox furs, and a small amount of marten fur.

As for the money earned, it was not much. Usually, it amounted to only twenty or thirty gold coins a year, enough to buy a full set of chainmail, a helmet, and a longsword, or one-third of a fine warhorse.

It did not seem like much, but for the previous White Bear Baron, this extra income had been especially important.

At the current grain purchase prices of the Northern Border, the combined annual output of the more than thirty thousand mu of Public Land throughout White Bear Territory would not exceed five hundred gold coins.

Those five hundred gold coins had to support the baron's family, five knightly households, more than twenty knight attendants, and their families. They were barely enough to cover essential expenses.

Without those twenty or thirty gold coins from selling fur, the baron's family's standard of living would immediately drop by a level.

The transparent glass windows would be gone, replaced by windows made from pig bladders; the brightly colored wool coats would be gone, leaving them with only dull animal furs; and the Baroness's cosmetics would naturally be gone as well, replaced by the free wind and snow of the Northern Border.

However, none of that mattered to Lynn.

As he heartily devoured a sizzling, greasy boar leg, he was thinking about how to lay roads through the forest.

Discovering mineral deposits was one matter. Transporting them out of the forest was another.

Without roads, no amount of discovered ore would be of any use.

As for roadbuilding and mining damaging the forest, Lynn cared even less.

In White Bear Territory, forests covered eighty percent of the land, if not ninety.

He did not care about that meager fur income at all. If he needed to rely on that money to improve his life, then there would be no point in continuing as lord.

Lost in thought, Lynn casually asked, "Second Brother, how many serfs do you think we'd need to mobilize to build a road through the entire forest?"

Second Brother was focused on dealing with a slab of pork ribs. Hearing that, he could not help laughing. "Big Brother, how could I possibly answer that? At most, I can wield a whip and help you keep the serfs working."

"True enough." Lynn laughed as well.

Night shrouded the forest, while the warm campfire drove away the cold and the wild beasts.

After a simple meal of game, the exploration party, exhausted from a day of travel, quickly fell asleep in their tents.

The next morning, they boiled water, ate a little dried rations and ham, then set out once more.

On the afternoon of the second day, after the exploration party had ventured nearly twenty kilometers north into the forest, Lynn's Pixel Map finally

displayed a resource point notification. Before them lay a vast swamp with no end in sight.

"Found it."

Lynn stood on the grassland at the edge of the swamp and looked into the distance. Most of the ice and snow covering the swamp had melted, revealing vast stretches of withered yellow reeds.

"Big Brother, is this swamp what we came here to find?" Second Brother narrowed his eyes, clearly puzzled.

"No. What we're looking for is right beneath our feet." Lynn lowered his head and looked at the soft grass beneath them.

"Under our feet?" Second Brother stamped his foot, but felt nothing unusual.

"Bring me a shovel."

At Lynn's command, one of the men immediately took a shovel from his horse's back.

Lynn accepted the shovel and dug into the soft grass where he stood.

After digging down around twenty centimeters, the soil gradually changed from deep yellow to dark brown.

Under Second Brother's puzzled gaze, Lynn bent down, grabbed a handful of dark-brown soil, and sniffed it lightly. It carried a faint sour, rotten odor, like decaying straw.

Second Brother asked curiously, "Big Brother, what is this?"

"This is peat." Lynn tossed the shovel back to one of the men and brushed the dirt from his hands.

"Peat?"

"Do you remember the compost I made two days ago?"

"I do. You said that compost could increase farmland yields."

"Peat works much like compost and can replace it. Once dried, this stuff can also be used like charcoal, and it is even better than charcoal for heating."

As he spoke, Lynn's gaze turned westward. From where he stood all the way west, the edges of this swamp contained enormous quantities of peat.

If it only supplied the roughly three thousand people of White Bear Territory, they might not finish digging it up even after a thousand years.

"I get it. This is what we came here to find. That old bastard Albert said before that there wasn't enough compost. Heh, if he were here, he'd probably want to bury people straight into the ground."

Second Brother did not understand farming, but he understood Lynn very well.

Seeing the smile on his eldest brother's face, he knew this peat had to be good stuff.

Although they had found an astonishingly large peat deposit, Lynn was not satisfied.

Rather than returning the way they had come, he continued exploring west along the swamp.

Thirty years ago, the Marsh Duke's army had marched north along the White River to hunt down the Wild People. If there had been mineral deposits along that route, they would certainly have been discovered long ago.

His next route would take them completely away from the White River. The risks along the way would be greater, but so would the chances of finding mineral deposits.

By the afternoon of the fourth day, the exploration party had left the swamp behind. The scenery along the way was no longer just forest or swamp; small rolling hills had begun to appear.

At that moment, the map notified Lynn that there was a new resource point not far to the left.

He did not spend much time finding the unremarkable-looking low hill.

The hill, some fifty or sixty meters high, was bare and slightly pointed, with no vegetation covering its surface.

End of Chapter