Lord's Dispute

After helping that woman, Zhou Ming was smoothly fired from the construction site and returned to his rented room feeling lighthearted.

Of course, the foreman still paid him his wages. It wasn't out of pity, but because the work Zhou Ming had done alone in the past few days was equivalent to that of one and a half bricklayers, and he could keep it up for more than ten consecutive days. The foreman had rarely seen such astonishing physical strength and endurance in all his years and wouldn't dare withhold his wages.

Actually, it wasn't that Zhou Ming's physical strength was inherently strong. In the last few days, he was indeed close to collapsing. Fortunately, playing Zhang Ergou's Counterattack Life in injection mode had given him a few tricks. By relying on unscrupulous methods like ambushing, building harems, and forceful acquisition, he had achieved 3S ratings in three consecutive games, earning over 8000 achievement points.

All these achievement points were exchanged for Strength Point Cards, adding 8 points to his strength attribute. Moving bricks at the construction site naturally became much easier.

Returning to his rented room, he spent a day cleaning the inside and out. Then he went to a nearby supermarket and bought a large amount of instant noodles, biscuits, bread, ham sausages, and other convenient food, enough to last him for one or two months.

After taking a comfortable hot shower, Zhou Ming, feeling completely relaxed, lay comfortably on the bed, closed his eyes, and opened the game panel in his mind.

"System, enter the game."

"Beep~"

"Player is entering the game..."

Game Background Introduction:

This is an absurd, ignorant, and conservative era. Lords are selfish, knights are obsessed with force, farmers starve, priests spread hypocrisy, and slaves barely survive... In this world plagued by frequent wars, epidemics, and bandits, how will you, the son of an ordinary farmer in Rose Town of Glan Territory, intervene in this Lord's Dispute...

"Wah~ Wah~"

A clear and loud cry echoed from a dilapidated and crooked mud house, spreading throughout Rose Town.

"@#￥#……￥%" a woman with light yellow hair and white skin said weakly.

"@#￥#@!￥@#!" a white man with wavy hair excitedly held the baby in his arms, babbling excitedly, clearly overjoyed.

What on earth are these two saying?

Zhou Ming, in his infant state, was bewildered. But seeing the happy expressions on the faces of these two people with typical white features, he knew that these two must be his parents.

I'll learn slowly if I don't understand. Anyway, I'm just a baby right now.

After drinking the breast milk fed to him by the white woman, Zhou Ming, feeling a little drowsy, fell into a sweet sleep.

In the blink of an eye, three years passed.

Sitting on a log stake in front of the fence, Zhou Ming swung his little legs, observing the environment of this world.

Fields of green wheat seedlings, a peaceful and serene town, a stream with clear water, a castle standing tall on the mountaintop...

What a world like a paradise.

Yes.

If there were no lords and knights stationed in that castle, no hateful tax collectors and estate managers, and no bandits scattered throughout the mountains who occasionally came to harass the town... then this would be a paradise.

Zhou Ming's name in this world was Ryan. His father was named Derek, his mother Julina, and he had a one-year-old little sister named Alice, a lovely name.

A relatively happy family of four.

But this happiness was also built on the foundation of good weather and harvests in recent years, allowing the family to barely maintain subsistence.

His father, Derek, a farmer, rented one hundred acres of land from Baron Connor, the lord.

One-third of this hundred acres would be left fallow, and the remaining two-thirds would be used to plant crops such as barley, oats, wheat, and rye, as well as a small amount of peas and fodder.

The crop yields in this world were generally very low. In a slightly better year, the seed return rate was about 4 times, meaning planting one catty of seeds could yield four to five catties of grain.

This harvest seemed decent, but half of it had to be paid as rent to the lord.

In addition to the lord's rent, the church also collected a tithe, and although it wasn't much, what was left could only ensure that the farmer didn't starve to death.

Furthermore, his father, Derek, was also obligated to perform corvée labor for the lord three days a week. He had to do odd jobs for the lord, such as plowing, transporting, sowing, threshing, and storing grain, before he could drag his weary body back to work on his own land.

After completing the labor service, his father, Derek, also had to serve in the military for the lord. Whenever Baron Connor wanted to fight Baron Howard or Baron Garcia from the surrounding Glan Territory, his father, Derek, had the obligation to be conscripted into the army, standing at the front of the ranks to serve as cannon fodder for the knights behind him.

In the past two years, his father, Derek, had been conscripted twice. Once was to fight Baron Garcia to the west. After a lucky victory, he received a small bag of black flour as a reward (flour ground from rye, which, when made into black bread, was as hard as a brick).

The second time, fighting a group of roving bandits, he wasn't so lucky. He was shot in the right hand with an arrow. Although it didn't penetrate deep, it affected his normal work for three months and still hadn't fully healed.

If it were just high rent, heavy labor, and dangerous military service, that would be one thing. But on top of that, there were all sorts of strange and numerous taxes imposed on farmers like his father, Derek, even down to a single chicken, a single egg, or a single piece of firewood.

You couldn't catch fish in the river, hunt wild beasts in the mountains, or catch rabbits in the fields, and you couldn't even touch the lord's pigeons if they were ruining your crops... because all of these belonged to the lord.

Even his father, Derek, himself couldn't leave this small town at will or marry off his daughter at will...

In short, for his father, Derek, besides honestly farming, paying taxes, and performing labor and military service, everything else was not allowed or permissible, unless the benevolent lord took pity on him.

Zhou Ming was incredibly surprised that such a feudal serfdom system, which exploited farmers to the extreme and was even more miserable than slavery where people were treated as private property, could exist in this world.

Didn't those lords fear that these farmers would unite and, on a day of despair and anger, swarm forward and tear them to shreds?

But...

Look at that tall and sturdy castle, look at the knights in their bright, full-body armor, and then look at his father, Derek's, malnourished and frail body...

Farmers in such physical condition, even if a thousand of them were gathered, probably couldn't take down that tall castle guarded by only ten knights, could they?

Zhou Ming frowned tightly.

It's difficult, truly difficult. This map simply doesn't give the common people any way to live. Compared to these lords, Li Shouzhen in Zhang Ergou's Counterattack Life is simply as benevolent as a Bodhisattva. Zhang Ergou's living situation is truly much, much better than his own.

"Let's take it one step at a time for now."