Pinecone Farmstead.
A towering wall of mixed stone bricks and wooden stakes enclosed a vast stretch of land. On one side stood densely packed houses; on the other lay crisscrossing fields and orchards dusted with patches of snow.
Rather than a farmstead, it was more like a city from the classical age.
Ten or twenty thousand people lived within the walls, forming a settlement centered around a marketplace. There were officials, craftsmen, soldiers, and their families. Another thirty or forty thousand lived outside the walls, most of them farmers. More than half were serfs who had lost their freedom, while the rest were tenant farmers renting land and not yet bankrupt.
Everything here was the property of the farm owners.
The land and the people alike.
If Boulder City was an extreme product of industrialization coordinated by the War Construction Committee's Production Department, then this farmstead was another extreme born from the unchecked growth of survivor settlements.
There was not the slightest trace of industrialization here.
Though a near-future metropolis stood not far away, there was no sign of inheritance here, not even anything vaguely similar.
The reason was simple enough.
A ship would not move on its own. Either the wind had to blow, or someone had to row.
For Pinecone Farmstead, neither condition existed. They were neither included in the War Construction Committee's plans nor motivated to develop industry.
The farm owners here had bought a few machines from Boulder City, but the results had been far from ideal. In time, the machines had simply been left to gather dust in warehouses.
To put it bluntly, whether they were bankrupt serfs or tenant farmers teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, they could all be considered the farm owners' private property.
Even if they gave those poor bastards new