On Blackfire Festival, Blackfire Land had a day off. The serfs no longer had to work so hard and could wander freely wherever they pleased.
Young men and women held hands as they slipped into the little woods.
Elderly serfs puffed on pipes, reminiscing about life in the Volcanic Oasis.
There were also traveling peddlers, some selling goods from carriages along the roads, some pushing flatbed carts deep into the reclamation sites, and others simply carrying boxes of wares on shoulder poles to hawk them along the field ridges. Tofu, sundries, bread—there was everything.
The blueprint for developing Blackfire Land had more or less been finalized.
With Cigar Castle at the center of the triangular territory, hot spring water flowed northwest, southwest, and due east. Half carved out by nature and half excavated by hand, three great rivers had been dug, with countless canals reclaimed around them as the main arteries.
The many future manors would be divided in sequence along the boundaries of these three rivers.
The great river flowing northwest past the Black Oil Mine was called the Blackwater River; the great river flowing southwest, with newly reclaimed farms on both banks, was called the Redwater River; and the great river flowing due east, which might someday merge into the marshlands, was called the Xiangshui River.
Among them, the Blackwater River would likely flow into the underground caverns and vanish into subterranean rivers.
The Redwater River, meanwhile, might one day merge with the Glimmering River, forming an even larger river that would continue carving southward.
The reclamation sites lay along the banks of the three great rivers.
There was one reclamation site every few kilometers, each destined to become the center of a future manor. This arrangement was exceptionally neat compared with Guangguang River Valley.
This was the