Barbarian Laborers

Victor nodded. He knew the people before him were laborers who had just been brought in, Barbarian slaves sent by the vassal nobles.

Two months had passed since the Snowflake Family's visit. The woolen mill that had been in Riverside Town had finished relocating to Edelweiss Territory and should have begun trial production by now.

The new woolen mill in Two Rivers County had been completed at the border between Muyuan Town and Songsea City. A new town and station had also been built around it and the textile mill.

The women who had worked at the Riverside Town mill had not been dismissed. They were skilled workers with at least a year's experience. Letting them go would mean training replacements, seriously hurting production efficiency.

The new woolen mill, however, had only a little more than half as many looms as the old one. Its newer looms were more efficient and required fewer hands; it could run with just half the original workforce.

The remaining workers had somewhere to go. They joined the textile mill built and opened alongside the new woolen mill. That mill used cotton, and it was the reason Victor had dismantled the old woolen mill: he needed a large pool of skilled workers to staff it.

Through the Great Expansion, Two Rivers Territory had reclaimed more than 3,000 square kilometers of farmland. Half was needed for food crops to feed the territory's residents and provide concentrated feed for its livestock. The rest was used for cash crops and various industrial raw materials.

At least 100 square kilometers of that farmland were devoted to cotton, planted with a variety exclusive to the Golden Sunflower Family.

Researchers at the Agricultural Technology Research Institute in Two Rivers Territory had bred it from more than a dozen cotton varieties collected