Inside the Governor's Office of the Northern Three Territories, Stanford leaned back in a broad oak office chair as wisps of smoke curled from his brass pipe in the sunlight.
He narrowed his eyes and looked into the distance through the glass window. Several Forest Orcish laborers were learning under human instruction how to turn the soil with Steel Plows, while the heavy breathing of the oxen could be faintly heard.
He blew out a smoke ring and watched it slowly dissipate in the air. Before the Alarda People arrived, the Forest Orcish of the Northern Three Territories had still been living at the level of slash-and-burn farming. Now, more than a dozen large farms had been established across the vast black-soil plains.
Stanford's fingers gently rubbed the planning blueprints spread across the desk.
The first phase of the swamp drainage project in the Blackwater Basin had been marked in red. Beside the open-pit Iron Mine on the outskirts of Lucky Forest was the note "Awaiting Development," while the neatly arranged black squares on Serene Prairie represented ten thousand mu of fertile land about to be reclaimed.
A crisp whip crack came from outside the window, interrupting his thoughts. A team of Four-wheeled Carriages loaded with timber was heading toward the newly built processing plant, and the driver was also an orc.
Stanford nodded in satisfaction. As long as the orcs were given sufficient rewards, they worked extremely hard.
He picked up his fountain pen and wrote in his notebook: "Next step: establish literacy classes for the orcs and offer basic skills training..."
The tobacco in his pipe gradually burned away.
Stanford rose and walked to the enormous map on the wall, then used a red pencil to draw a larger circle around the Northern Three Territories. From the coast