At this stage, the exploration of this island had basically progressed halfway.
However, with winter approaching and next year's spring planting in mind, Zhou Xu felt that the fields here were about ready to be opened up on a large scale.
The island's villages and towns did not have a large population to begin with. Even counting every man, woman, and child, there were fewer than three thousand people.
Yet the demand for labor here was already considerable.
On top of fishing and farming, they would undoubtedly need to open mines and extract ore in the future.
At the same time, considering the extraction and transportation of ore and grain later on, there was no need to say that roads would have to be built as well.
Besides that, construction in the village and town would certainly have to get underway too.
Once construction began, related industries such as logging teams and lumber mills would also have to be established.
After all, if all those construction materials had to be shipped over from the mainland, the transportation costs would be substantial.
Thinking about it that way, the island's population of fewer than three thousand was nowhere near enough.
Not to mention that many of those fewer than three thousand people could not even be counted as laborers.
This was probably because life on the island had always been so comfortable before. Every household had children in droves.
From what Zhou Xu had learned earlier, many families had three children, and some had even more.
With the islanders themselves being poorly educated, and with having more children making it harder to think up names, the island's children had names that were casual yet unexpectedly in line with the original Wa culture. Most of them were simply called Taro, Jiro, or Saburo.