With the Gale Falcon gone, the Twelve Mu Spirit Field was quickly harvested through the efforts of the village's able-bodied laborers.
Of the Twelve Mu Spirit Field,
the ten mu cultivated according to the old methods produced a total of 1,131 jin,
of which roughly twelve jin had been lost during the battle with the Gale Falcon. Otherwise, the harvest would have been even greater.
As for the experimental plots using the improved planting methods, tended by Teams Eleven and Twelve,
one mu yielded 136 jin, while the other yielded 148 jin.
The yield per mu had undoubtedly risen enormously.
This seemed somewhat exaggerated,
but after Shen Changchuan tallied the increased harvest from the ten mu of Spirit Fields whose cultivation methods had not been changed, he roughly understood the reason.
There was nothing strange about it.
The reason was simple:
nothing but care.
In the past, everyone in the Spirit Fields—men, women, old, and young—had been driven out to work together.
Yet after they toiled through the hardship of cultivation,
the harvest had not the slightest thing to do with them.
Under such circumstances, the villagers' attitude had probably been that getting by was enough. They had no initiative to make positive changes at all.
After all, there was no reward for doing well, while doing poorly would bring reprimands. Any normal person knew which choice to make.
But after Shen Changchuan arrived,
he began trying out new reforms.
The output of the Spirit Fields had become closely tied to every villager.
As a result,
the villagers put far more care into planting Spirit Grain and tended the spirit rice stalks with greater attention.
This alone
had brought about a ten percent increase in the Spirit Fields' output.
With that comparison,
the thirty and forty percent yield increases of Teams Eleven and Twelve's Spirit Fields became understandable.
Shen Changchuan was greatly satisfied after obtaining the concrete figures.
When spring plowing came next year, he would spread the planting experience of Teams Eleven and Twelve. The increase in production would only grow larger then!
Moreover,
Shen Changchuan could clearly sense
that there was still room to dig deeper and improve further.
"The Spirit Grain Planting Manual should still have room for further improvement."
"And now that I've slain the Crocodile Demon in the Great Bay River, next year I can excavate the sediment formed from the fusion of water-vein essence and earth-vein essence from the riverbed to use as fertilizer. My harvest will only grow greater then!"
As Shen Changchuan took stock of the gains from harvesting the Spirit Grain,
his mood was buoyant.
Even much of the exhaustion accumulated from his great battle with the Gale Falcon faded away.
After all,
although Great Bay Village was his main base,
he also had side income elsewhere.
For instance, the two mu of Spirit Fields in Zhao Family Village belonged entirely to him.
Then there was the submission of the other six surrounding villages, which was also a considerable source of income.
Shen Changchuan made a rough calculation.
After subtracting the thousand jin to be handed over to the Shen Family, and adding the output of Zhao Family Village's two mu of Spirit Fields, as well as sixty to seventy percent of the tribute from the four mu of Spirit Fields belonging to the other six villages,
his gains for this season had already exceeded eight or nine hundred jin!
Converted into Spirit Stones, that was nearly eighty or ninety of them!
Of course, some expenses still had to be paid from that sum.
For example, bonuses and pensions for his subordinates, as well as remuneration for maternal grandfather, his eldest uncle, and the others, who had now become cultivators.
But those were merely the smaller expenses.
Even after deducting every expense, Shen Changchuan's final income would not fall below seventy or eighty Spirit Stones!
That figure made him catch his breath for an instant.
Just because he had obtained over a hundred Spirit Stones after killing the Four Fiends of Heshan did not mean that this harvest of seventy or eighty Spirit Stones was small.
The former
had been a one-time deal.
Moreover, it had required risking his life, challenging enemies above his level in desperate combat. One misstep, and he would have died on the spot.
But cultivating Spirit Fields was a stable source of income available every year!
And there were two harvest seasons a year.
This endless stream of income far surpassed the former in both safety and practical value!
Such an enormous harvest
was something he had never dared imagine back when he was at Shen Family Manor!
"I wonder how far the internal struggle within the Shen Family has progressed."
"But no matter how fiercely they fight, my decision to leave Shen Family Manor and come to this borderland was the right one."
"If I had remained at Shen Family Manor, how could I possibly have an income of seventy or eighty Spirit Stones in half a year like I do now?!"
Shen Changchuan was delighted,
and could not help feeling immensely satisfied with his decision back then.
With such a large income in Spirit Stones,
he naturally had to use it to improve his cultivation next.
But how should he spend it?
Shen Changchuan began calculating in his mind.
He did not know what the merchant caravan at Wu Family Market might have.
Still, his first target should be pills that could increase his cultivation speed.
Having taken a Qi Gathering Pill and risen from the middle stage of Qi Gathering Fourth Level to Qi Gathering Fifth Level in just two short months, Shen Changchuan had personally experienced the benefits pills brought to cultivation speed.
As for the pill toxicity spoken of by novelists,
it was the same principle as discussing only a medicine's properties without considering dosage—pure nonsense.
So long as he did not treat pills as daily meals, but instead took one every few days, a cultivator's body would naturally digest and expel the imperceptible pill toxins during cultivation. There was no need to worry too much.
Besides pills,
he also needed to examine spells, Dharma Artifacts, Formations, and other means of strengthening himself. In particular, he had to focus on things capable of dealing with the Gale Falcon.
After all, the Gale Falcon was a tremendous problem for Great Bay Village.
If he was lucky enough to discover an inheritance related to alchemy, artifact refining, or Formation Masters, he could consider that as well.
Of course,
that last point was somewhat like dreaming in broad daylight.
A single craft was enough to become the foundation upon which an immortal cultivation Lineage stood.
With barely a hundred Spirit Stones, he probably was not even qualified to catch a whiff of it.
"So that means I'm still just a poor bastard?"
Spirit Stones had to be spent here and there.
After only a brief calculation, the budget in his hands had already been spent clean.
Shen Changchuan could not help letting out a bitter laugh.
It made him deeply realize the fact that he was still a poor bastard!
Tragic in capital letters!
Just as Shen Changchuan was taking stock of his household wealth and lamenting inwardly,
Han Qinhu entered, carrying several sheets of paper covered in records of who knew what.
"Changchuan, there's something I think you should know."
Han Qinhu looked at Shen Changchuan, hesitated for a moment, and finally spoke.
"What is it, maternal grandfather?"
"You're the person I trust most. If there's something, just say it."
Seeing Han Qinhu's reaction, Shen Changchuan found it somewhat strange.
Han Qinhu did not answer.
He handed the sheets of paper in his hand to Shen Changchuan.
Shen Changchuan accepted them curiously.
They recorded several people's names, followed by detailed household registration information such as their ages and family sizes.
Shen Changchuan had initially been somewhat puzzled,
but after reading for a while, his gaze suddenly froze. He quickly flipped through the next two pages,
and his brows tightly furrowed at that moment.
"The five people on the first page—the first four were villagers who rushed forward during yesterday's battle in the Spirit Fields and were killed by the Gale Falcon. The last one worked himself to death in the Spirit Field this morning while harvesting the remaining Spirit Grain."
Han Qinhu's voice was grave.
"The people on the second page were the six who died during the ambush against the Crocodile Demon when it came ashore."
"Among these people, they were either already past fifty, disabled, or sickly medicine jars burdened by chronic illness. I looked through the old records, and nothing like this had ever happened before."
Han Qinhu explained in a low voice.
He did not continue spelling it out.
For a time,
the atmosphere fell silent.
"So someone was committing insurance fraud?"
Only after a long while did Shen Changchuan speak in a low voice.
"Insurance fraud?"
"Oh, it means scamming the family settlement payment."
"Then they really were committing insurance fraud."
Although Han Qinhu did not know how the "insurance" in Shen Changchuan's insurance fraud had anything to do with a family settlement payment,
that did not stop him from following Shen Changchuan's lead.
"Changchuan, I actually wanted to tell you this long ago. The compensation you set for the two villagers killed by the Crocodile Demon was too high."
"Ten jin of Spirit Grain, with a little luck, is enough to let someone embark on the Immortal Path. It is enough to make someone sell their life!"
"It was only because you announced the reforms and said that part of the increased yield per mu would be taken out to reward them, giving them hope of obtaining Spirit Grain, that there was no large-scale rush to die."
"But even so, mortals who feel that they are of no use for the rest of their lives and that living only burdens their families do not mind exchanging their crippled bodies for the prosperity of their descendants."
As he spoke of those old, weak, sick, and disabled people who had sought death to commit insurance fraud, Han Qinhu's voice became somewhat murderous as well.
"These lowly commoners are only taking advantage of your youth and kind heart."
"In my view, we should kill the chicken to scare the monkeys, revoke the original decision, and absolutely not give these insurance fraudsters a single grain of Spirit Grain!"
Shen Changchuan did not speak.
Silence followed.
When he had decided to compensate the two villagers who died in the Crocodile Demon's jaws with ten jin of Spirit Grain,
it was because the idea of using riverbed silt as fertilizer to improve the Spirit Fields' yield per mu had been proposed by him.
They had carried out his suggestion, only to die in an accident.
In a sense,
they could be considered to have died because of Shen Changchuan's mistake.
Having transmigrated only two and a half years ago, the humanistic ideals shaped by the industrial civilization of his previous life still remained in his heart.
He felt guilty,
and so decided to grant them that exceptionally generous pension, at least by mortal standards.
But how matters developed afterward
was something he had not anticipated.
After all, Shen Changchuan before his transmigration had merely been an ordinary person.
He was not a sage who could devise every plan without a single oversight, capable of foreseeing every possibility.
"No. The pension and family settlement payment for these people will all follow this standard."
Shen Changchuan closed his eyes and pondered for a long while.
After a quarter of an hour, he opened his eyes and spoke with a firm gaze.
Han Qinhu's expression immediately turned anxious upon hearing this, and he wanted to say something.
But Shen Changchuan raised a hand to stop him,
then explained as though speaking to himself:
"The matter of the family settlement payment was something I did not think through. It was my mistake."
"Though these people are suspected of committing insurance fraud, they ultimately went to their deaths because of the family settlement payment I proposed. They lost their lives, and during the battles, they were not entirely without use."
"Let these payments be the price of settling the bill for my mistake."
"Of course, from today onward, if anyone dies while carrying out village business, the family settlement payment will be adjusted to one jin of Spirit Grain as compensation."
One jin of Spirit Grain as compensation
was already very little.
What was more, once the reforms were implemented next year, the portion of yield exceeding one hundred jin per mu would all be divided thirty-seventy,
No one would likely risk their life for such a small settlement payment again.
As for the dozen-odd Spirit Stones spent, he would treat them as the price of a lesson for his mistake.
All right,
this lesson had truly been painful to buy,
after all, it had cost him more than a dozen Spirit Stones.
But he had always believed
that making mistakes was not frightening; once one made a mistake, one simply had to correct it.
What was truly frightening was not knowing one had made a mistake,
or even knowing it and refusing to change.
Thus, although Shen Changchuan felt some regret over it,
he merely etched this lesson into his heart, rather than becoming angry or taking it out on anyone else.
The expenditure of more than a dozen Spirit Stones would serve as a warning and lesson to himself,
so that he would take it as a caution in the future and think things over more carefully before making decisions.
Before you continue