Land of Wind.
The vast desert stretched beneath the blazing sun. Even in winter, standing out in the desert for a while would leave one drenched in sweat.
In weather like this, over a hundred people stood beneath the scorching sun, holding shovels as they scattered about digging holes, planting trees, and filling in soil.
They were prisoners held in Land of Wind's prisons.
Many of the prisoners had once been conglomerate leaders or high-ranking government officials. They understood very well what planting trees in the desert meant:
Twenty or thirty years later, the trees would block the wind and sand, forming a natural barrier and creating more fertile soil.
Fifty or sixty years later, new villages would be built upon that fertile soil.
A hundred years later, those villages would become prosperous cities.
The Land of Wind had the widest gap between rich and poor of any nation. One reason was its official political system—from Tokugawa Shingen on down, they were all profit-driven merchants.
The other was this cruel desert.
The strong only grew stronger, while the weak had no room to develop. Over time, the rich became richer and the poor became poorer.
Lin Qing had rewritten the Land of Wind's political system. Now, he intended to change its environment as well, reversing the nation's situation at its very root.
You could call these prisoners bad people, but no one could call them incompetent.
They understood Lin Qing's goal, and precisely because they understood it, the prisoners found the whole thing utterly absurd.
Wasting manpower and resources now for something that would only matter a hundred years later?
These trees had been improved by the Research Institute to possess absurdly strong drought and salt-alkali resistance. The fertilizer was the same.
Wouldn't it have been better to spend that