In China, there was a kind of city known as a ghost city: countless high-rises and grand developments, yet completely empty, with no one living there. Foreign reporters would then proclaim that China's economy had collapsed and was doomed sooner or later.
Yet once the shops moved in and the facilities opened, these places would swiftly be filled by Chinese people, becoming new bustling districts.
Liszt greatly admired this model.
He therefore ordered many such ghost cities built throughout his territory—empty houses, empty streets, empty roads, even the farmland outside the cities lying vacant without crops. Basically, ghost cities stood one after another in transport hubs, flat arable regions, and other such areas.
They included not only town-level ghost cities, but also small city-level ghost cities.
Liszt even intended to construct several large city-level ghost cities in key areas of Flame Island.
He was not afraid of empty cities at all. So long as he continued launching wars and plundering, the population he seized would automatically fill these ghost cities and quickly set them into operation.
Now, in Reed City, batches of newly arrived serfs were continually being assigned to the various ghost cities—many nobles who had voluntarily surrendered had also had their serfs incorporated by Liszt. In time, these serfs would gradually be granted freedom and replenish the ranks of the free commoners.
They would serve as the breeding ground for the future knight class.
In truth, as the Flame Kingdom continuously developed its technology and combined magic with farming and industry, the serf system was increasingly unable to keep pace with the times. The power brought by Fire Dragon super-magic directly drove traditional handicraft workshops toward the factory stage.
The birth of large numbers of factories—brickworks, glassworks, paper mills, cement plants, textile mills, and more—freed countless serfs from