Conch Produces Pearls (First Update)

Black Horse Island.

Liszt was inspecting the extraction of volcanic glass ore. This volcanic glass was quite interesting—hard on the outside, filled with bubbles within, and clearly distinct from the surrounding soil and rock.

As long as they dug deep enough to reach the basalt pillars, they could follow the cracks to find volcanic glass.

Thus, once a thousand serfs had mastered the digging techniques, they searched the ground all along the lowlands, uncovering vast quantities of volcanic glass while also clearing the land into farmland.

"My lord, using the Red River as our boundary, we have been reclaiming land and mining to the south. At present, we have reached the wasteland between the eastern foothills of Needlegrass Hill and the East Coast. The newly reclaimed fields have already been sown with soybeans and peas. The germination rate may not be very high, and the yield will likely be quite meager," Blair, Port Town's administrative officer, reported.

Mining, land reclamation, and sowing—this was the work plan Liszt had devised.

For the crops, he had chosen soybeans and peas because leguminous plants could cultivate rhizobia at their roots. He had observed that legumes in this world still grew rhizobia, though not very visibly. Among them, soybeans, peas, and peanuts not only had stable varieties, but also possessed larger quantities of rhizobia.

Moreover, the forage grass alfalfa also had rhizobia. That might be one reason it was such high-quality fodder.

Therefore, during the early reclamation of Black Horse Island, he had decided to plant large quantities of legumes and alfalfa to fertilize the fields and provide the soil with organic nitrogen.

"It doesn't matter if the germination rate is low or the yield is poor. As long as the harvest can cover our investment in sowing, that will be enough. Farmland must