Five Years of Long Enjoyment, Shipwright Kim's Recollections, Old Tales of the Treasure Ship, and the Heavenly Soldiers of Kamikuni!

"Uh, what we plant, what we eat?... My lord! In Gyeongsangnam-do, my family has worked for generations as ship-repairing households! I've never farmed, and the masters don't let us have land either... As for the surrounding villages, naturally they plant mostly rice, and some millet too... As long as they don't run into typhoons, floods, or terrible droughts, the villagers can still just barely get by, and they can eat rice several times a month..."

The sky gradually darkened, the evening glow a sweep of gold and red across the heavens, echoing the gray-white snowfields. Thousands of li from his home, Shipwright Kim Seon-su rubbed his nose and recalled life back in his Joseon hometown.

The villagers he spoke of were actually the last two ranks, Commoners and Baekjeong. As for the Outcasts, who were not counted as people, they could not be touched. He did not understand them, and was even less willing to understand them. Yet the Joseon countryside he saw with his own eyes, though the four ranks of people were utterly fixed and the contradictions between every stratum were extraordinarily sharp, did not have so many famines, and was nowhere near the hellish poverty of Wagokuan villages!

"Huh? As the Buddha is my witness! The villagers of Joseon can actually eat rice every month?!"

Hearing this, Murakami Suemichi and Sukeichiro, both from Ezo Land, looked at each other, truly finding it somewhat unbelievable. Seeing the two men's excited reaction, Shipwright Kim Seon-su shrank his neck in fear, then nodded and confirmed in a low voice, "Yes, my lord! The provinces in the north have many mountains, so they probably plant less rice. I don't know the details... But all over Gyeongsang-do, outside the villages I saw with my own eyes, there were generally water channels built