"Obviously! If I farm, I'd be lucky to keep my family fed for the year. I wouldn't have a single copper coin left over. But if I spent that time doing other work, I could find something to do at practically any merchant guild in the city and earn at least ten gold coins a month. That's well over a hundred gold coins a year! Even if I bought all our food for the whole year, I'd still have at least fifty gold coins left to spend on other things. Why do you think I don't want to farm?"
Sakeqi rolled his eyes and looked disdainfully at the man opposite him, who claimed to be a City Lord's Manor Administrative Officer sent to conduct a survey. Figures. An officer serving an idiot of a city lord must be an idiot himself.
Did he really need to come all this way to ask about something so obvious?
It was just basic arithmetic. Even an old farmer like me, nearly sixty and never having been to school, could work it out easily. Yet this fellow in his expensive-looking uniform didn't understand? Were these officers from the City Lord's Manor just like their idiot city lord, with nothing but straw stuffed inside their heads?
Seeing the undisguised contempt on the old farmer's face, Administrative Officer Moya felt deeply displeased.
At any other time, he would not have deigned to speak to a lowborn old farmer with yellowed, calloused hands. If not for the city lord's specific orders, why would he have come to a remote, filthy, backward place like Mexilan Village to conduct this damned survey?
Remembering the city lord's earnest instructions before his departure, Moya barely suppressed his displeasure and tried to maintain what he considered a warm, friendly smile. He continued