Xu Yi walked out of the City Lord's Manor and looked up at the stars filling the night sky. He let out a long breath of white mist, a wry smile crossing his lips as he shook his head slightly.
If only Count Samo were still the city lord of Bunta City. Then Xu Yi would not have had to go about things so indirectly and consider all sorts of unrelated matters just to accomplish something.
Earl Stark had ultimately agreed to the wager and even initialed an agreement with him, but in truth, the wager offered little benefit to Xu Yi himself or the Xinfei Merchant Guild.
The condition he wanted Earl Stark to accept was simply the widespread implementation of mechanized farming reforms throughout Bunta City.
This would greatly benefit Bunta City's agricultural development. For Xu Yi and the Xinfei Merchant Guild, the benefit was probably limited to freeing up agricultural labor through mechanized farming, making it easier for the guild to hire enough workers.
But frankly, given the Xinfei Merchant Guild's reputation, it was the first choice for anyone looking for work, whether they were local residents of Bunta City or citizens of the Lampari Kingdom who had come from elsewhere. The guild was hardly short of workers.
The only staffing issue he needed to worry about was elsewhere.
On that subject, Xu Yi could not help lamenting how small the population of the Lampari Kingdom-or rather, the entire Sains Continent-really was.
Bunta City, a small border city in the Lampari Kingdom, had a registered population of just over fifty thousand. According to the statistics, the Lampari Kingdom had fewer than five million people, not even as many as a moderately large city on Earth.
Although no precise census existed for the entire Sains Continent, the accounts