When Lord Wellen first transferred those two hundred and forty thousand-plus hectares to Xu Yi as his private fief, he transferred only the land, not the people living on it.
As a result, after Xu Yi acquired the fief, its only inhabitants were the roughly seventeen thousand employees who had moved there with the Xinfei Merchant Guild.
Compared with the average population density on the Sains Continent, having over seventeen thousand people on a tract of land measuring less than twenty-five square kilometers was already quite respectable.
But most of the Xinfei Merchant Guild's factories were labor-intensive operations. A single factory occupying little more than a thousand square meters could accommodate several hundred workers.
Even with all the factories and the residential district combined, they occupied no more than fifty thousand hectares.
This left the rest of Xu Yi's fief looking extremely empty and somewhat short of people.
More importantly, without a large influx of people, the Xinfei Merchant Guild found it extremely difficult to expand production and increase its capacity.
Although people from the Lampari Kingdom had continued to arrive and join the Xinfei Merchant Guild, fewer than two thousand had actually come over the past year or so. Against the guild's enormous labor demands, that was barely a drop in the bucket.
The production capacity problem that had long plagued Xu Yi was, in fact, primarily a population problem.
Without sufficient human resources, the Xinfei Merchant Guild could not rapidly increase its production capacity, no matter how much money it had.
The Xinfei Merchant Guild had begun cooperating with the Rulson Kingdom and investing heavily in the Milando Duchy precisely so it could establish more production bases and increase its overall capacity.
But neither the Rulson Kingdom nor the Milando Duchy was under the Xinfei Merchant Guild's control.