Jelena could not help asking, "My lord, will we need to transfer slaves from the estates for a construction project on this scale?"
The Archon of Tyrosh and Greenbeard had owned many estates and tracts of land, normally managed by stewards and worked by slaves. Now all of them belonged to them.
Liu Qian shook his head. "No. A project like this will need at least ten thousand workers. The prisoners from the Seven Kingdoms have been eating our food every day. It's time they paid for it."
Liu Qian had the confidence to build a castle because he held seventy thousand prisoners, including twenty thousand strong, healthy soldiers and another fifty thousand laborers and sailors.
Liu Qian recalled how the stone castles of the Middle Ages in his previous life had taken an exceptionally long time to build.
For example, a tower at tenth-century France's Langeais Castle, measuring 10 meters long, 17.5 meters wide, and 16 meters high, with walls averaging 1.5 meters thick and containing 1,200 cubic meters of stone, had required 83,000 person-days of labor.
After inspecting the area atop this hill, Liu Qian decided to build a square Norman keep, 50 meters long and wide and 80 meters high, with walls averaging around 4 meters thick.
He would then surround the keep with a curtain wall roughly 30 meters high and 5 meters thick.
At least four towers, each 100 meters high, and a gatehouse would also have to be built into the curtain wall.
Outside the first curtain wall, at least one more curtain wall would be built, requiring at least nine towers and a gatehouse.
Besides that, Liu Qian also wanted to build secret passages beneath the castle like those in the Red Keep, in addition to cellars.
The sheer scale of the work