Gull Manor garden square
The garden square had relatively cheap slate paving, a small square of ten thousand square meters surrounded by ordinary holly, pines, and redwoods.
The manor's residents were now allowed to stroll there in the evenings when they had nothing to do, and the little groves occasionally harbored a few illicit lovebirds and the like.
Men and women in this era were wild! Nobles had lovers everywhere! People were pretty much the same in every era! After all, reproduction was human nature!
Anyone who could truly restrain those desires was a master!
Su Qin did not interfere much with commoners or nobles in that regard. His only requirement was that the maids in the main keep were forbidden from having sex with outsiders!
After twenty-five, she/they could be released! This was for the safety of Su Qin and the others!
The largest structure in the square was a sixteen-hundred-square-meter platform, primarily intended for circus troupes and other performers, military oath-taking rallies, and announcements of the lord's policies!
Below the platform stood several policy noticeboards, recently installed so that the manor's residents could directly see any government announcements!
The manor was actually quite large! A full four square kilometers, with walls four meters high! It now housed six hundred refugee households, over two hundred orphans, three hundred and fifty soldiers, and a hundred and fifty servants-a grand total of twenty-seven hundred people!
There was actually still plenty of empty land! Four square kilometers was a lot!
The farmers first dried the grain in the sun, then Su Qin arranged for people to collect it. The gold payments could only be recorded for now and distributed later!
As for the grain harvest...
After all that work, they harvested sixteen thousand units of grain! Enough to feed twenty-seven hundred people for half a year!
Given the constant stream of people coming to Gulltown, the refugees could only receive reduced rations for now! They had to survive first. Once the thousand large mu of corn were harvested in the second quarter, things would get easier!
One night in early June, in the second-floor study
Su Qin summoned Gery, his construction officer, to discuss the cost of building a farm for five households!
After drawing up plans and discussing potential future sewage and street-cleaning issues,
Su Qin prepared to build the first village on the eastern side of the bottom end of the main crossroads within the looped canal!
It would be called Lower Gull Agricultural Town!
As for the farm's cost...
The final cost price was set at five gold for one level-two farm!
Copper coins were valuable! Gold coins were actually even more valuable!
One gold equaled ten silver, or a thousand copper!
A farm could house five families! That was only the cost of materials; Su Qin could get the labor for free!
Su Qin currently had only two hundred gold! But military and administrative salaries alone cost three hundred and sixty gold a month! It was nowhere near enough!
Therefore, the plan could only be to build fifty five-household farms first, as an emergency measure!
Fifty farms could house two hundred and fifty households! But there were six hundred newly arrived refugee households! More would come in the future! For now, he could only give people somewhere to live!
Having them stay at Gull Manor forever would not do. This was the private residence of the lord and his army!
There was definitely not enough money. What could he do?
Borrow from his wife's family!
Soon, a raven flew northeast with a request to borrow two thousand gold outright! Two thousand gold was two years' income for an ordinary baron!
He would repay it after the second harvest ended at the end of the year!
He could only gaze longingly at the refreshed items over the next few months!
His wife's family was very supportive, sending the Master of Coin, Boris, straight to Su Qin with three hundred soldiers escorting two thousand gold! As for repayment, they specifically said any time within two years would do!
Angel investors!
Early July, 275 AC, Gull Garden Square
Early that morning, the right Master of Coin brought administrative staff to post a large government notice.
It was written in the language of Westeros! Chinese characters circulated only among the craftsmen! With more dimensions and greater information density, they saved a lot of effort!
The notice soon attracted a large crowd of refugees living in the manor! They pushed forward a literate old man.
White-haired and leaning on a walking stick, the old man slowly began to read...
[The lord's first autumn announcement
Following discussions between the lord and his ministers:
Considering that refugees and subjects who have lost their homes cannot live in the lord's manor indefinitely, the lord will now fund the establishment of a new town.
Every five households in the town will operate one farm. Of its buildings, the stables and cowshed are explicitly designated by the lord as his private property. Residents must wait for the next policy before using them! Every household will have its own other facilities, such as storehouses and granaries!
For the first three years, farm residents will work for the lord without pay. Each household may keep the grain it needs each year, and all remaining grain must be surrendered!
Furthermore, considering the need for everyday goods, the lord will issue each household one gold in working funds annually at the end of the year as a subsidy. All residents interested in participating may register with the administrative staff at the entrance to Seagull Castle!
Signed: Su Qin Herculys, Baron of Gull
Seal: Qilin seal (Yellow Dragon)]
The moment he finished, the old man threw away his walking stick and ran toward the center of the manor to register! What old man? He was still hale and hearty, running like the wind!
The people in the inner circle turned around, only to find that the noisy crowd had already vanished!
The lord was actually giving out houses! After just three years, the houses would be theirs!
What the hell were they waiting for! Living in the lord's wooden houses inside the manor offered no sense of belonging in the end!
In fact, each town would have four thousand households, a thousand fewer than the original estimate of five thousand. A thousand fewer households meant two hundred fewer farms, freeing up another seven hundred and twenty thousand square meters!
That was seven hundred and twenty large mu, and this area would become Lower Gulltown's town center! It would be planned, built, and walled!
If attackers came, all the farmers outside could hide in the town center! At least it would offer plenty of security and functionality!
Of course, Su Qin was also paying attention to the registration of new refugee households. After all, this was the most basic issue of people's livelihoods!
Su Qin stood on the castle's highest platform, looking at the registration queues stretching several dozen meters in multiple lines!
He nodded. Now he could truly absorb the labor of these several thousand people!
Meanwhile, merchant ships were also lining up at the harbor. Over the past three months, word of Gulltown's lord buying construction resources like mad had spread to several places!
He bought iron ingots from Dorne! Deer glue, flooring, large blue bricks, and other building materials from the Storm Kingdom!
Apparently, he was also poaching people from Featherwood? But Featherwood was in such chaos that it had no attention to spare for refugees!
According to the intelligence, in Featherwood,
two barons had been killed by the Kingswood Brotherhood and impaled on sharpened stakes! This was to express the people's discontent!
Taxes in Featherwood were even higher, with seventy percent being the minimum. Maintaining House Targaryen's directly controlled army of tens of thousands cost a lot!
Back to infrastructure!
Of course, the [Shelter Seed-Corn] seeds had already been placed in the manor's large stone-brick warehouse. That was also a core area, with dozens of rat-catching cats and dogs kept inside!
A hundred people had been assigned to routine upkeep and to sun-dry grain when they had nothing else to do!
Many people did not know that dogs were actually very good at catching rats too! Cats sometimes did not take their work very seriously!
Of course, it was all stored in wooden containers!
The granary's interior reached ten meters high! Fifty spearmen also guarded it daily!
The spearmen trained on rotation! Only a hundred trained each day! The others defended the manor walls and checked the identities of people coming in!
He really ought to find a professional drillmaster to train the soldiers!
He had not found one yet, but the captain of his personal guard was barely adequate!
That raised a question: from the end of the rainy season to the end of June, how many people had come from various places because of the publicity?
Nearly sixty people a day! Old and young, men and women!
That was two thousand immigrants a month!
As part of the Crownlands, how large was Featherwood's total population?
Several million, certainly! It was a long-established wealthy region!
But it was currently losing a great many people! Taxes in other regions were currently lower than in Featherwood!
Refugees were fleeing in droves!
Could King's Landing stop them?
No! It could not stop them at all!
If Gulltown simply attracted a hundred thousand workers away and could still feed them, the restoration of Gull Territory's former glory would not be far off!
Thus, by early July, with the original refugees and those newly arrived in June, the manor had another thousand people compared with the previous population count. After matchmaking, that amounted to roughly two hundred households!
Su Qin currently had sixteen thousand units of grain. If corn planting began in August, it would mature three and a half months later, roughly five months from now!
During that period, how many refugees whose expenses he had to cover up front could those sixteen thousand units of grain feed?
With reduced rations, his surplus grain could feed sixteen hundred households!
The total number of new resident households had now reached over seven hundred.
At this rate, Su Qin would accept however many refugees came!
Of the two thousand gold borrowed from his wife's family, another five hundred would go toward building farms! That would allow roughly a hundred farms to be built in total!
By the end of July, there should be nine hundred refugee households, and five hundred could formally settle down!
The remaining four hundred would continue living in the manor!
Of course, that would leave only seventeen hundred gold!
But loans had to be repaid eventually!
So what about income? He could not simply sit around eating through his reserves!
Simple: sell weapons!
Smelting iron ingots was easy! But this era had very few blacksmiths! Skilled workers were precious! Yet Su Qin had no shortage of them at all!
How much did a [Dornish wooden spear] with a top-quality Dornish iron spearhead cost?
The market price was five silver!
Then how much should a Gull wooden spear, made with hundred-fold-forged iron and so sharp, be priced at?
One gold would be no problem!
As the kingdom began descending into chaos, weapons were in short supply among minor lords, great lords, wandering knights, and the like everywhere! The Free Cities were also in great turmoil, with demand for weapons and armor outstripping supply!
Everyone was waiting, waiting for the old dragon on the Iron Throne to breathe his last!
The Free Cities were the biggest buyers! At this time, the Disputed Lands, once ruled by House Blackfyre; the Kingdom of Lys, skilled at selling female slaves; the Kingdom of Tyrosh, a gathering place for sellswords; and the Stepstones, where the War of the Ninepenny Kings had taken place and pirates ran rampant, were all sharpening their blades! Who dared say that every remnant of the Blackfyre bloodline left there had died out!
Noble bastards were one way for nobles to prevent their bloodlines from ending!
Several merchants from Pentos had already discovered that Su Qin's spears had a suitable weight and met the required length! Most importantly, their spearheads had three edges! Their thrusts were very powerful!
More powerful than Dornish wooden spears!
Sharp! Hard! Deadly!
Pentos was a city where most of the land was desert! Its resources were gems and spices!
Although Pentos avoided war by offering money to other countries' armies, as a city whose mainstay was trade,
its city watch, noble private soldiers, sellsword companies, and others needed large quantities of weapons!
Pentos lacked iron!
What could they do? Buy it!
They had already noticed that Su Qin's standardized wooden weapons were better than Dorne's!
They offered one gold, a thousand copper, per spear!
So industry would always be an economic pillar!
After weighing everything, Su Qin went ahead and established Smithy No. 5! The skilled workers for one smithy, plus its construction costs, came to four hundred and fifty gold!
Build smithies along that entire kilometer from the manor's south gate to the eastern wall! One row could fit sixteen! Of course, once material yards were included, there would not be that many!
In one row, Nos. 1 through 9 would actually fit just right! The extra land would be used to give the blacksmiths a large tavern!
The paved roads and reserved open spaces had been designed long ago!
Thus, in early July, after the building materials were ready, the eighty craftsmen from large smithies Nos. 2, 3, 4, and 5 led twenty-four hundred unemployed workers-men and women, old and young-as large-scale infrastructure construction formally began!
The personnel had already been trained in wall-building back in June!
Smithy No. 1 devoted itself entirely to making wooden spears, while armor production was suspended!
Throughout July
Lower Gulltown, construction site
An endless stream of grain carts headed to the construction site. First, wells were dug in the planned areas!
One well per farm!
Gulltown had abundant groundwater! It was found at shallow depths; even the deepest wells could reach it at just fifteen meters!
They had water, food, tools, and building materials! They had labor, experts, and logistical support!
What else was missing?
They had everything they needed!
Time to get to work!
First, they built the houses, then made the furniture right there once the houses were finished (one bed, one table, and a few stools). Just like that, within a month, 2,400 people successfully built 100 farms!
By the end of July, the first phase of major infrastructure construction was complete!
On the trade front, after delivering 1,000 spears and earning 900 gold in net income (after costs), Su Qin's funds reached 2,100 gold!
After deducting 700 gold for two months of military and civil administration salaries, he had 1,400 gold left at the end of July!
Of course, arms trading could not be done recklessly-it could easily supply the enemy! Especially the armor trade!
Su Qin had no choice but to sell weapons. Who didn't keep some spare weapons for the militia to use?! Once called up, the farmers would all be militiamen! Su Qin believed the farmers would be willing to fight for him!
He believed they would be willing to defend the enormous benefits Su Qin had given them and safeguard Su Qin's rights!
They would be the source of Su Qin's power!
The source of power that would one day give Su Qin the strength to interfere in the entire kingdom!
There were some people Su Qin was unwilling to let walk down a road to certain death!
This world was so strange! So strange he did not dare think too deeply about it!