Su Qin spent an entire week thinking about the main buildings to construct in Lower Gulltown's [inner city].
For a large town that would eventually have 4,000 households, aside from daily living and entertainment, the most important things were security and administrative capacity!
How much space could be freed up in the center of Lower Gulltown?
A full 720,000 square meters!
Even excluding the roads and city walls, there would still be at least 640,000 square meters!
City walls with sides 800 meters long!
An administrative court definitely had to be built, and besides that, many, many other buildings needed constructing!
They needed plenty of bricks! But right now, they simply could not afford that many!
Did the craftsmen know how to fire bricks? The answer was yes!
Fired hollow bricks and long bricks had already appeared during the Western Zhou dynasty! The craftsmen might lack the intelligence and skills required for high-level buildings such as the [Divine Court] and might not know how to construct them, but firing bricks?
That only took a lump of clay, a mold, and a fire!
Su Qin spent an entire month considering where to build the brick kilns. Gulltown certainly had abundant clay resources, but there were no good sites.
An industrial building that produced smoke and dust pollution could not possibly go inside the inner city! After some thought, he decided to put it by the riverbank for now, but its foundations would have to be built at least three meters high with large stones! That would keep it from being submerged when the Gull River flooded!
On average, the Gull River flooded once every ten years!
Beside the proposed kiln site, there also happened to be a forty-meter-wide main road that had already been cleared! Transport would be convenient too!
As for clay resources? They were everywhere in Gulltown!
A one-square-kilometer patch of clay, excavated five meters down, would yield five million cubic meters! If one person dug two cubic meters a day, it would take 2.5 million days! Two hundred people could dig for a lifetime!
Even calculating for Lower Gulltown's walls to be thirty meters high, five meters thick, and eight hundred meters long on each side, the bricks required would total only 150,000 cubic meters!
How long would a hundred people take to excavate 150,000 cubic meters?
About two years of digging would be enough!
But in this world, where would walls that high even be needed?
Ten meters was already quite good!
Still, even ten-meter-high walls would take quite a while to build!
A city could hardly be built overnight. Construction was measured in years!
Anyone who raised towering walls in a few months with ordinary productive capacity either had thousands working at once or was using cheats!
After some consideration, the reserved central area could only be enclosed with a two-meter-high wooden palisade for now. Once the bricks had been fired, they could build the castle estate!
Throughout August, the residents who had already settled also planted corn across the 1,000 mu cleared in advance, just east of Lower Gulltown! Plenty of laborers were still idle. Su Qin had also arranged several weapons deals over the past two months, so he was not short of gold coins. He had even repaid the gold borrowed from his wife's family!
Clearly, the merchants liked Su Qin's spears!
Nothing happened in August or September. The days drifted by, and aboard time's little boat, they arrived in October!
Of course, the 1,000 mu of corn had grown too!
But one thing worried Su Qin!
The system had gone kaput!
That intelligent voice had not answered his calls for two months!
In the first week of October, many nobles came to Gulltown. They saw the corn that had already grown tall in the fields and were actually quite curious about what it was.
When told that the lord had supplied the seeds, they would briefly discuss the plant with Su Qin. They did not know its yield!
Whether they belonged to the dragon faction or the eagle faction, Su Qin would receive them briefly and treat them courteously.
They were going to attend the tournament for Prince Rhaegar's betrothal ceremony!
As for the Duke of the Storm Kingdom, Steffon Baratheon, and his wife, who had gone out last year to find Rhaegar a bride, they had long since disappeared in a storm at sea! Robert Baratheon remained under Jon's care, while the Vale was temporarily left to a regent!
Su Qin took no faction's side. He knew he had things to do that went beyond factional struggles!
The system gave you so much, and all you want is to fight for supremacy? What a joke!
Haven't you seen that the system has been down for two months? The enemy is unfathomable!
Jon Arryn's people had also extended an olive branch, but Su Qin rejected it outright. He was the Earl of Runestone's man, so in his actions, he would certainly side with the dragon faction!
In his heart, however, he belonged to neither faction. In truth, he mentally belonged to a reformist noble faction that maintained the order of the noble class on the condition that commoners lived happy lives! He leaned toward the lawful camp!
Su Qin's ideals might have had much in common with those of the Dragon Mother, Daenerys Targaryen. Their ideals were compatible, but Su Qin kept a tighter grip on the grassroots!
Su Qin believed that the future Daenerys would like this territory!
Su Qin wanted to change the childhood experiences of the Dragon Mother, [Daenerys Targaryen], who had developed ideas of liberation in this medieval world, yet had wandered destitute as a child, going so far as to smear ash on her face to hide her looks and sell her [House Targaryen crown]!
Childhood experiences could have an enormous effect on a person!
But the burden was heavy, and the road was long!
Would that unknown enemy allow Su Qin to alter a major character's fate so drastically?
Who knew!
But if he wanted to do it, then he had to act!
The first step was to possess sufficient military strength, economic strength, and cultural influence!
At present, conflicts between nobles and commoners in Gulltown seemed to have lessened considerably!
It could be said that as long as Su Qin kept Gulltown in check, even its unwritten rules would be much cleaner!
The nobles and knights traveling through Gulltown all marveled at Lower Gulltown's construction layout!
The two farms were built with their gates facing each other from east and west. Right outside the gates were ten-meter-wide side roads leading straight to the twenty-meter-wide main roads inside the town! Those twenty-meter-wide dirt town roads in turn led directly to the forty-meter-wide central main road by the concentric rectangular canals on the left, all laid out in neat rows!
Carriage roads and pedestrian roads had already been separated too. Inside the farms were dry latrines, large bathhouses, granaries, warehouses, stables, wells, cattle sheds, and homes of stone brick and redwood! Everything was neat and orderly!
They looked as though they had been cast from the same mold!
For the first time, Gulltown was sung of by bards.
"In distant Crab Bay, there is a strange lord. When he took office, he did not seize the commoners' property. He has collected no taxes for a year, and there are not even any scandals about him. The people there all believe in their lord's religion, called the Qilin Faith..."
"The people there are all happy, and their lord is very powerful. Everyone can live in a stone-brick house..."
"Even corn, a crop that vanished long ago, has appeared!"
These nobles of the Kingdom of the Vale were all taking ships to King's Landing to attend Prince Rhaegar's betrothal ceremony and, most importantly, the tournament.
Did anyone harbor malicious intentions? Of course!
In this era, nobles were still relatively respectful toward one another in public! But no one could fathom what they thought in private!
But Su Qin had informants everywhere. Once he caught them, he simply fined them! Dealing with nobles who were not his subjects was rather troublesome. He could not just kill them all; they were bound together by marriages, and touching one would affect them all!
Every foreign noble who tried to tamper with the cornfields received a beating from Su Qin! With a legitimate reason, what was he waiting for if not to beat them?
They wanted to tamper with Su Qin's private property. That was the reason!
Had anyone attempted infiltration? Yes, but they had all failed! Their main aim was to abduct craftsmen and force them to reveal whatever techniques they could once brought back!
The craftsmen were leading teams building the farms!
The problem was that groups of loyal commoners guarded the craftsmen every day. At night, the people voluntarily kept watch within dozens of meters of them. Traveling noble knights could not bring many retainers, so how would they dare provoke this seemingly crazed crowd?
Moreover, the old and newly formed families making up the five hundred refugee households had been directly allotted stone-brick homes they would never even have dared dream of! Their average loyalty had already risen above eighty-five! They were also firm believers in the Dragon God Faith!
Of course, to outsiders, it was called the Qilin Faith!
That was because the relief grain distributed by the lord was all given in the name of the Dragon God Faith! Before the second quarter's grain harvest, the lord directly handed out money and grain so the commoners could stay alive and well!
You tell me, how could outsiders stir up the people's distrust of their lord?
Su Qin's pro-commoner policies meant that even the lesser nobles did not dare oppress the people! Once caught and investigated, anyone found to have oppressed the commoners faced severe punishment!
After consolidating his power, Su Qin even explicitly stipulated that every official had to believe in the Qilin Faith!
Any acts of banditry, such as oppressing commoners, forcing respectable women into prostitution, or seizing farmland, would be punished by the lord!
With the people's support and an army, Su Qin could bring himself to act!
Haven't you seen that the three noble houses-House Keir, House Augustus, and House Aite-have all embraced the Qilin Faith?
They simply lacked a strong authority to discipline them!
If a noble dared break the rules, the intelligence would reach Su Qin's desk that very night. Su Qin did not care who they were; all serious offenders were beheaded!
But he had to offer sweet dates along with the stick. Officials and soldiers received high salaries! Ministers started at ten gold coins a month, worth ten thousand copper coins!
Ten thousand copper coins were worth more than a hundred thousand in modern cash! When had lesser nobles ever seen so much money? Neither the lesser nobles nor even the ministers dared imagine how much money Su Qin had now!
Truly, high office and generous pay! As long as he managed those at the top properly, they would restrain their own subordinates! As for how they spent it? Weapons in this era were not cheap goods turned out on a lathe, and warhorses were expensive too! Add their everyday chicken, duck, fish, and meat, and keeping a lover was quite feasible!
I'll make them cough it back up later! Money is actually only a medium for exchanging material goods. As a ruler, you cannot focus on money. You must focus on productivity!
Moreover, nobles and commoners alike had a red line they could not cross! Private land transactions were forbidden, and exactly how much land each person owned was currently being watched closely!
This was the intelligence minister's daily work: monitoring for land annexation! Once such a problem arose, the peasants and nobles involved in the transaction would be executed outright! Human lives were not worth much in this era!
It was that strict!
As for the intelligence minister secretly colluding with nobles? It was not as though Su Qin had no informants of his own!
And those informants knew whom they served! They served the lord, not this intelligence minister!
Those below knew whom they served. Would Kelun collude with anyone? Let him try!
As soon as he did, anyone below who saw it would go straight to the estate guards to come in and report it.
Su Qin was not easy to serve at all! Merits were rewarded, faults punished, and anyone who dared abuse their authority had long since been executed! It left the nobles both loving and fearing Su Qin!
When people felt fear and gratitude toward their leader at the same time, authority and power were born!
Thus, public order throughout Gulltown was much better than before. Thieves and the like were hauled straight off to build houses!
As for bandits? Two words!
Execute them!
Bandits had already crossed the bounds of what could be tolerated! At present, once the facts were established, every one of them was executed!
This was not actually the kingly way, but the way of might!
The way of might was very necessary in the early stages!
Thus, the people of Gulltown, along with those of Keir Keep, Aite Keep, and Augustus Castle, all wholeheartedly supported Su Qin's rule!
This was the result of more than half a year's hard work. Of course, the system and his wife's family had provided a great deal of support!