Time soon reached the end of October.
After collecting and pooling the nobles' payments for building their new manors, Su Qin had only about 800 in available funds, mostly deposits from three minor nobles for their manors and money borrowed from his wife!
The number of households in Gulltown had now officially reached 2,000!
It could already be called a level 3 town!
Families of refugees kept pouring in. Featherwood was simply too chaotic!
And for now, the nobles of Featherwood could do nothing about residents sneaking out of their territories!
The Brotherhood Without Banners was their true scourge!
Two earls' castles had already been successfully attacked! The bodies of the local nobles had been impaled on sharpened wooden stakes! This was called execution by impalement!
Aerys II, the king on the Iron Throne, was working with the nobles to deal with the popular rebellion!
The lords had no time to worry about commoners wandering off!
Besides, refugees fleeing everywhere was very common in the final years of a dynasty!
Although, in theory, the commoners of each territory were all the private property of their lord, it seemed that the lords currently placed more importance on their own safety!
They did not seem to do much about subjects fleeing without permission.
Mainly because relatively few were leaving.
Not everyone would believe that a noble called the Baron of Gulltown had such good policies!
As long as they could survive, they would not wander off!
Moreover, word had already spread that Gulltown followed neither the Faith of the Seven nor the Old Gods, but the Qilin Faith.
Some people rejected foreign religions, so there were not that many arrivals either!
Until people saw or experienced for themselves that this religion truly was good, they generally remained cautious!
So, for now, the number of arriving refugees was limited!
One evening near the end of the month, at Seagull City.
Su Qin was hosting the actual owners of the three manors: Aite Keep, Augustus Castle, and Keir Keep. Although the lands outside the manors had already been bought back, the manor castles had not. That was precisely what they were discussing!
The three family heads were Paul Aite, Tron Augustus, and Hall Keir!
Su Qin met their eyes, waiting for their answer!
Paul and Telang exchanged a glance. At 1.8 meters tall, Hall looked big and imposing even seated on the sofa!
Paul looked at Su Qin and found his lord looking into his eyes. After some thought, he had an answer.
"My lord, I can hand over the manor at Aite Keep to you, but you must at least sign a contract with me, allowing me to serve as your deputy financial officer for at least ten years! And the compensation you promised for the future must be paid in full!"
"That way, we'll have enough gold coins to feel secure!"
Su Qin looked at Telang and Hall again. They nodded in agreement too. It seemed they were still afraid he would simply remove them from office! They had probably discussed their terms with one another beforehand!
Originally, they had only been nobles on the level of village heads!
Su Qin could indeed have simply arrested and beheaded them to seize control! But that would have had extremely bad repercussions, so he had been negotiating and maneuvering with them all this time!
After hearing Hall's words,
Su Qin fell silent for a moment. Their abilities were too poor, and he really did intend to replace them in the future!
He would only employ people with a politics stat of at least 10 in the future, but making a necessary compromise was not out of the question. So Su Qin made his decision.
"All right, then I'll sign contracts with you. Once they're signed, we'll send them to the earl's maester and have him send them to the Grand Maester in King's Landing to be registered."
The three nodded and took three noble seals from inside their clothes, all made of brass!
House Augustus had a black eagle on a white field, House Keir a white dog on a black field, and House Aite a black bow on a white field!
House Augustus knew falconry!
House Keir knew dog training!
House Aite knew bow-making techniques!
They were all minor nobles granted fiefs to deal with the clans near the Vale of Arryn (village-head level)!
Su Qin also took out his Yellow Dragon seal, wrote three contracts in ink on parchment, and had all four lords stamp their seals on them.
Another day, Su Qin notified the earl's maester, Dengwen, to send someone to the three men to collect the contracts!
And there was a source of income for the maesters: contract management fees!
With the Grand Maester or in Oldtown, the one-time contract storage fee was 10 gold coins, with the contracts stored in Oldtown or King's Landing!
Mainly because they might be kept for decades, another contract storage payment was required every five years.
Every contract seeking official recognition from the maesters required not only family seals, but also a contract fee every five years!
This was an important source of income for the maesters' organization!
The three men put away their contracts with satisfaction.
"My lord, Keir Keep/Augustus Castle/Aite Keep belongs to you!"
Su Qin nodded and instructed the guards to escort them back to their new manors!
He had finally regained direct jurisdiction over the four small territories: Gulltown's main town, Augustus Castle, Keir Keep, and Aite Keep!
He still had 800 gold, and the corn would be ready for harvest in late November! He would first see how much grain they harvested!
A mu here was a large mu of one thousand square meters, and corn yields were not low even during droughts!
Let alone in Lower Gulltown's fields, which were not suffering from drought! This crop was extremely adaptable!
Now that he had direct jurisdiction over the four towns, it was time to address the next problem!
Building roads!
For now, Gulltown's main town would be called Seagull City!
Seagull City lay west of the Gull River. A kilometer upstream was a bridge called Gull Bridge!
Heading east across Gull Bridge, over the Gull River, which was several dozen meters wide, brought one to the eastern bank, five kilometers from Lower Gulltown!
Lower Gulltown was roughly six kilometers by road from Seagull City (the manor)!
It took about half an hour by carriage!
But there were very few coachmen at present!
By the end of October, Lower Gulltown had developed only about half its planned farmland and housed roughly 2,000 farming households!
Those who had missed the planting season had all gone to help build houses.
Having received such great benefits, the commoners were still willing to help build new houses for their lord and those who would come later.
So there was no shortage of construction workers either.
After October ended, November 1 arrived.
It marked the beginning of a lively month in King's Landing, and it was also the day Su Qin's system shop refreshed. King's Landing was celebrating Prince Rhaegar's betrothal ceremony with a tournament!
Su Qin had been waiting for the system since the early hours. He wanted to try communicating with its intelligence, which had been out of commission for several months!
Su Qin was very anxious!
Fortunately, the system's own functions still worked!
The items from the previous few months had been too expensive. Su Qin could not afford them at all!
Su Qin prepared to look at the items refreshed for November!
Leaning against the bed, Su Qin fiddled with the system screen that only he could see.
[November refreshed items: medicine/weapons/books]
Su Qin thought for a moment. "System, I choose medicine!"
[Warning: medicine is exclusive to the host. Giving it indiscriminately to certain important people will cause a world-class catastrophe!]
Su Qin froze, then slowly nodded. He would not sell it casually! The system intelligence being out of commission probably had something to do with the medicine he had sold!
Then he turned his gaze to the screen.
[Medicine: 10 antibiotic pills (blue), exchangeable for 10 gold coins! Effects: reduces inflammation and fever, effective against internal inflammation! (Bacterial or fungal infections)]
The system really was afraid he would get killed by this unhygienic world!
After exchanging for them,
Su Qin tucked the medicine inside his clothes and slowly drifted off to sleep.
Early the next morning, Su Qin finished breakfast with Yira attending him.
Then came his unshakable daily routine of spear practice in the first-floor training room! Or practicing mounted archery outdoors!
Two hours later, around nine, Su Qin finished bathing and sat in the second-floor study.
This was where he usually studied policies.
Sometimes he invited his ministers to discuss matters together.
The second-floor library was entrusted to Kerry. His daily task was to manage the minutes of each month's meetings. At other times, Kerry generally went to study with his father.
Su Qin sat down, thought for a moment, and spread out a parchment map.
This parchment map did not show the entire Kingdom of the Vale, but the whole Gull Territory. Su Qin had ordered the falcon-training family, House Arryn, to produce it within three months, referencing previous maps and drawing it on parchment in fade-resistant ink!
On the map, the main town of Gull Territory was Gull Manor. North of it was Augustus Castle, where there were two fortresses: Augustus Fortress and the other-Four Crossroads Fortress. Sovereignty over both belonged to Su Qin, but he currently lacked sufficient troops, so Four Crossroads was temporarily garrisoned by Earl Yalun!
East of Augustus lay a holding under Runestone Territory-the former Seagull Port (already extensively destroyed! Ruins!). Northwest lay Aite Keep, and farther west was Keir Keep!
At this point, Su Qin shifted his gaze to the area of Gulltown. Gulltown's harbor was not particularly good; its geographical location was inferior to that of the original harbor to the east, which was a natural sheltered harbor! But it had already been destroyed by dragonfire!
Just like Harrenhal back then! Rebuilding would require far too many gold coins!
Su Qin looked at the map.
"First, a 40-meter-wide main road from Seagull City to Lower Gulltown. How long would it need to be?"
Su Qin measured it with a ruler. "About six kilometers long!"
"If I calculate the area, how much would need to be paved with bricks?"
He did a quick mental calculation.
"It would take 240,000 square meters!"
"Then how many bricks would that require? One brick is 40 centimeters long and 20 centimeters wide, meaning a surface area of 0.08 square meters."
"It would take three million bricks!"
He shook his head. That was an enormous number of bricks! Gulltown probably could not afford it right now! Su Qin began calculating the cost in gold...
"One copper coin for ten long blue bricks. (There are brick kilns elsewhere! Bricks aren't as expensive as grain!) It would cost about 3,000 gold!"
1 gold = 10 silver = 1,000 copper coins!
He was somewhat shocked!
"Too expensive! Too expensive! Three thousand gold for one road. Three thousand gold could hire a 500-man unit of the Golden Company for a year! Where would I get any extra gold coins? I still owe my wife's family 1,000 gold! (I borrowed another sum!)"
"I need to find a way to fire bricks!"
In this era, grain yields were very low. Grain was silver! There was no particular shortage of people, though! This made some industrial products relatively cheap!
Over the past few months, Su Qin had also collected information on some brick kilns in Westeros!
In the Storm Kingdom, one kiln could fire tens of thousands of bricks in a batch! Of course, it took a long time! A brick kiln needed to fire for a month! However, one team could manage several kilns, so an ordinary brickworks owner could produce 80,000 bricks a month without any problem!
But when would ordinary commoners ever have the chance to live in brick houses or stone-and-brick houses? Since bricks could be used to build city walls, they were also strategic supplies, though controls were lax!
But because the nobles levied too many taxes, ordinary commoners struggled even to feed themselves. How could they spare a thought for building stone houses?
Calculating through the end of December, and including what he owed his wife's family, Su Qin was currently still 200 gold in debt!
Minus 200 gold, or using the name for gold coins here, [Golden Dragon]—minus 200 Golden Dragons!
Poor! He dared not build roads!
He could only make do with dirt roads for now and first have the spare labor widen the main dirt roads leading to his three directly administered territories to 40 meters!