Golden autumn harvest

Time slowly passed.

Soon, it was late November. Prince Rhaegar's betrothal ceremony was drawing to a close, and King's Landing was bustling.

Meanwhile, in Seagull City, a piece of explosive news arrived from Lower Gulltown.

One mu of farmland had yielded 2,000 jin of corn kernels! A full 500 jin above the projected 1,500!

Everyone had gone mad, completely mad!

Two thousand jin per large mu, and there were 1,000 mu!

Merchants began asking the farmers whether they would sell seeds at a high price. Although cold water was thrown on their enthusiasm-the corn had been blessed by the Dragon God and could only be grown in Lower Gulltown!

They still wanted to try it elsewhere!

Some passing nobles began frantically sending messages to other regions!

A single stone stirred up a thousand waves!

Food and weapons were the hard currency of this era! And Su Qin lacked neither!

Gold coins? Merely a medium of exchange!

What ruler concerned himself with how much something was worth? They all focused on productivity. What concerned them was whether the value of the goods themselves was needed!

Su Qin ordered the 2,400 farming households to devote all their efforts to harvesting. Lower Gulltown's fields were firmly guarded by 300 Qilin Guards, with any outsider entering within one li of Lower Gulltown!

The 50 horses provided by his wife's family were also used to transport grain. It was not raining, so they had to hurry!

First, they transported the grain back to the 300 five-household farms!

Each farm had five households, and each household had a granary. The granaries took up the most space on the entire farm! Each household's granary covered 400 square meters (not actually that big, 20 by 20), stood four meters tall, and was built entirely of stone bricks with stone flooring. It was ventilated and had torch pillars.

Inside the granaries, planks were used to build circular wooden grain bins two meters tall. A small outer enclosure of stone bricks was first built around the bottom edge, with the bin's redwood base placed inside. Several stone supports 30 centimeters tall were then placed underneath, raising it off the ground to keep rats from ruining the grain!

The wooden bins had tilting mechanisms. When grain was needed, opening the switch let it slide out!

Each grain bin was two meters in diameter. Excluding aisles and the like, one granary contained ten such bins! Five on either side of the aisle! However, the grain would not be put straight into them!

The corn needed to be dried in the sun. Even after drying, it could still sprout the following year!

Grain storage had to be dry and ventilated! The grain also needed to be taken out for some sun from time to time!

Here came the question.

How many jin of grain could a five-household farm hold?

A grain bin held around six cubic meters, or roughly 4,500 jin of corn. Each household had ten bins! That meant it could hold 45,000 jin!

A farm had five households, so it could store 225,000 jin!

There were currently 300 farms, enough to hold 67.5 million jin of grain. With 30 jin equaling one unit, that meant storage for 2.25 million units of grain!

At a yield of 2,000 jin per mu, or around 60 units per mu, a full 1,000 mu could produce 60,000 units of grain. How many households were farming it?

Only 250 households actually cultivated those 1,000 mu!

There were also around 1,000 households that had caught the planting season but had not planted corn. They had planted buckwheat yielding 200 jin per mu, and it had ripened too. How many mu was that?

Each household had actually reclaimed four mu, making 4,000 mu of land! Thus, 4,000 mu of buckwheat yielding 200 jin per mu had ripened! Many people had only worked and missed the planting season!

The additional harvest was therefore 800,000 jin of buckwheat, or 25,000 units of grain!

Altogether, Lower Gulltown alone had obtained 85,000 units of grain in these six months!

How many people could that feed?

An adult needed 30 jin of grain a month, or one unit! Twelve units a year! Children needed roughly two-thirds as much, or eight units!

Gulltown currently had around 2,400 households, roughly 9,000 people!

Around 6,000 adults and 3,000 children. How many units of grain would they need for six months?

(Because six months later, the crops would ripen again. There were two harvests a year here.)

Sixty thousand units! A full 60,000 units of grain!

It was absolutely enough!

How much did they currently have?

Eighty-five thousand!

They could finally achieve adequate food and clothing!

Probably very few regions in this world could keep ordinary people fed. There were simply too many taxes, and nobles oppressed the common people at will, keeping the population of the Seven Kingdoms from growing despite its being as large as Brazil!

This world was desperately short of food!

The nobles' oppression left the common people displaced, and with disease on top of that, the population had never managed to grow!

Most were refugees from Featherwood!

How much of its population had the entire Featherwood region lost over these six months? How many people did Featherwood have in total? Who knew?

Runestone and its subordinate lands (meaning all 7,000 square kilometers of territory) were already a major grain-producing region, yet their total population was only around 15,000 households! The population of a standard earldom!

Reaching the level of a duke required at least 100,000 households and 10,000 regular troops under direct command! Thus, in status and bloodline, House Royce was indeed better than the average duke, but in strength, it ranked at the level of a weaker first-tier duke!

Back to the matter at hand: enough seeds also needed to be kept for next year's planting. One large mu required around ten jin of seeds!

Here came the question: how many seeds were needed?

Over these seven months, those without land, helped by those who already had it, had reclaimed 9,000 mu. Some land had not been planted, and some had not been fully cleared!

Next year would require 90,000 jin of seeds, only 3,000 units of grain!

A semi-collective system was currently in effect. This was the only way to accumulate the necessary initial capital!

Then, by this calculation, how much grain could he harvest in the first half of next year?

A full 600,000 units! At current prices, that was worth 108,000 gold! Two years of income for the Vale of Arryn! Yet the problem was that the entire Vale of Arryn was tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of times larger than Lower Gulltown's farmland!

Snowballing! This was true snowballing!

One town's [gold coin] income rivaled two Vales? What kind of joke was that!

Of course, that was impossible!

As the food supply increased, prices would fall. What would the price become then?

It would certainly fall very low! But that change would take a long time! Still, would Su Qin sell it all for gold coins?

Of course not! This place had long winters! Although winter could not reach Gulltown, precautions were still necessary! They had to stockpile more grain!

He could not let the common people fend for themselves during long winters as they had before!

Gold coins were only a medium of exchange. Only those who had gone hungry knew how precious grain was! They would not trade it even for gold!

Apart from countries with vast land, sparse populations, and high productivity that could sell it, no other country sold grain lightly as long as it had other industries for foreign trade!

Still, this world was currently short of food, so grain prices probably would not fall much! There would be no fear of lacking money then!

Delia cared the most about the harvest. She also began taking the 100 personal guards escorting her around Lower Gulltown, now home to 2,400 households, to maintain order.

In fact, Su Qin had never had anyone capable of managing this area and had simply left it to Luke's Patrol Guard. The Patrol Guard was a 300-man squad Luke had voluntarily organized with the people, using his own status as the lord's bronze knight. It was responsible for everyday dispute mediation in Lower Gulltown, as well as patrols and inspections!

When disputes could not be resolved through mediation, they would be sent to Su Qin for resolution!

Some people serving in the Patrol Guard possessed considerable martial prowess, but Su Qin currently could not afford to support so many regular soldiers.

Three hundred leather-armored Qilin Guards were the limit. He would find a way to expand them when they campaigned against the barbarians next year!

One evening in late November, after coaxing Delia to sleep, Su Qin opened the system panel before him, visible only to himself.

First, he checked the territory information.

"System, open the territory information."

A flash of multicolored light swept across the screen, and the information for Gull Territory appeared.

[Gull Territory: comprises four administrative regions-Gulltown, Augustus, Kiel, and Aite-all under direct rule]

[Affiliated house: House Hercules; house sigil: Qilin (Yellow Dragon); family members: 2]

[Population: 3,000 households (total across all four regions)]

[Administrative center: Gulltown, level 3 town]

[Lord's private property: level 2 large smithies (20 people each): 5; level 1 small redwood logging camps (10 people each): 20]

[Grain production: 85,000 units/half-year; gold coin income: 20 gold coins/month (lord's private property; the two brothers, Red and his brother, at the outside smithy are now craftsmen bestowed with miracles)]

[Military: Qilin Guard (320 people): elite (blue); Militia Patrol Guard (320 people): ordinary (white)]

[Public security: 83 (good)]

[Exclusive system item storage: Basic Divine Court Blueprint (blue), Divine Court Dragon Staff (blue), One Hundred Cases Explained (blue), antibiotics: 11 pills]

[Labor force: 6,500 adults, 6,000 employed (4,000 in agriculture, 1,000 in industry (crafting, forestry, handicrafts, transport, logistics, etc.), 600 military personnel, 400 estate logistics and livestock workers), around 500 unemployed]

[Minors (under 14): 2,500 people (handicrafts, intelligence, transport assistance, students, etc.)]

After checking, Su Qin sighed. Construction of a formal academy would have to be postponed!

He would have to wait until next July, when he truly had money, to build a Seagull Academy large enough for the children, one genuinely dedicated solely to education!

Because the extra 25,000 units of grain were rations for the army and the new refugees arriving after December and in the coming year! They could not be touched!