Chapter 341 Pre-War Preparations (I)
For Yang Qiu, taking over Dutata City was not a problem at all.
Although the number of nobles in Adler County is greater than that of Innadri, and each noble family has more private soldiers with stronger combat effectiveness, there was no problem for them to beat up the Innadri family during the Bartles period - but unfortunately, the undead army they had to face also increased from 3,000 at the time of the Bartles family to 30,000.
It is no exaggeration to say that if it were not for the governance issue, Yang Qiu, who had 30,000 players, could have taken over the entire Rhine Kingdom before the Winter Festival, and taken over the small eastern countries such as the Rose Kingdom and the Halifax Kingdom at the same time...
Of course, if this were to be done, Yang Qiu’s base would probably collapse. Overthrowing the old regime without rapid planning and governance, and establishing a new order in a timely manner, would only lead to speculators with worse means and more extreme methods rapidly rising to power and occupying the power vacuum. Then the conquered areas could not be said to be liberated, but could only be said to be dragged into the quagmire of war, with turmoil and chaos, widespread grief, and people’s livelihood in misery…
Only destroying without building , even if Yang Qiu was really crazy, he would not do such a thing.
(Alternative World Time) At the beginning of the year, Yang Qiu had been very eager to eliminate Adler and his group of incompetent nobles, but considering that the national team was short of manpower and that there were still many operators and clerks in the city hall who needed training, he had waited patiently until now...
Now is the time to test the talent reserve of the City Hall - to gain the trust of hundreds of thousands of residents in the slums within 24 hours of the alien world, to appease these civilians who are closest to the battlefield and most easily instigated and used by those with ulterior motives during the war, and to prevent these innocent people from suffering large-scale chaos and riots due to the tense atmosphere caused by the fighting!
This is definitely a challenge.
Mrs. Hank, who came to the front line as a volunteer among ordinary staff, knew how heavy the burden on her shoulders was when she set out.
But Mrs. Hank was not afraid... Her son Sam Hank had been living next to thousands of vicious criminals and had stayed in the Tarantan Wasteland for more than a year. She would never tolerate herself as a mother bringing shame to her son.
There were many brave women like Mrs. Hank. Most of them worked in the Logistics Department, or underwrote the public shops opened by the Logistics Department in the city. Seeing that verbal solicitation alone could not make the slum dwellers approach them, these former housewives discussed for a while and simply divided into several groups. Two or three people pulled a tricycle and bravely entered the deep alleys of the slums.
Horse-drawn carriages cannot enter the alleys of the slums, but small tricycles are not a big problem.
Mrs. Hank, Kate Berkeley, the cold dish chef who also signed up as a volunteer, and Kate's brother Becky, the three of them pulled their tricycles into the alley. Kate, the cold dish chef who was used to hawking her wares on the street, greeted the residents who were hiding in their homes and secretly watching them as enthusiastically as Mrs. Hank.
"A bowl of vegetable noodles costs only two copper coins. Try it and see for yourself. It's cheap and delicious, and comes with a small side dish!"
Mrs. Hank grabbed a handful of Westham's homemade multi-grain vermicelli and gestured to the big pot on the small stove in the tricycle; Kate scooped a spoonful of spicy pickles from a plastic bucket with a long-handled wooden spoon and actively blew it into the nose of a resident who was looking out of his house.
The taste of multi-grain vermicelli made from potatoes, corn and a small amount of wheat flour is much worse than rice noodles, but it is grain after all, and it will naturally emit the aroma of food after being cooked; plus, the price of two copper coins per serving is really very cheap, and the residents of the slums usually spend more on a meal than this. Soon, some brave people walked out of their homes and paid tentatively.
"We didn't bring any cutlery. Get a bowl from your house!" Mrs. Hank happily took the money and greeted them in a very familiar manner.
The tenant who paid the bill brought out a wooden bowl from home, but Mrs. Hank waved her hand again: "It's too small, bring a big bowl, three taels of noodles and soup, it won't fit!"
The resident excitedly exchanged for a large wooden bowl, and Mrs. Hank filled the bowl with soup and noodles in front of many local neighbors...
Kate also did not forget to add a small spoonful of complimentary side dish to the man's bowl of noodles.
The resident's eyes widened as he slurped the soup from a wooden bowl and even impatiently used his dirty hands to pick up vermicelli. At the same time, more people rushed out of their homes with their own wooden and ceramic bowls and ran to the mobile tricycle noodle selling point that exuded the aroma of food...
The human-powered tricycle that the undead rode out of the Tarantan Desert and to Westram was ordered by Yang Qiu from a local machinery factory in Province G that produces agricultural machinery. The body of the tricycle is heavy and sturdy, and is usually used by farmers in Province G to transport grain and land, and is also often used by workers to transport bricks, cement, and coal. Although it does not look impressive, it can easily carry hundreds of kilograms.
The tricycle loaded with nearly 300 kilograms of vermicelli was sold out halfway through the alley.
Fortunately, the city hall had anticipated this situation. When there were still more than ten kilograms of vermicelli left, Mrs. Hank asked a resident's child to help notify the back to replenish the vermicelli. Soon, an agent rode a bicycle and brought two large boxes full of dry vermicelli...
The vermicelli business was a hot seller and lasted until noon.
More than 60 tricycles of mobile vermicelli sales points run by more than 200 volunteers went through the alleys of the slum, selling more than seven tons of vermicelli pulled by Dongfeng heavy trucks and more than a dozen carts of vegetables pulled from the new town (the wasteland in the south of Adler Territory)...
The current specific number of slum dwellers was also counted.
"According to conservative estimates, there are about 260,000 to 270,000 people living in the slums now."
In the front-line camp that had been set up all morning, after nervously calculating the consumption of vermicelli, Ms. Mia, the chief steward of the logistics department who came to the front in person, wiped her sweat and said, "It's much less than the number we had before. The missing people should have gone to the countryside to do odd jobs during the autumn harvest."
Ms. Mia's assistant, Ban, a member of the logistics department, nodded and said, "It should be. When I went to help deliver vermicelli, water, and soup ingredients, I observed that there were very few young and middle-aged men among the residents. Most of them were women, the elderly, and children."
An agent who came from Xinzhen to help also said: "I heard from John that he used to go to the countryside for more than a month every year during the autumn harvest, otherwise there would be no food for the winter. The residents of the slums here are probably in the same situation."
"Young and strong people are also a good thing. At least they won't be dragged into the battlefield by the nobles in the city." Ms. Mia nodded and turned to look at the assistant team. "We have been here all morning. Is there any reaction in the city ?"
"Nothing has happened yet," Ban replied. "I went to the South City Gate half an hour ago and it was still open. There were people from the laundry pulling clothes out of the city, and people doing odd jobs were also coming in and out normally."
"The masters here don't react that quickly. They may not even know that we have arrived at the city." The operator who came from the new town to help said sarcastically, "You will never guess how slow the people here are. In September, Mr. Walton received a letter from the Dutata City Tax Commissioner, claiming that someone would come to supervise the autumn tax collection. As a result, Mr. Walton made full preparations and waited for more than half a month, but the person still hasn't arrived... It's only more than 200 kilometers away. Even if it's a snail, it should have crawled there, right?"
Mia, Ben and others couldn't help but laugh.
Ban smiled and said, "I don't think it's necessarily the tax commissioner who is so slow. These people are not very active in doing other things, but they are very active in collecting taxes. I guess they think that they can't grow much food in the first year of reclamation of the wasteland, so they are not interested."
"That makes sense." The operator from the new town said happily, "It's a good thing they don't know how good we are at growing crops, otherwise they would have moved the poor people here to open up wasteland long ago, and who knows how many people would have been killed in vain."
There is a cognitive bias between what the Chinese people think of as land reclamation and the land reclamation in this world...
In the minds of the Chinese people, land reclamation is a great process, but it is also difficult, difficult, with scarce materials, hard work and overcoming difficulties.
But the development of this world is fatal.
If the nobles thought that a certain area was worth reclaiming, they would usually prepare a batch of supplies, recruit a group of refugees, and send out a few capable stewards and deacons, then just wait for the refugees to turn the wasteland into fertile fields and obtain an endless supply of agricultural output.
The initial investment in land reclamation is the biggest cost for the nobles.
But for the recruited... no, conscripted refugees, the cost of land reclamation is their lives.
The noble lords would not sign employment contracts with them that included five social insurances and one housing fund, nor would they provide any medical insurance. Even whether they could have enough food twice a day during the land reclamation period depended on whether the stewards who were in charge of managing them were still willing to be human beings...
A farm with hundreds of acres of fertile land rose from the wasteland. The noble lord might have paid hundreds or thousands of gold coins for it, but the refugees who actually participated in the reclamation might have paid with several or even dozens of lives.
What's even more outrageous is that because these refugees were conscripted to do the work, the land they reclaimed did not belong to them. After they completed the reclamation, all they got was a change in their status from refugees to serfs...
The Chinese upper class in the feudal era knew that they should allow the migrants to own the land they had reclaimed, and then spend decades or even hundreds of years slowly exploiting them, passing taxes on to them, and annexing their land... Although the result was still the same, at least their attitude when eating people would be more "decent".
The aristocracy in this world also values decency, but this decency, even if it is a pretentious hypocrisy, will never be directed towards the lower class.
After chatting for a while , the people who had taken a short rest in the tent went off to do their work.
Most of the lower-class civilians in this world only have two meals a day. After eating vermicelli in the morning, they will not eat again at noon. Many residents, while savoring the taste stimulation brought by the vermicelli and the side dishes, return to their usual pace of life, and their hands and feet are constantly busy with the chores of making a living.
The people in the city were disturbed by the declarations of war published in the newspapers by China Darcy and Coulson O'Neill, but the people in the slums outside the city didn't care about that - most of them didn't even know it happened.
The residents who were working as usual were talking about the extra camp outside the slum and the Innadri people who looked friendly and were willing to sell them food at unimaginably low prices.
Not far from the city gate, in a small courtyard surrounded by earth walls, more than a dozen local craftsmen who were making leather goods with simple tools were enthusiastically discussing the group of Innaderis.
Most of the craftsmen who know how to process leather goods are adult men with good incomes in the slums. When these leather craftsmen with a certain "social status" discuss loudly, nearby residents also gather around, either sneaking into the yard with their handicrafts, or sitting at the door and listening to their discussions with relish.
It was absolutely hard for people to believe that this group of Innadris came to fight. Almost everyone thought that these people were a merchant group from Innadri. However, they could not explain why the businessmen who came to do business would give them such a great benefit - you know, the food in Dutata City is definitely not so cheap, or in other words, in the entire Adler territory, you can't find such a good thing that you can eat well and be full with only two copper coins.
For slum dwellers who are generally chronically malnourished and have small stomachs, a bowl of vermicelli with a pinch of salt is enough to make them feel full... Although potatoes can also fill the stomach, the mashed potatoes and potato pancakes with only a light taste of salt are far from the satisfaction of eating real food.
After speculating and arguing for a long time, no one could come up with a credible conclusion.
One of the oldest leather craftsmen hung a buckled leather belt on a wooden rack beside him and clapped his hands, saying, "Don't guess blindly. It's just luck that we got such a good meal. Don't think too much about the rest. The most important thing is to live a stable life."
Inside and outside the courtyard, many local residents who were participating in the discussion or just listening in fell silent for a moment.
A little boy squatting at the door said bluntly: "Grandpa York, are you saying that I can't eat that kind of vermicelli a second time?"
The leather craftsman Old York twitched his lips but did not answer. He tore off a leather belt from the mat at hand and continued to punch holes and install buckles on it.
The little boy wanted to ask something, but a bigger kid next to him poked his arm.
The little boy looked back in confusion at first, then his eyes suddenly widened.
The woman who was sitting on the threshold of the yard twisting hemp rope had a slightly changed expression. She quickly stood up, grabbed a half-grown child in one hand, and rushed into the yard with her two children.
The residents who were standing at the gate of the courtyard listening to others chatting and talking also hurried back to their homes.
As people in the alley were trying to get out of the way, a group of people coming out of the city swaggered into the alley.
This group of people were all young and strong, wearing leather shoes and small hats. Although the material and cut of their clothes were ordinary, it was enough to show the difference between them and the slum dwellers - most of the slum dwellers only had wooden slippers and straw sandals to wear, and there were always indelible dirt and patches on their clothes.
When this group of young men, who were obviously different from the residents of the slums, passed by the leather craftsman's yard, one of them stepped on the threshold where the woman had just sat, took off his cap to fan himself, and shouted casually and almost rudely to the craftsman who was sitting cross-legged in the yard doing his work: "Hey, old man, is there anyone doing business around here this morning?"
