newbobooks Chapter 168 : Chapter 168
Chapter 168 : Chapter 168
Chapter 168. A New Variety of Stoneheart Potato
My lord, I want to try the gun.
That was probably the only thought in every recruit’s mind at that moment.
“Akash.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Put the factory on a three-shift schedule. Let the men rest, but not the machines. I want this thing issued to an entire regiment within one month. Then I want you to drill these people into the ground. I do not care whether they have tactical awareness. They only need to learn two things: first, how to use a gun; second, how not to blow their own comrades away.”
“Yes, sir!” Akash snapped a salute, his eyes shining with almost frightening intensity.
Once he had given all the necessary orders, Logaris did not stay any longer.
He walked out of the workshop and drew in a deep breath of the icy air outside.
Was that enough?
No.
This was only enough to give the Northern Territory the right to bare its fangs.
Several heavy trucks rumbled past him, their beds piled high with raw ore freshly hauled down from the mines. Logaris gave them a glance and silently took stock of what he had on hand.
Money was not a problem for the time being. After ransacking that old bastard Tarassa’s estate, and with the “friendly cooperation” he had established with Phoenix, the balance sheet was still in the green.
The guns were ready.
The men were training.
But there was still an even deadlier problem hanging over their heads.
People were iron, food was steel; miss one meal and a man grew faint. In this cursed corner of the Northern Territory, the soil held nothing but stones and shards of ice. If the food problem was not solved, then even with the finest guns in hand, they would still starve to death in the trenches.
“I still need to go push Iowen.”
Tightening the collar of his coat, Logaris turned and headed toward the experimental fields outside the city.
In the trial fields beyond Winter City, Iowen was slumped beside a mound of potatoes piled up like a small hill. He was still clutching the notebook he used to record data, and the dark circles under his eyes were so enormous they looked as though someone had punched him twice in the face—though, as Logaris reflected, that might actually have happened.
“Boss, you finally came.”
The moment Iowen saw Logaris walk in, his voice sounded like that of a zombie clawing its way out of a grave, carrying the hollow emptiness of a man beyond despair. “If you had come any later, I was going to bury myself in the dirt and serve as fertilizer. Just now, I could swear I saw my great-grandmother waving at me beneath the World Tree.”
Lilith, who was sitting nearby on a wooden crate and idly playing with a dagger while supervising the work, rolled her eyes at that. “Drop the act. You were the fastest one grabbing drumsticks at lunch just a while ago.”
Logaris ignored the usual banter between the two clowns.
His gaze was firmly drawn to the heaps of freshly unearthed crops.
Thanks to Iowen’s relentless day-and-night mana-assisted ripening, combined with the golden parent stock selected through “Scenario Projection,” the first batch of improved crops had finally begun to show a return on investment. The air was filled with the fresh scent unique to soil and plant roots.
Walking over, Logaris casually picked up a sample that was oval-shaped and roughly the size of a palm.
“This is the high-sugar variety?”
“Yes. Sample Number Three.” Iowen pointed weakly at it. Though exhausted, the moment the conversation turned to his own field, the elf still forced himself to perk up. “I spliced in the genetic fragments of southern sweetroot beet. The starch conversion rate inside this thing is absurdly high. Boil it just a little, and the texture is practically like eating honey.”
Logaris did not mind the dirt. He rubbed a finger across the muddy tuber.
A faint flash of light flickered at his fingertip.
Divination Spellwork: Revelatory Divination.
In Logaris’s mind, every statistic concerning the tuber began to cascade past like a waterfall of data.
Non-toxic.
Sugar content: extremely high.
Fiber structure: loose.
It truly was a good thing. If this were given to the children in the city who had not yet been weaned as supplementary food, it would probably make the neighbors’ children cry with envy.
He then walked over to another pile, this one filled with dark, rough-skinned things that looked almost like chunks of old tree bark.
“This is Number One?”
“Yes. The cold-resistant specialized variety.” Iowen yawned. “This thing’s skin is so thick I’m tempted to make shields out of it. But that same thick skin is exactly why it can remain dormant even in frozen soil at minus twenty degrees. As long as you do not throw it directly onto a block of ice, it will basically survive anywhere. The downside is that the texture is a little coarse. Anyone with a delicate throat might have a hard time swallowing it.”
“As long as it grows, that is enough. When people are starving badly enough, they will fight each other over tree bark. No one is going to care whether their throat is delicate.”
Logaris tossed the “brick” back into the pile, and it landed with a heavy thud.
At last, he turned to the pile in the middle. That was the largest heap of them all.
Each sample there was about the size of a baby’s head and looked satisfyingly heavy.
“Number Two. The yield-specialized variety.” A trace of pride entered Iowen’s voice. “This one is my masterpiece. Give it a little fertilizer, and it grows like it’s gone mad. The yield per plant is more than five times that of an ordinary Stoneheart Potato. It does not have much in the way of flavor, and it is not especially frost-resistant either, but it really does grow.”
Five times.
Logaris adjusted his glasses.
That number meant that if all the wasteland around Winter City were put to use, then within three months, the food problem that had plagued the Northern Territory for decades could be smashed to pieces by this heap of unremarkable dirt clods.
“Well done.”
Logaris pulled out a cheque from inside his coat, swiftly wrote a string of numbers on it, and slapped it into Iowen’s chest.
“This is your bonus for this phase. As for the villa with a garden that you wanted in Winter City, go see Grayson. Tell him I approved it and have him pick one with the best sunlight.”
“Magnificent, boss! May the boss enjoy perfect health! May the boss live for ten thousand years!”
The moment Iowen saw the line of zeroes on the cheque, the ashen color of his face instantly became rosy again. Both pointed ears shot straight up with a snap, and the half-dead look he had worn moments before vanished on the spot, replaced by an energy that could only be called the power of money.
“That is enough. Put away that money-grubbing expression of yours.”
Logaris dusted the dirt from his hands. “Now we need to discuss how to get these things planted.”
At that moment, a new problem presented itself.
The Northern Territory seemed not to have a Ministry of Agriculture.
Yes, it sounded absurd, but it was true. For the past several hundred years, agriculture in the Northern Territory—and indeed throughout the entire kingdom—had remained in a primitive state of relying on the weather and leaving growth to chance.
The lords only cared about collecting taxes. Whether they collected wheat or some other crop made no difference. As long as the required quota was handed over, that was enough. As for how to plant it, when to plant it, or whether disease might strike, all of that was the farmers’ own problem.
City Hall kept a whole swarm of officials handling taxation and public order, yet not a single one handling farming.
Logaris rubbed at his temples.
Expecting that group of civil servants, who only knew how to sit in offices drinking tea and doing accounts, to guide the spring planting would be like hoping pigs could fly.
“There is no helping it.”
Logaris sighed and pushed up the glasses on the bridge of his nose. “We will just have to go find people among the common folk.”