Chapter 44 — Serfs and Freemen

Gao Yang looked at her with approval, and Rebecca—encouraged by the Xuanmai Sect for the first time—at once grew bolder and spoke fluently: "And I've noticed, too, that if you send one serf to work, he'll always find a way to slack off—but if you send two serfs to do the same job, and tell them whoever finishes first gets an extra loaf of bread, they'll suddenly do the work of three or four men, worth far more than that loaf... so even then I thought, you don't necessarily need a whip to keep them from idling; some other way might work better."

"That's already a very fine awakening." Gao Yang could not help laughing. This was all quite simple and plain—yet in this age almost no one paid attention to such matters. In truth, the nobles never even observed how the serfs and commoners under their rule worked, nor had they any notion of measuring work efficiency; the whip and soldiers posted as overseers were the ultimate expression of their ruling skill. Someone like Rebecca...

One could only say that this penniless country viscount's daughter truly had a great deal of leisure.

And thanks to that leisure, she could think of such things.

Only, she could reach no further than these shallow observations drawn from her own experience—whereas Gao Yang well knew that the rise and fall of slavery was not merely a question of "whip and bread." The deeper cause was whether the productive forces were sufficient, whether society had truly reached the point of needing change.

From his observations over this period, he judged that, at least within the range of his own sight, the serf system no longer matched this world's productive forces. Great masses of people were piled into repetitive, low-efficiency, low-end labor; relying on sheer numbers, they produced goods of every kind at the lowest efficiency to sustain the upper strata—and these people had no channel of ascent, ever. The upper classes, who commanded magic, had already reached the stage of watching fireworks and listening to music in their castles, lighting their halls with daylight stones (magic crystals), while the commoners below lived scarcely better than primitives—the whole of society was near deformity.

On Earth, by this time, earth-shaking transformation would long since have taken place; here, however, the existence of supernatural power had blocked that process.

For a hundred commoners with pitchforks could not defeat a single low-rank mage or knight—no, not even if they feared death not at all and doubled their numbers.

Perhaps, if this world went on developing, the deadlock would be broken one day—but Gao Yang did not intend to wait. He must change all this in advance, and then set his great development plan in motion.

For he had a feeling: the magic tide was, in all likelihood, truly coming.

The Gondor Empire in its golden age could not withstand the magic tide—so how would the nations of this continent, fallen in every respect to a medieval benightedness, withstand it with their bare faces?

And even setting the magic tide aside, Gao Yang had other things on his mind.

Those "eyes" in the sky, whose nature he could not fathom.

A backward medieval world can never break free of gravity. With gravity's hand clamped around its throat, it has not even the right to lift its head and look at the sky, let alone study the secrets hidden among the stars.