Chapter 50 — The Main Force
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
The nearest noble fief was the Leslie family's Tansang Town. According to Ansu law, the nobles great and small along the southern border also bore the responsibility of monitoring the Gondor contaminated zone. So Gao Yang guessed that Viscount Andrew must know something, more or less, about the recession of the magic tide's influence. But for that traditional noble who lived comfortably off his mines, this temporarily stabilized land was probably still not worth investing in. Add to that the fact that the reclamation fever of this era had already cooled, and the good viscount had likely never even sent anyone to look at the situation here…
Gao Yang nodded and looked at Rebecca. "The range of land currently confirmed safe is the portion I drew out. The pollution farther out should have receded somewhat as well, but that will require careful surveying after the main force arrives. Don't go over there for now."
The clear overhead view in his mind was from ten years ago. Over the past decade the contaminated zone should have shrunk further still, but exactly how much… given that the satellite view had now turned into a "magic imaging map" that could not be adjusted, Gao Yang had no way of determining that for the moment, so this was the only arrangement he could make.
Time continued to pass. Through Hedy's tireless preaching and the territory's people gradually adapting over a period of time, the new work system finally began to show results. The laborers started to realize that work meant better rations, while those "clever ones" who tried to exploit loopholes and slack off in the new system came to understand that more painful than drinking vegetable soup while watching others eat meat was watching others drink vegetable soup while starving. As for Gao Yang, those clumsy loophole-exploiting tricks were hardly clever at all, and the punishments he laid down were never tempered with mercy.
This was a matter concerning everyone's future survival; there could be no room for leniency.
And because the new system had taken effect, the construction of the outpost camp was completed at an astonishing speed, and preparations were made for the arrival of the main force that would follow. Under Gao Song's planning, the fences around the camp were extended several hundred meters to the south and east, with a large stretch of open ground left for the seven hundred who would come later to pitch their tents. Space was also reserved for the workshops of carpenters, stonemasons, and blacksmiths, as well as new areas for piling materials. He further ordered a temporary small dock to be built of wood where the camp faced the river shoals, and a sawmill to be built on the spot nearby, to process the timber floated downriver from the logging sites in the western forest.
Of course, at present the dock and the sawmill existed only on blueprints. A hundred laborers were truly limited; even with Hedy's magical assistance, building the camp felt like stretching a poor covering over too much—there was never quite enough. At times like this, Gao Yang sincerely wished from the bottom of his heart that Rebecca could cast some spell other than fireball…
Standing on the high ground by the river shoals, Gao Yang looked at a large wooden-plank building nearing completion in the distance. It was one of the few structures in the camp that could actually be called a "house," and a very large building at that. For some time to come, it and the broad open ground around it would serve as a temporary blacksmith's forge. Although the mountain vault held many metal ingots already smelted into shape, they were hard to put to use in the camp's construction: most of them were mithril, adamantite, purple copper, and purple steel. However broad-minded Gao Yang might be, there was no way he was going to melt those things down to forge nails, was there?