Chapter 154 — Building the Territory
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Once the thermal ray gun tests were complete, Gao Yang left the proving ground, and with him went Heidi and Amber; Rebecca and Jenny still had to stay and keep optimizing the rune array, Nicholas was returning to the Mechanical Institute to design a new production line, and the two knights each had their own duties, so none of them left with Gao Yang.
The success of a new weapon lifted Gao Yang's spirits and put him in an irrepressibly good mood, and in that good mood everything in the territory looked far more hopeful to him than usual.
Frostmoon was already half gone, the temperature was dropping day by day, and before long this southern land too would enter the cold winter—but the first harvest of crops had already been gathered in, and with the grain and supplies the king had promised arriving one shipment after another and the provisions purchased from Tamsin Town steadily filling the warehouses, the territory would not have to worry about hunger at all this winter.
The Cecil family was perhaps the most generous of nobles when it came to food. On other nobles' lands, commoners often had to surrender seventy to eighty percent of their harvest as tax, and serfs were squeezed for close to ninety percent; even with druidic spells or fertility blessings to help, the impoverished lower classes lived always on the edge of famine, and in any slightly poor year death by starvation was commonplace, with wild herbs, tree bark, and even grass roots the usual fare in most poor folk's pots. But in Cecil Territory, Gao Yang had set the grain tax directly at one half.
The people of the territory were overwhelmed with gratitude; Gao Yang, for his part, felt the rate was still too high.
Other nobles levied such exorbitant taxes partly because they never genuinely cared about farming on their lands, nor improved cultivation techniques or practiced effective labor management, so that the yields from their soil were low to begin with, and with low taxes they could not sustain their lavish lives; and partly because their luxury and extravagance truly reached appalling heights—a petty baron would insist on building a castle and supporting a steward, a personal manservant or maid, four first-class servants and four first-class maids, plus a whole host of odd-job men, laundry maids, kitchen maids, grooms, and so on and so forth, and would host endless banquets and hunting parties; and if the noble was religious, he would donate a great sum every year to the local church—and all of this was converted into taxes pressed onto the poor, whose harvests were meager to begin with.
But Cecil Territory needed none of that.
And Gao Yang understood one thing clearly: with magical industry already beginning to stir, the economic output of an agrarian society would in the end be overtaken and replaced by industry. Farmland had once been the world's main source of wealth, but soon gold coins would flow out from the chains of factories and commerce. He did not intend to continue that model of development which drew its nourishment from the peasants—it was only that magical industry was still barely a sprout, and so he had to maintain this state of affairs for the time being.
The gold and silver stored in the mountain treasury would run out sooner or later, but Gao Yang was confident that before that wealth was exhausted he could carry the territory from net expenditure to balance. Once the territory's industrial output met its own needs and began to show a surplus, it would be time to send trade caravans abroad...
Passing along the bank of the Whitewater River, Gao Yang saw a large ship moored at the dock, and a great many ragged people were disembarking, submitting to routine registration and inspection. Those handling these affairs were clerks drawn from the Hundred-Person Reconstruction Corps and literate soldiers from the territory: after a period of adaptation and study, these people could now take on such work.