Iron Harvest: When Farming Becomes Conquest
Chapter 100 - 4: Rebuilding the Homeland

Chapter 100: Chapter 4: Rebuilding the Homeland

Roman had no mood to deal with Moor’s greetings.

Various accidents had continuously interrupted his plans for the future.

He had hoped to recruit 400 qualified Soldiers by the end of this winter.

After training in autumn and winter, they would immediately launch the "Spring Plan" next year.

Frankly speaking, by this time next year, the population of Sige Town would at least double, which was much more cost-effective than buying slaves.

But reality often went against wishes.

Roman had been asking himself these past two days, could they meet his demands, could they allow him to smoothly carry out his "Spring Plan"?

Now it was clear.

These people couldn’t do it.

He had spent many days going out full of fighting spirit and coming back exhausted, merely hoping to push the rapid development of the entire Sige Town, mining coal, refining iron, and ultimately creating an invincible steel torrent.

He wanted to accelerate, to floor the throttle, to smash this era with a violent torrent of steel.

Just as he was about to speed up, he found that Sige Town had run aground, the infrastructure was too poor!

Roman discovered painfully that sometimes he had to compromise!

Compromise with this terrible and dilapidated era!

If he couldn’t even provide them with a meal, if he couldn’t even provide them with a dwelling, how could he expect all these fools to follow his every command without question?

What reason and qualification did he have to talk about conquest and domination?

If he ignored their plight and forcefully pulled everyone to strive for a war next spring...

That would be driving them to a dead end!

When the time came, the war he personally ignited would burn not only his enemies, but also his subjects.

Roman rode his fine horse, surveying the miserable environment.

The iron-shod hooves of his horse splashed in the puddles with a slap, sending murky muddy water flying far.

The road was all dirt and stones, washed disorderly in all directions, no foul stench to smell, no excrement to see, the air especially fresh.

The torrential rain was fierce, the amount of rain astounding, like a flood rampaging, unstoppable as it swept away everything here.

Although it left a mess everywhere.

Along the way, Roman saw some peasants sighing as they looked at the cracks in their houses, their faces full of worry.

They had survived this year, but what about next year? And the year after?

He also saw some peasants standing in front of their homes that had become ruins, alongside their wives and several children.

The expressions on the whole family’s faces were numb, not knowing what to do.

He also saw some peasants finding their houses unscathed, expressing either schadenfreude or a sense of survival after disaster on their faces.

The joys and sorrows of human beings do not resonate with each other.

Roman’s arrival caught their attention.

They knew that Lord rarely entered Sige Town, only giving orders on public grounds, because nothing here caught his eye; his disdain for this place was as deep-seated as when he called them fools, never changing.

For reasons unknown, driven by some mentality or thought, a peasant started to follow Roman.

Then a second peasant followed, and then a third, a fourth...

Roman did not care that more and more followers were gathering behind him, he saw a somewhat familiar short figure.

He said, "Jimmy, come here."

The frail Angel Envoy glanced at his mother beside him and then ran over, coming to Roman’s side.

Roman looked down at his clerk from his elevated position, his brow slightly furrowed.

"You’ve been injured?"

The child’s forehead had a swollen scar, strikingly prominent, about seven or eight centimeters long and three or four centimeters wide, with the flesh split open.

Seth had said these days that he learned quickly, worked hard and diligently, arriving at the manor early every day, doing various accounting tasks with Seth.

But Roman hadn’t arranged his living quarters.

Roman had made the peasants build many temporary houses, but they were for the future population of Sige Town, and their comfort was less than that of an animal shed.

Even though Jimmy had a place to live, Roman didn’t have the time to build a house specifically for the clerk.

He felt it would only delay his grand plans.

So the little clerk still lived in Sige Town, sharing a low straw house with his mother.

Now his hair was wet, with a head wound that no longer bled, just a bit pale. His once cherished attire, the clean and tidy clerk’s uniform he meticulously cared for every day, had also become shabby, covered in mud, hardly recognizable.

Jimmy’s small hands nervously fidgeted with the hem of his clothes, as Seth had instructed him to pay attention to his image, to be elegant and composed at all times, which is why he had been custom-made a soft and neat attire out of fine linen.

He looked like a drowned rat, his body filthy and disheveled.

Roman asked, "How did you get hurt?"

Jimmy’s voice was aggrieved and pained as he whispered, "The house collapsed."

It had fallen on the first day of the storm, and he and his mother had stayed at a neighbor’s house the day before.

His identity as a clerk had those neighbors falling over themselves to please him.

If it had been in the past, there probably wouldn’t have been many people willing to open their homes to this poor mother and son—their own houses were crowded enough as it was.

Roman dismounted, gently touching the edge of the wound on his forehead.

"Little Angel Envoy, tell me, does it hurt?"

Jimmy’s nose turned sour, and he pursed his lips and nodded.

Roman stroked his back, pulling the boy into his embrace with a helpless expression and closed his eyes.

A Three Stars Angel Envoy had nearly been killed by a falling beam!

He thought.

This can’t go on any longer!

He turned to everyone and said, "I will lead you to rebuild our home!"

He altered his plans and made a swift decision!

This place was the foundation of his rule; if he didn’t lay a solid foundation, how could he face the upcoming storms?

...

Mud houses, wooden houses, stone houses—all were no longer considered.

He intended to build brick houses that would stand the test of time.

Roman planned to reorganize a residential area, arranging manpower to dig for clay, add water to make mud, shape it with molds, and then dry the bricks—producing hundreds of bricks per day was no problem for one person.

Brick kilns could also be built; if he could build lime kilns, brick kilns were a cinch, and he went ahead with the most advanced rotary kiln technology in his mind.

People of this era knew how to bake bricks, but such technology was only used in castles or churches.

For commoners, the construction costs were too high.

Roman didn’t care about that.

The more items produced in bulk, the lower the cost; once the plan was to make tens of millions of bricks, the average price would be very low.

The main question was whether you were willing to invest or not.

But for a lord wielding great power, those costs were largely negligible; Roman just needed to cover their food expenses so that they could work without worries and give their all.

If he was going to replan everything, then everything had to be overthrown.

Roman designed standardized brick houses, each covering a standard area of 80 square meters, enough to house a family of six, divided into three bedrooms and a living room.

No kitchens—everyone would eat at the communal kitchen.

There was no time to let them cook for themselves; how much work would that delay?

If someone was sick at home, let their family bring food back; cooking was possible, but healthy people had to be worked to the bone.

No restrooms, there was a spacious public restroom in the middle of each row of houses.

The days of relieving oneself anywhere were gone for good.

The main feature of the houses was their simple and square shapes, regular doors and windows, basically resembling square boxes, standardized to the point of being featureless,

In total, five hundred buildings were to be constructed, divided into five areas.

Each area had one hundred buildings, split into ten rows with ten houses each.

At a glance, the exterior lines were neat, and the internal structure was uniform, as if carved from the same mold.

This was exactly the effect Roman desired.

This process of systematization and standardization aimed to improve construction efficiency and reduce technical difficulty.

Spacious roads were paved with lime and gravel, and both sewers and water channels were dug.

Roman swore, anyone who dared to damage the sanitary environment here would be done for!

He would appoint a Steward of Sanitation to inspect the hygiene conditions; anyone’s household failing to meet standards would have to leave!

The overall architectural structure was simple.

The thickness of the walls equaled the length of the bricks.

Even though Roman had done his best to reduce the number of bricks required, a single house still needed more than ten thousand bricks.

This was an astronomical figure.

Therefore, the progress was evidently slow.

Just digging foundations and building brick kilns had taken half a month of preparation time.