Autumn had arrived, bringing cool, pleasant weather.
The sky was completely clear.
It was the perfect time for the harvest.
Nearly eight hundred people from the Zhao residence had headed to the fields at the edge of the valley to harvest the sweet potatoes.
A man brushed away the soil with his hands and uncovered a sweet potato almost as big as his fist.
An excited smile spread across his face.
Although those sweet potatoes belonged to Lord Zhao and had nothing to do with them, the instinctive joy a farmer felt at the sight of food was impossible to suppress.
“This one’s huge! Just one would be enough to fill me up. Lord Zhao said that once we finish today’s harvest, he’ll let everyone have some to try. They say they taste pretty good.”
“Huh? There’s another one right next to it?”
The man pulled out the sweet potato and discovered another one growing beside it.
So he kept digging.
He pulled that one out and found another.
Then another.
The more he dug, the more he found.
But little by little, the excitement on the man’s face turned into fear.
Was he seeing a ghost in broad daylight?
How could there possibly be this much food growing underground?
Not far away, an old man was digging as well.
His expression had gone through the exact same change—from excitement to fear.
“Is this real? Is this real? This is actually food?”
The old man was practically losing his mind.
He grabbed a sweet potato and, without even bothering to brush the dirt off, took a bite.
“It’s edible! It’s really edible!”
“Hahaha… Waaah…! If we’d had something like this back then, my third son wouldn’t have starved to death!”
“Waaah…! My third son…! Dad misses you!”
At the edge of the field, Zhao Baihui sat comfortably in a reclining chair, sipping tea as he watched the scene unfold.
Under circumstances like these, he had originally wanted to recite a poem.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t exactly a man of great learning.
So all he could do was quietly drink his tea.
The four girls were gathered nearby as well, sitting together and discussing the family’s various businesses.
Jinwen’s father came running over, drenched in sweat.
“Lord! Lord! Everyone’s gone crazy! There are people hugging the sweet potatoes they just dug up and eating them while laughing and crying at the same time! It’s frightening to watch!”
Zhao Baihui stood up and looked toward the fields.
After watching for a moment, he said,
“It’s nothing serious. They’re just too happy.”
“Do this. Find some people and use the freshly harvested sweet potatoes to prepare food for everyone. Make several different dishes.”
“Once everyone has eaten and calmed down, they can get back to work.”
The four girls hurried off toward the fields to see what was happening.
A while later, Jinwen came running back, her face full of excitement. This story is hosted at g.com.
“Lord! Lord! You weren’t exaggerating! There really are tons of them! It looks like the yield isn’t just two thousand jin per mu!”
“Then find some people and measure out one mu of land in several different locations. Calculate the yield per mu.”
“Understood! I’ll do it right away!”
Before long, Jinwen gathered several people who had already calmed down, and they began measuring and digging.
“It’s out! The results from the first plot are ready! Put it on the scale!”
“Three thousand seven hundred jin? Are you sure we didn’t make a mistake? Do it again!”
“How much did the second plot yield? Three thousand nine hundred and twenty jin? Nearly four thousand?”
“Quick! Go dig up the sweet potatoes from the third plot!”
Across five plots in different locations, the average yield came out to 3,800 jin per mu.
The moment that figure was announced, everyone was left completely stunned.
At that time, the yield of rice and wheat barely reached around 180 jin per mu.
Even the most productive grain crops only produced around two or three hundred jin per mu.
Yet this crop that no one had ever seen before had a yield forty times greater than rice, and nearly twenty times greater than ordinary grain.
No wonder everyone had gone crazy.
If they harvested everything from those more than two hundred mu of farmland…
Wouldn’t the total exceed 800,000 jin?
A poor family could normally survive an entire day on one jin of ordinary grain cooked together with various wild vegetables.
Around four hundred jin of grain per year was enough to feed one person.
Eight hundred thousand jin would be enough to feed two thousand poor farming families and keep them from starving!
Two thousand families…
That meant around ten thousand people!
Of course, that calculation only considered the amount needed to keep people from starving.
If people could eat as much as they wanted, without mixing the sweet potatoes with wild vegetables, and eat until they were completely full, a person could consume several times that amount.
Even so, the fact that those two hundred-plus mu of land could allow two thousand people to live like well-off families was something no one would have dared imagine before.
Being able to eat ordinary grain until you were full at every meal, without having to stretch it with wild vegetables, was already the standard of living of a well-off household.
“Er’ya, go buy your father a jin of liquor. Once we’re done eating, I don’t care if I have to work myself to the bone—I’m going to help Lord Zhao finish harvesting all of these!”
“With Lord Zhao here, we don’t have to worry about being poor or going hungry anymore. If we’ve got money, we should spend it!”
Many people decided to send someone to buy liquor.
They were prepared to work themselves to the bone alongside the sweet potatoes.
Of course, Zhao Baihui wasn’t going to let that happen.
Some people worked until it was dark and still had no intention of going home.
In the end, Baihui had to send people to force them to return.
Did they think their bodies belonged to them?
They belonged to Lord Zhao!
If they wouldn’t take care of themselves, even Lord Zhao would worry about them!
Once the sweet potato harvest was finished, the four girls went around distributing money again.
Naturally, the work they had done during those days would also count toward their wages.
A relatively high daily rate had been set, and they would receive that money when the tenth day arrived.
But this time, the money was an additional reward.
The sweet potato harvest had been recorded by household, with an approximate tally of how much each family had harvested.
For every ten jin they harvested, they would receive one wen.
Some families of five or six people had harvested between five and six thousand jin, meaning they would receive between five and six hundred wen.
That was equivalent to half a liang of silver!
An ordinary family working as day laborers could barely earn a dozen wen a day.
Over these three days, that was equivalent to earning nearly a hundred wen a day.
Were they really working for Lord Zhao?
No!
Lord Zhao was the one giving them a share of the profits!
That realization made some of the people who had tried to slack off regret their decision bitterly.
Even though they had only worked a little less, it meant they had missed out on one or two hundred wen.
It hurt.
It hurt so badly they could barely breathe!
“Serves them right! Let those who tried to slack off regret it as much as they want!”
The girls laughed as they talked about it.
“Lord, we’ve finished harvesting all the sweet potatoes. What should we do next?”
“Actually, sweet potatoes are nothing more than another ordinary crop. But right now, we’re the only ones who have them. And since anything scarce is valuable, we can turn them into all kinds of food and use the opportunity to make some money. At the same time, we’ll be promoting them.”
“If anyone wants to buy sweet potatoes to use as seed stock, sell them some. And explain the entire cultivation method to them as well.”
“Then how much should we sell them for?”
“If we’re selling them as seed stock, twenty or thirty wen per jin should be fine. No one else has them right now, so it’s only natural that they’ll cost even more than rice.”
“And if we sell them prepared as food, they’ll naturally be even more expensive.”
“Understood. The four of us will discuss it and come up with several dishes and different ways of preparing them. Then we’ll go to Qingniu and see how the market responds.”
Zhao Baihui had originally thought that reaching the one thousand people required to upgrade to village level would take quite some time.
He never expected a sweet potato harvest to cause such a frenzy.
A large portion of the eight hundred people already living there went looking for their brothers and sisters, telling them how good life was in this place, boasting about the incredible sweet potato yield, and telling them how high the wages were.
In short, more than two hundred people arrived in less than a month.
Once the evaluation period was over, the voice Zhao Baihui had been waiting so long to hear finally sounded in his ears.
[Congratulations! You have fulfilled the requirements for an upgrade. The system has been upgraded to Village Level.]
[The Village-Level Shop has been unlocked.]
[Permissions to configure various units and functions have been unlocked.]
[You have obtained Monetary Authority.]
[To upgrade to the next level, City, you need a population of 50,000 and must possess…]