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But feeding a team of three thousand people meant she needed a serious, reliable food supply.
The Western Plains had a thriving livestock industry. Agriculture, though, was another story. Without machinery or chemical fertilizers, a harvest three times the sown amount was considered a bumper year.
Take Siria as an example. Wheat yields in the city's outskirts ran about ninety kilograms per acre, which was already considered high-yield farmland. Most regions only managed sixty.
Back in 21st-century China, wheat could hit six hundred kilograms per acre. More than ten times what the Western Plains could produce.
The situation here mirrored 11th-century Europe. Food was scarce, meat preservation was primitive, and no royal house could afford to field a standing army. Warfare ran on knights and mercenaries.
Medieval France, for instance, had nearly ten thousand knights nationwide, and a good chunk of them were senior nobility who never set foot on a battlefield.
In the Western Plains, the largest country in the Northlands, the Kingdom of Xita, had fewer than ten thousand professional soldiers total. Conscript laborers bumped that number to maybe fifty or sixty thousand, if they were lucky.
Low productivity. Thin grain yields. Feeding a hundred or two hundred people was manageable, but two or three thousand? That was a different beast entirely. It wasn't a money problem, either. The grain simply didn't exist to buy.
If she wanted sustainable growth, if she wanted no one ever choking her supply lines, she needed her own food source.
Demon Island wasn't suitable for grazing. But the weathered volcanic soil? That was excellent farmland. Once the islanders finished building their houses, land clearance had to move up the priority list.
She'd need to get started on the Misty Plains early, too. The Dark Elf had built an entire city by herself. Clearing a few thousand acres of cropland shouldn't be beyond her.
Luo Wei silently repeated "clear the land" ten times in her head, hoping the message would somehow reach its destination.
All that fertile soil stretching across the Misty Plains, and not a single crop in the ground. What a waste.
Clearing land was the easy part. Set a fire, done. The hard part was what came after.
Luo Wei never thought just one step ahead. Leave cleared land fallow too long and it reverted to wasteland. All that work, gone. She'd need to improve crop yields too, or the effort wouldn't justify the return.
That meant selecting and breeding superior grain varieties. Designing better farming tools. Teaching people how to compost and fertilize properly. Scientific farming was the only path to reliable harvests.
The backyard at Star Luo Residence needed expanding as well , a pair of experimental plots, at minimum.
And the seeds themselves...
Luo Wei really missed rice. Properly fragrant, steaming white rice. The Western Plains had none of it. Six months of barley, wheat, and oats had her on the verge of becoming a grain spirit herself.
Wild rice had to exist somewhere in this region. With enough patience, she might actually find it.
She looked around. Dense vegetation swallowed the view in every direction. Finding wild rice here was like hunting a needle in the ocean.
Wild rice preferred wet, marshy ground. Every step sank, the air was thick with miasma, and the mosquitoes were relentless. She could spend two years searching and still come up empty.
The Misty Plains really didn't have enough workers. Not nearly enough.
She sighed and reached out to push aside the chest-high grass in front of her.
Then she saw it — a thin thread of light seeping through her wrist.
Not just her wrist. Her entire body was turning transparent, becoming like a shard of ice crystal held up to sunlight, slowly melting away.
The dream was ending.
She tightened her grip on the arrow in her hand and the fistful of pepper she'd gathered from the rainforest. Darkness closed in, and her consciousness floated free.
DONG,
The bell rang. Luo Wei opened her eyes to the familiar stone ceiling of the castle.
The blankets were warm. She moved her fingers.
Empty.
Whatever consciousness could touch, the body couldn't keep.
Dream or reality , she'd just have to wait for that Color Fantasy Bird to bring word.
She got up, looked in the mirror, and nearly startled herself.
The bleeding from seven orifices in the dream had been real. Her face was a mess of dried blood, dark crusts caked under both eyes, flaking off at a touch.
Lucky she'd checked the mirror first. If she'd walked over and opened the door looking like that, the mute old granny who delivered her water would have dropped dead on the spot.
...
First day of the new semester. Potions class, same as always.
Luo Wei arrived early and settled into the second-to-last row. By eight o'clock, the other students had filled in around her, and Professor Phil strode to the front of the room.
"Last semester, we covered blending spices and preparing external decoctions. This semester, we move on to identifying basic magical plants and brewing low-level potions."
He handed out a thick stack of papyrus sheets, each printed with drawings of common magical plants.
Magical plants were expensive. The academy wasn't flush enough to put the real thing in every student's hands each class, so illustrated sheets would have to do.
"The first magical plant is the Death Fruit. It is the foundational ingredient for brewing antidote potions."
Professor Phil lifted a flat, white specimen from the lectern and held it up for the class to see.
"Death Fruit grows on the rotting bones of magical beasts. The skin is grayish-white and shaped like a flattened egg. July is its optimal harvest window. Once mature, the skin splits open and the contained magical elements begin to dissipate."
Luo Wei studied the white thing in his hand, then glanced down at the illustration on her papyrus.
Death Fruit.
...That was an oyster mushroom.
An oyster mushroom was a fungus. Also known as a white mushroom. It loved growing on sheep bones and droppings out on the grassland. Delicious in soup , rich, fragrant, and good for preventing constipation and obesity.
And they'd named it Death Fruit. The entire oyster mushroom family would be spinning in their graves.
"The second magical plant: Devil's Tooth. Found in the forests of the Magical Beast Mountains. Long, slender leaves, a root bulb wrapped in a light brown membrane, and inside — several milky-white, fang-shaped nodules with a powerful, foul odor. Used in brewing emetic potions."
Luo Wei stared at the illustration.
...Devil's Tooth. Are you kidding me. That's garlic.
They were calling garlic's scent a foul odor. No wonder their food tasted like watery paste. Ancient Babylon had been cultivating garlic for thousands of years, and the Western Plains had the nerve to name it after the devil.
"The third magical plant, Purple Luo Grass — I expect most of you are familiar with it. This is the standard ingredient for low-level healing potions. It carries mild toxicity; consumption can induce hallucinations. It must be brewed alongside Death Fruit to neutralize that effect."
Luo Wei frowned.
Purple Luo Grass was toxic?
She'd eaten it and been completely fine.
This class got stranger every time she sat through it.
Four hours later, she walked out of the academy with her mind elsewhere.
All she could think about was mushrooms. Fragrant, meaty mushrooms. And clean, sharp garlic. No wonder she'd never found the ingredients she actually wanted anywhere in the city , they were all sitting in the Magical Beast Mountains, dressed up in ridiculous names.
Why hadn't she spotted them last time she was out there?
Oh. Right. Winter. Nothing would have been growing yet.
She climbed into Yves's carriage and rode back to Star Luo Residence. The moment she stepped down from the carriage, Troy materialized from behind her like a shadow that had learned to walk.
"Miss, the merchant has been apprehended. Would you like to conduct the interrogation yourself?"
Somewhere along the way, without her noticing, Troy had started calling her "Miss." Formal address included.
➤ Next: One More Gluttonous Than the Last
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