Chapter 10: The Curved-Beam Plow

The militiamen, having just finished their training, barely paused for rest before voluntarily heading north of the camp to the grasslands, joining the bustling teams breaking new ground. They were, after all, the main force behind reclaiming the land; for these peasants, farming was their true vocation, not warfare.

Urian had once promised that in the second year of cultivation, the land would be distributed to each household: every adult man would receive an acre of land, permanently exempt from taxes. The actual amount of farmland one could obtain depended entirely on how much land the villagers could reclaim in the first year.

Such favorable terms had never been seen in any region or pioneering territory. With the onset of feudal lordship, independent farmers were increasingly squeezed out, and on the manors established by noble lords, not only the land itself but everything upon it belonged solely to the lord, never to the common folk.

In truth, only the sparsely populated frontiers of the empire still had a large number of independent farmers. In the prosperous, densely populated southern provinces, the manorial system reigned supreme; the free farmer had long disappeared, replaced only by tenant farmers and serfs.

Leo, feeling idle, followed Urian to the site, perching atop a rotting stump to watch the laborers at work.

Hundreds of able-bodied youths formed, at times, a V-shaped line, at times a straight one. Their hoes, spades, and mattocks swung through the air, turning over the charred earth beneath their feet, scorched black by fire. The elderly, women, and children followed behind, carting away the unearthed stones, piling the uprooted grass roots for burning.

In just a single morning, several acres had been turned. This land was so well-suited for cultivation, far easier than the villagers had imagined; young and old alike were utterly absorbed in the task.

Leo was filled with emotion. In the fragments of memory from his predecessor, at this season his homeland’s fields would still be buried beneath a foot of snow. Even tilled land there required a mattock to break the frozen soil.

Although he had migrated only a thousand miles to the southwest, the climate was drastically different—as if he had moved from the frigid northeast to the temperate central plains.

Fertile earth and the sights of vigorous labor always roused hope in people’s hearts, making them forget their hardships.

Yet as Leo watched, a growing sense of wrongness gnawed at him. Suddenly, he sprang up and shouted, “Where are the donkeys? Where are your donkeys?”

“What donkeys? All the donkeys have been taken off to graze by the Podova boys.”

“Why aren’t you using the donkeys to plow?” Leo demanded, exasperated.

His words were met with a burst of laughter. A villager jeered, “Ha! Let donkeys plow the fields? Why not have them learn magic while you’re at it?”

Leo was beside himself, turning to Urian and asking, “Have you never seen… donkeys used for plowing?”

He had meant to say “plow,” but found, to his dismay, that there wasn’t even such a word in his predecessor’s memory.

There was no way he could ask Urian in his native tongue.

Urian, a man who had served in the army for ten years and traveled far and wide, stroked his chin thoughtfully. “I suppose a donkey could be used to till the land, but wouldn’t that be difficult? Maybe it would need some kind of magic…”

Leo had no patience for this nonsense. Muttering curses, he strode back to camp.

How could farmers lack plows? Plows had existed since the dawn of civilization. For a medieval farmer to be ignorant of plows was as absurd as a twenty-first-century recluse never having seen a mobile phone.

At this level of productivity, Urian still dared to lead his villagers into the wilderness to open new farmland—truly, the people of the north were reckless.

Back at camp, Leo brushed past Olivia’s attempts to stop him, seized, and broke her family’s best pointed shovel.

He then hacked a few wrist-thick, curved branches, quickly notched and nailed them together, and fixed the battered shovel blade at the bottom as the plowshare.

A crude, makeshift plow was thus born.

Gazing upon this rough and simple curved-beam plow, Leo felt a surge of pride.

In my first week after crossing worlds, I have invented the curved-beam plow!

Hoisting it up, he had Olivia lead a donkey while he returned to the field. He tied the harness to the plow, straightened it, and shouted, “Let’s go!”

The donkey didn’t budge.

Olivia, understanding Leo’s intent, smiled and tugged the bridle, coaxing the donkey forward while Leo steadied the plow, gently pressing the blade into the earth.

The soil on the river’s floodplain was so soft that its only resistance came from dry grass roots and the occasional stone. The donkey barely had to try, yet the plow advanced steadily.

A furrow a foot deep appeared behind them.

The villagers, absorbed in their own labor, paid little heed to Leo’s antics. To them, the ignorant and single-minded Leo was unlikely to produce anything of value.

Not until Leo, in a matter of minutes, effortlessly outpaced the sweaty militiamen did people begin to take notice of his marvelous contraption.

Urian, who had watched the whole affair, was wide-eyed with excitement, even lapsing into Imperial High Speech: “I’ve seen this before! It seems so familiar—so familiar indeed!”

The truth was, just as on Earth, plows had existed in this world for thousands of years. In the fertile southern provinces of the Orlantis Empire, they already had two- and four-horse drawn wheeled heavy plows, with yields more than triple those of the north.

Otherwise, the empire would never have had the strength to unite the eastern coast of Dawnlight Continent and drive the formidable beastfolk from the northern provinces all the way to the snowfields beyond the North Ice River.

But the cold, barren banks of the North Ice River were a different story. Here, the lords derived their wealth from herds of cattle, sheep, and horses on their pastures, from pelts and magical herbs in the hunting grounds, and from rare timber in the logging camps.

They had no interest in organizing their subjects to cultivate fields. The rye and beans collected from the villagers were used mostly as horse feed. Noble lords had no taste for the coarse grains of the frozen north.

In fact, few nobles were willing to remain in their fiefs north of the Anzeno River. Their lands were managed by stewards trained by the family, while the lords themselves dwelled on the relatively warmer southern banks of the Anzeno.

Leo’s little village, nestled at the edge of the North Ice River, was one of the few farming settlements that had arisen naturally by virtue of the land’s suitability for cultivation.

Before Urian’s return from military service, the village had possessed neither donkeys, cattle, nor horses. Many poor families didn’t even own an iron hoe; the wealthiest might have a few pigs and sheep.

They lacked both the manpower and the land allocation to feed their families.

Over a third of their food came from the bounty of the nearby forests—acorns, mushrooms, wild greens, yams from deer-antler shrubs, and so on.

Had Urian not retired and become headman, even knowing the threat posed by beastfolk scouts, the villagers would, like all the others, have waited quietly for death.

In the established manorial system of the south, these free folk could at least abandon their land and become tenants on a noble’s estate.

But in the northern wilderness, their only fate was to become vagrants, starving to death in the icy wastes.

Leo’s demonstration made the advantages of the curved-beam plow immediately obvious to Urian. Though he claimed to have seen the world, in truth he had only served five years as a border scout at a watchtower on the Frelov County frontier, and then five more as an infantryman at the Windgod Fortress, rising through the ranks to the highest position possible for a commoner—Imperial Sergeant.

He had spent all those years in the army; plows were but a fleeting sight glimpsed on a march.

Without delay, Urian gathered the village’s best carpenters, and—under Leo’s guidance—had them assemble eighteen simple curved-beam plows at once, then rounded up every available donkey and sent them out to the fields.

Leo squatted once more on his rotting tree stump, contentedly watching the villagers till the land at triple their previous speed, as if some distant voice echoed in his mind:

You have unlocked the technology of iron plows and animal traction. Farmer productivity +1! Grain yield +1!