Blank paper makes the easiest canvas.

Although the camp wall of this factory had a side length of only three hundred meters, sounding rather small, the reality was quite different.

If all four sides of the camp wall were built, the total perimeter would reach twelve hundred meters, requiring at least four hundred defending soldiers, not even counting reserve forces.

In most pioneering knight territories, the total population of a village was only three to five hundred, with able-bodied men making up at most half of that, yet the village itself was no smaller than this factory.

Even if every able-bodied man in the village rushed to the ramparts, they would be spread desperately thin, leaving vast stretches of the wall completely unmanned.

If an enemy of equal numbers wanted to invade, they could easily break through at any chosen point.

Therefore, building a wall alone was useless.

Under such circumstances, it was far better to construct a sturdy manor house or a small castle, complete with subsidiary towers, where a mere hundred militiamen could withstand a siege by forces many times their size.

Stone castles situated strategically against mountains and rivers could hold off thousands of attackers with just a few dozen guards.

The Riverbend Territory had started out the exact same way, initially enclosing a perimeter with wooden walls to defend against wild beasts and weaker demi-human races like kobolds.

While the villagers were still living in tents, the lord's manor was built immediately at the highest elevation point.

Once the manor was completed, the population grew, and a surplus of labor became available, Ulyan slowly began to fill in the camp walls.

Armed with the "advanced" fortification techniques he had learned in the legion centuries ago, along with various little inventions from Leo, the difficulty of building the camp walls was nearly halved compared to the efforts of other lords.

Furthermore, both Leo and Ulyan harbored ambitions far exceeding those of typical minor lords.

War could not be fought solely through defense; active offense was equally essential.

The wildling and vagrant camps served as the bulwarks of the Riverbend Peninsula, designed to hold back the shocks of alien races from the Wolf-Driving Plain.

Now, this factory functioned as the forward bastion of the Riverbend Territory, intended to deter malice stemming from human society.

Sturdy walls not only served as a psychological deterrent but also allowed the compound to be converted directly into a military camp during wartime.

Cramming two thousand vagrants inside and providing the able-bodied men with minimal training would transform them into a city defense force with formidable combat capability.

After all, their families were secure within the camp walls, and coupled with sturdy fortifications and ample food, the morale of the defending militiamen would unquestionably double.

Moreover, the factory was adjacent to the Western Outpost and the Solovay Knight Territory, and only thirty miles away from Riverbend. As long as it was not breached in a single wave, reinforcements could arrive in a short space of time.

Had the forces of the Gladstone family marched out of the Western Outpost back then and stumbled upon such a military camp, they would have turned around and left without even needing the intervention of Knight Solovay.

Throughout this month, Knight Solovay had remained in his own knight territory, continuously strengthening his defenses, boosting morale, and preparing to meet the impact of the vagrants.

When he finally emerged to survey the enemy situation, he discovered to his astonishment that the enemies had vanished, having been completely absorbed into Leo's domain.

Finding it hard to believe, Knight Solovay had entered the factory to investigate for himself.

Just like the vagrants, the moment he laid eyes on the place, he had no desire to leave.

Since the factory was less than half an hour's ride from his knight territory, he came over to loiter almost every single day once the threat posed by the vagrants was lifted.

Whenever he encountered something novel, he would shamelessly copy it and haul it back to his own manor construction site.

Leo was sorely tempted to dub him "Fiesa the Second."

By the time the construction of the tapioca processing plant reached its final stages, Knight Solovay could not help but admire Riverbend's construction capabilities.

His own hot spring manor also housed five hundred vagrants, led by a team of fifty craftsmen, yet after a month, they had barely laid the foundations.

Even so, that was already quite an achievement; the craftsman leader from the Petukhov family, who oversaw the construction of the hot spring manor, had originally estimated it would take half a year to complete.

It was only after the foundations were laid that he dared change his tune and claim it would only take three months.

The issue lay not in the craftsmen or their techniques, but in the laborers and the organization.

The new types of construction tools provided by Riverbend's craftsmen, combined with the artisans trained by the Petukhov family, met the basic requirements for building the hot spring manor.

However, the five hundred vagrants recruited were not well-trained construction workers and had to rely entirely on the hands-on direction of the leading craftsmen.

Had there not been a sufficient number of artisans and well-fed laborers, the construction efficiency would have dropped even further, and they might not even have finished the foundations by now.

Naturally, the difficulty of building the tapioca processing plant was far lower than that of a noble manor, but its workload still exceeded that of ordinary stone-and-wood mountain strongholds.

Achieving this scale in a mere month left Knight Solovay deeply impressed.

The advanced management system, rational allocation of manpower, and soaring efficiency were truly breathtaking.

Chatting casually with Leo, Knight Solovay leisurely climbed the newly erected wooden ramparts.

Once the stone foundations were completed, the upper wooden walls had risen rapidly, reaching a full height of five meters.

Without large siege engines, capturing this military camp with just a few scaling ladders was utterly out of the question.

Standing atop the newly constructed camp wall, Knight Solovay looked out beyond the factory.

He watched as laborers not far upriver chopped down large oak trees, sawed them into logs, and tossed them into the stream.

These logs floated downstream, only to be fished out by laborers inside the factory and set aside for air-drying.

Once the water-powered saw was completed, the lumber would undergo further processing.

As the giant trees along the banks of the upper river fell one by one, the field of vision gradually opened up.

Knight Solovay continued with words of praise, "Your vision is also commendable. The terrain here is flat, transportation is convenient, and water sources are abundant, making it exceptionally well-suited for developing into a settlement. Given sufficient food, this place will attract outsiders even more easily than the Riverbend Territory."

Leo nodded in agreement, "You can only paint well on a clean sheet of paper. If I brought everyone straight back to Riverbend, no matter how I arranged them it would be troublesome, and it would much more easily spark chaos."

Knight Solovay nodded and said, "Your words carry both philosophy and reason. Sometimes, I truly suspect you are the descendant of some great noble family; an ordinary youth could not utter such remarks."

Leo sighed casually, "Actually, I am a half-elf who has secretly lived for fifty years. In terms of age, you ought to call me uncle."

Upon hearing the first half of the sentence, Knight Solovay almost believed it six tenths; it was only upon hearing the second half that he realized the other person was joking.

He laughed, "If I called you uncle, Lord Ulyan would probably hang you up and beat you."

Although Leo continually tried to establish connections by calling him his uncle, Knight Solovay was only in his early thirties, whereas Leo often appeared remarkably mature when serious.

Consequently, when getting along with Leo, Knight Solovay frequently treated him as a peer.

Even when joking around, the usually stern and proper Gale Knight felt not a shred of displeasure.

The location of the processing plant bore a striking resemblance to Knight Solovay's territory.

If the map were folded along the World Tree Avenue, the two places would almost overlap.

The Western Primeval Forest to its west extended all the way to the Bak Pass two hundred miles away, while heading north toward the Riverbend Territory, there was also twenty or thirty miles of flat terrain.

Even if development to the west stopped at the abandoned blockhouse thirty miles away, and the northern timberland was split evenly with Riverbend, this patch of land spanned over a hundred square kilometers, fully qualifying as a new pioneering knight territory.

Of course, the entire forest was choked with ancient oak trees thick enough for several men to embrace, and turning it into arable land and pasture would not be achieved overnight.

The pioneering of Knight Solovay's territory had required the efforts of two generations of the Misevich family.

Knight Solovay was right: once the processing plant was completed, it would absorb population far more easily than the Riverbend Territory.

Yet once vagrants joined the Riverbend Territory, where they would live was never something they could decide for themselves.