Chapter 160: Estuary Town

To prevent vagrants from moving freely in and out of the factory and causing chaos and contamination, Leo divided the tapioca flour processing plant into two sections: a production area and a living area, separated in the middle by a wooden fence.

Accommodating two thousand people to work and live inside had already reached the population limit of this camp.

This was only because the vagrants did not mind living conditions and were willing to squeeze ten or eight people together into attached wooden houses, sleeping on communal platform beds.

However, once the vagrant crisis passed, such a lifestyle certainly could not be maintained for long.

Able-bodied men with wives and children naturally would not want their families to share a room with strangers indefinitely.

Therefore, once the factory buildings were completely finished, Leo would arrange for craftsmen to continue building wooden houses in the living area as an incentive, to be assigned to exemplary worker families.

On the other hand, this tapioca flour processing plant did not require all that many laborers anyway.

Judging from the current situation, even if all the able-bodied vagrants went with the laborers to undertake engineering construction, cut down trees in the western dense forest, and dig up stag-horn tapioca, leaving only a thousand the elderly, weak, women, and children in the factory area would still be more than enough to maintain the production of tapioca flour.

With only a few woodworking planes, chopper blades, sieves, and a few large pots, these elderly, weak, women, and children spent half a month consuming the entire stock of stag-horn tapioca in Riverbend as well as the temporarily gathered supplies, processing all of it into tapioca flour.

Learning as they worked through purely manual labor, combined with the factory assembly line production method, their output was astonishingly high.

While they were producing tapioca flour, the three camps of Riverbend Barony, along with some able-bodied vagrants from this processing plant—nearly a thousand people across four settlements in total—were all searching for and digging up wild stag-horn tapioca.

Cart after cart, boat after boat of stag-horn tapioca was continuously sent into the factory, yet it still could not satisfy the demands of the production workshop.

Therefore, Leo had to adjust his plan, leaving only six hundred skilled workers in the factory's production area to process tapioca flour, while throwing everyone else into the western dense forest to clear land on the felled areas for planting stag-horn tapioca.

Although wild stag-horn tapioca grew almost everywhere near Wolf-Drive Plain, this shrubbery plant also required a certain amount of sunlight to thrive.

The stag-horn tapioca dug up from the western dense forest and the northern pine barrens could yield dozens to a hundred pounds per root, but those were old tree roots that had grown for three, five, or even eight to ten years.

Newborn stag-horn tapioca lacked sufficient sunlight and grew slowly, failing to gain much weight in a year.

With harvesting just beginning, the resources of wild stag-horn tapioca were not yet depleted, but in a couple of months, once the stag-horn tapioca in the nearby logging grounds was exhausted, they would have to search further out in the hunting grounds.

The hunting grounds beyond the logging area still harbored quite a few beasts, and ordinary villagers venturing in there to search for stag-horn tapioca would clearly be a losing proposition.

Ultimately, they had to grow their own.

Leo had already given instructions that as soon as open ground was cleared in the dense forest west of the tapioca flour processing plant, it should be promptly replanted with stag-horn tapioca.

Stag-horn tapioca was extremely easy to survive, and planting it was much less difficult than clearing wheat fields. Although the yield could not be accurately estimated, it certainly would not be less than the wild ones previously found.

On the other hand, in the northern foothills and gravelly hills, wild stag-horn tapioca grew in intertwined, dense thickets.

That place used to be the territory of the boar-men, who relied on this stuff to sustain a tribe of over two hundred people.

Had it not been for the continuous hunting and weakening by wilderness folk over the years, and its close proximity to the empire's border, they could have almost evolved into a wasteland overlord at the southern end of Wolf-Drive Plain.

While managing the processing plant, establishing rules, and optimizing structures, Leo continued to recruit vagrants.

The recruited able-bodied vagrants not only had to participate in productive labor to exchange for food, but also had to undergo regular military training, form a militia regiment, and assist the Riverbend infantry with guard duty and patrols.

Seeing that the situation had calmed down, Knight Solovy also restarted the construction of the Hot Spring Manor.

Compared to the bustling construction outside the western watchtower, the chaotic scene inside the western watchtower was like a living hell.

After driving tens of thousands of vagrants into the western outskirts, the lord's army of Isempor eagerly plunged into a killing frenzy.

In the eyes of many noble lords, once vagrants were driven into the wilderness, they became wilderness folk.

Wilderness folk had no human rights, their status was even lower than that of slaves, and killing them was not a crime.

If they dared to resist, that would be even better; wilderness folk who resisted the lord's army were equivalent to bandits and robbers, and killing them could demonstrate martial prowess and earn military merits.

Compared to genuine bandit suppression, this way of acquiring military merits was safe and efficient.

However, some lords still possessed a shred of conscience and were unwilling to slaughter the innocent, so they cooperated with Rigolav's forces to drive the scattered bands of vagrants from the mountain forests out beyond the western watchtower.

Prior to this, only the two thousand vagrants controlled by Rigolav had been completely driven out beyond the western watchtower.

Most of the remaining vagrants were encircled and suppressed by the lord's army, or even killed each other for food resources, resulting in eighty percent dying within a single short month.

On the contrary, those who had colluded with local bandit gangs and degenerated into outlaws early on managed to survive because of their decent combat capabilities and hidden lairs.

Not many true survivors remained, and all of them were gathered up by Rigolav and sent beyond the western watchtower, left to fend for themselves.

This was already the utmost effort he could muster.

Driving the vagrant tide into the wilderness was not happening for the first time. Although the wilderness was fraught with danger, human resilience was equally formidable.

There would always be some people who could eventually adapt to the wilderness environment and find a way to survive.

Many wilderness settlements and small natural villages appeared precisely this way.

When these wilderness settlements and small natural villages grew and flourished, the noble lords could come to pluck the harvest, developing them into their own knightly domains to secure taxes and land.

In comparison, Rigolav would rather all the noble lords chose the latter.

Plucking the harvest was still better than chopping off the tree roots.

When he returned to the western watchtower with twenty carts of grain and escorted another group of found vagrants out of the mountain pass, he discovered that very few of the previous vagrants had actually died.

Outside the western watchtower, a small stockade had abruptly appeared.

Crowds of dense vagrants, wielding logging axes and pulling large saws, had completely cleared the forest on the north side of the World Tree Avenue.

Anyone unaware of the details would have thought some legion from parts unknown had arrived to attack the western watchtower.

There was none of the tragic scene he had anticipated.

Standing at a high vantage point in the western watchtower, Rigolav stared at the tapioca flour processing plant for a long time. It was not until dusk fell that he said to his squire beside him, "Deliver the grain over there, and say it is a token of respect from the Petukhov family. I won't go over myself."

The twenty carts of grain he brought were originally intended to be distributed to the vagrants to encourage them into the wilderness to find a way to live, rather than waiting to die outside the western watchtower.

Now it seemed they wouldn't be needed.

Leo stayed at the tapioca flour processing plant for another half-month. It wasn't until the vagrant tide completely subsided and the processing plant entered stable production that he prepared to leave.

By this time, the tapioca flour processing plant had gathered three thousand vagrants both inside and out, bringing the total to twice that of Riverbend Barony.

Fortunately, this place was right next to the western watchtower, and the western dense forest had been thoroughly cleared by the ogre tribe and the Riverbend patrol, so there was no need to worry overly much about attacks from bandit gangs and alien races.

Because it was located at the river mouth, many laborers and vagrants had already begun calling this place River Mouth Town.

To most Northern folk, a settlement with city walls, watchtowers, and a population of several thousand was already a genuine small town.

Leo himself was terrible at naming things, and upon hearing it, he simply adopted the name as well.

Naturally, the small factory could not accommodate so many people, so Leo intended to take half of them away with him.