Crescent Continent's pillar industry is agriculture. This is a fact that can be easily learned with just a little investigation.
Staple food products grown in large quantities in plain areas; radishes and vegetables in hilly areas; and various imported crops, tea, fruits and vegetables in mountainous areas. The complex and diverse agricultural cultivation personnel account for nearly 70% of the country's personnel, and the remaining nearly 30% are engaged in fishery-related activities relying on the long coastline.
These geographical factors and production-related factors constitute the main dietary structure of people:
It uses millet, rice or potatoes as the staple food, accompanied by pickled vegetables, seafood, sea vegetables such as seaweed, and a small amount of river fish or sea fish. People further from the coast rely on soybeans for protein. Because of the relatively rich population, even if generations of wisdom were accumulated and farming methods such as terraces were adopted to cultivate as much land as possible, the cultivated land would only be enough to provide food for human consumption.
For this reason, animal food is even rarer in this country than in Rigal.
There is no vast grassland for grazing sheep, and the precious food on the cultivated land is not enough for people to eat. Naturally, there is not much leftover to raise livestock; Rigar-style semi-grazing pigs cannot be raised, because the mountains and forests of Crescent Continent are generally demanding. It is even more barren than the Black Forest of Rigar, which is full of pine nut berry fungi. And the terrain is mostly steep, so if you dare to release it, you will most likely not be able to find it again.
Under such conditions, the only large livestock that were raised in large numbers were cattle, donkeys, and mules used for farm labor, but these obviously could not be easily slaughtered for food. In addition, as a symbol of noble status, horses must be raised.
Apart from marine fish, the only truly common animal products are ducks and geese raised by people along the river or eggs laid by farm hens. But even these are often not sufficient due to shortages of rations.
If you can put an extra egg in your child's rice bowl a day, you are already a very well-off farmer.
"Rebirth of the Great Era of Fighting Waves"
Judging from the average level, the life of Kazuto civilians is probably not as good as that of some wealthy countries in Rigar.
But it's also because it's a larger country with a much larger population.
During the four thousand years, except for some minor internal frictions and rebellions, the Moon Country has been in a self-sufficient state with agriculture as the mainstay and fishery as the supplement.
Factors such as being located on an isolated continent and lacking direct communication channels with the outside world have put the country's overall economy and society in a state of internal self-circulation.
And if something happens to this self-sufficient and barely maintained model that breaks it, it will be like a ball rolling down a slope.
Lacking any outside force to stop it, it slid all the way down.
——It is the year 1332 of the Laman calendar and September 4164 of the Great Moon calendar. After capturing Taizhou, they bypassed Zhangzhou and landed directly at Minamata Port in Jeju. After capturing most of Jeju, they stayed for more than half a month to reorganize.
The feudal army advanced again.
The mighty troops were composed of feudal nobles and the incorporated Jeju Ashigaru - unlike most of the Jeju nobles who fled or tried to resist, once the leading Chinese were killed, the ashigaru under them would often attack in groups. defection.
When the governors and senior staff of Wanzhou and Yanzhou heard this fact, they cursed loudly, but what they couldn't figure out was that the reason for the Ashigaru's defection had actually been foreshadowed.
The soldiers and horses have not moved, but the food and grass go first.
The timing of the feudal army's attack coincided with the busy summer harvest season.
After all, the nobility is an existence far away from the common people. When Taizhou, an important town in the north and a major grain-producing area, was taken down, there was no rice. All the nobles in the neighboring directly governed states were thinking:
"It's bad, now the tribute rice handed over to Xinjing will become less/my own share will also become less."
For them, this is a political issue, and whether it can be resolved will affect their career.
Because what the nobles lack can always be obtained from the lower classes.
The fall of grain-producing areas has nothing to do with civilians in theory, because the main product is rice, which they can never afford. However, due to the lack of rice, upper-class people consumed more non-staple food, causing the price of non-staple food to soar, which also affected the lives of common people.
If that wasn't bad enough, the unrest started by Minamata led to more fields being laid waste and the nobles becoming suspicious of the common people. The tightening of martial law in Wanzhou and Yanzhou, which occasionally dispatched heavily armed patrols, has seriously caused unrest. Farmers have an instinctive fear of nobles. This fear stems from the well-known privilege of "disrespectfully asking for it".
"What happened in our village was that when a samurai master was patrolling the fields, the muddy water from the rice transplanted by Taro next door splashed on his clothes. As a result, the samurai master killed their whole family at once, and the child was not even one month old. Well, that’s miserable!”
Rhetoric like this, with the name changed and the details changed, spread in many rural areas that were still stable. The peasants only dared to hide at home because of such rumors that were difficult to tell whether they were true or not, and did not dare to make a sound when the nobles patrolled. Only in places where the aristocratic martial law was slightly looser did they dare to go out to farm.
"Being hungry is better than death." became the words of many mothers to comfort their children during this period. The fear of nobles firmly rooted in their souls made them rather believe in anything related to them.
The sad thing is that many of the New Moon Continent warriors who were nervous under martial law and accustomed to privileges actually did similar things, leaving people with an excuse.
What makes all this worse is the bias and carelessness of grassroots personnel in handling and reporting.
They did not understand the problem in depth, but simply reported the warriors' opinions to their superiors as a judgment record.
So in the words of the officials, all this became: "Farmers are unruly and unwilling to farm, and the crops rot in the fields." They blame the farmers' laziness and unruly for their faults. In short, the world is healthy and the nobles have tried their best. Farmers who were born lowly with bad bones brought the problems upon themselves.
What's more, some people even used the tense to add words like "suspected of treason" at the end.
Mutual misunderstanding and distrust have long been rooted in this soil.
Just like growing flowers, if the seeds die early, no matter how carefully they are cared for and watered, they will not germinate.
Chaos that quickly emerges with just a little bit of help and just the right push is often a problem that has been accumulated for decades or hundreds of years and has all kinds of signs of looming.
only.
Crescent Continent’s large, redundant, and overstaffed grassroots bureaucrats carelessly ignored the past.
And those scholars who are capable of doing things are bound by iron chains like thieves, and every effort is made to deny them any real power to implement.
Those who are aware of all this internally, work hard to verify, and work hard to change may only have the power to submit a report and wait for others to do it. And those in power, those who have the power and the strength to take action, end up doing nothing for one reason or another.
The stubborn internal diseases that had accumulated over several or even more than a dozen generations eventually became a powerful boost when foreign enemies attacked.
It's like an excellent swordsman who fails to heal his injured hand and doesn't practice using the sword with the other hand, expecting his opponents to be kind and not take advantage of this weakness in a life-or-death fight.
A slow giant.
For outsiders, this country’s red tape and culture accumulated over thousands of years are fascinating and rich in history.
Especially for the people of Rigal, who have a short history.
But all this is not a heavy yoke.
"Don't disobey the ancestral precepts"
"Because it's always been like this"
The inertia of this huge and ancient country is so great that the internal rebellion and the northern rebels have fought successively, and Beijing still regards it as a "minor problem."
This is an empire that has lived for four thousand years, and these are just small ups and downs.
The general guarding Taizhou thought so.
This is what the nobles of Jeju thought.
The nobles of Yanzhou and Wanzhou still think so.
"Farmers don't want to farm? Just like mice don't want to dig holes!" After receiving the report, Wanzhou Zhou Mu, who laughed and laughed at the farmers, waved his hand and used the most common method of treating farmers by Japanese nobles.
"Those who are unwilling to work will be killed."
"The rebels are currently in power. Anyone who is unwilling to work will be regarded as a collaborator with the enemy and will be executed."
They have always only known this simple and crude method, because they have the power in their hands and it is always easiest to make people obey directly.
But to the ears of the common people at the bottom, it was like a bolt from the blue.
It’s not that they don’t want to farm, because unlike the nobles who have stored grain or have money to buy grain, if they don’t farm, their whole family will have nothing to eat.
But now there is martial law everywhere, there are heavily armed troops everywhere, and the nobles have privileges, which makes no sense.
"You can get through it if you starve." This is the inner thought of most farmers. They want to avoid the limelight temporarily and wait until the war is over or martial law is over before they seize the time to cultivate.
"Maybe they will be fined and hand over more grain. Then everyone will work hard together and starve, and then it will be over." - This is the punishment that those at the bottom can see with their minds bound by layers of shackles. . Just bear with it and it will pass. It's always safer than the obvious threat right now.
So they didn't understand why the nobles suddenly issued such severe punishment, just like the nobles didn't understand why the farmers suddenly hid at home and didn't come out to farm.
From the point of view of the nobles, in their eyes, we are on wartime alert and it is also the busy farming season. Military rations are also important materials. It is a huge sin for these people not to work.
Without this summer harvest of grain and grass, the army may be short of half a month; if it is short of half a month, it may not be able to withstand the arrival of reinforcements from Xinjing.
You think you are just one person unwilling to work, but what you may cause is the eventual fall of the entire state.
One's vision is from a more macro perspective, while the other's vision is more personal. The two sides have different fundamental perspectives on the problem.
And communication channels.
And it was cut off a long time ago due to various misunderstandings and power.
The power of the New Moon Continent nobles is too great.
Even the knights of Rigar do not have the power to kill civilians in person just because they think they are rude to them.
Although they would also force civilians who offended them to duel with them - civilians holding wooden sticks, knights riding horses in full plate armor - such behavior was opportunistic by individuals taking advantage of legal loopholes, and was not recognized by the country.
Therefore there will only be "one bad knight" and "one bad lord" in Rigar.
Rather than a deep-seated fear and loathing of the entire aristocratic class.
There is a big difference.
People's awareness of personal good and bad makes people more or less look to a wise lord. The fear of the entire class due to their privileges will lead them to have extremely deep prejudices against samurai regardless of whether they know them or not.
And this kind of prejudice is under the harsh conditions of "if you go out to farm, you will die, if you don't go to farm, you will die."
Of course it turned into hatred.
Following the Jeju Minamata Incident, peasant unrest also broke out in Wanju and Yanju.
Due to martial law, personnel who could infiltrate the domain and provide weapons and equipment could not arrive in large numbers, so these farmers were independent and chaotic, and lacked combat effectiveness.
These peasant armed forces were suppressed in just three or four days, but the Ashigaru who were originally prepared to resist foreign enemies in the domain were forced to stab their own countrymen to death at the request of the samurai, which largely caused their morale is low.
Blood and dead bodies stained the fields, and the dilapidated thatched farmhouses were burned to the ground.
And this is Henry and his party who entered Wanzhou territory and took a long detour, but had to rush back to a populated place due to supply problems.
What meets the eye.
The corpses of children hugging each other inside the burning and collapsed house were twisted and twisted. It was obvious that farmers who were fleeing in groups were shot from behind and fell to death on their backs.
The ground was covered with messy horse hoof prints.
"It's cold. It was about two or three days ago." Henry touched the charred pillars of the collapsed house. The smell of corpses and the circling crows and scavenging insects swarming around him all told this story. This one-sided massacre obviously did not happen just now.
"All the grains are rotten." The Ashigaru people looked at the half-harvested fields. This village could have provided food rations for hundreds or thousands of people, but now there was nothing left.
"Even if it's a mob, they don't even collect corpses, so aren't they afraid of the plague?" As a person from Rigar who has more war experience, the Luoan girl said angrily while covering her nose.
"There are no decent weapons." But Henry looked around for a week. Most of the mobs who had fled from Jeju had pretty good weapons, but these people died with only weathered farm tools.
"He is a local, from this village. The samurai attacked the farmers in the village of his own state. Why?" Not only Rigar and his party could not understand, but also the samurai of the Qingtian family.
"Worried about rebellion, or maybe." Henry looked back at the field: "Disobeying discipline."
He guessed so closely that all the team members who were born with Kazuto fell silent.
But they are not worrying about other people's livelihood right now.
"What should we do with food and grass now?"
Because a more realistic supply problem is once again facing us.
