Three Kingdoms Overlord Online Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Food

The two straw houses finally finished construction during noon. Each straw house used 5 units of wood resource, a total of 10 wood resource was used for construction. Including the system awarded straw house and the village government building, Mountain village can now house a total of 20 people!

While Yang Rui busied himself physically, with labour, he mentally planned the distribution of resource and manpower.

The main priority of Mountain Village right now was the expansion of agriculture. It required the most manpower as well. The game system only awarded 100 units of food. If each person went by 1 unit of food per day as the population grows, the village would not survive for even 4 days.

However, the beginner level crops required 4 days before harvest, which means Mountain Village was likely to face famine within this 4 day period!

To remedy the dire situation, Yang Rui could only think of 3 solutions:
One was to search for wild berries and alike.
To compensate for the lack of food (which is also the most practical method), or he could buy food from the system market.
Lastly, he could consider Black Dragon lake as a potential fishing spot, he would have to consult Wang Hai for this.

Yang Rui also had population to worry about. With the current speed of expansion, Yang Rui may not have enough residential buildings to accept all of the daily influx of settlers! Since every residential building required 5 units of wood, Yang Rui had to acquire a steady source of wood resource, or he’d have to use money to buy the buildings.

Needless to say, wood was one of Yang Rui’s priorities as well, but not only because he needed them for construction. The imperial court’s corrupted actions have caused the price of wood to skyrocket, during the years before the Yellow Turban uprising. Yang Rui was very familiar with the event, of course he would have to take advantage of it!

“Master Searing Sun, we currently have 9 settlers that have already registered in Mountain Village. The population of Mountain Village has reached 13. What are your orders?” Wang Hai reported to Yang Rui, bringing 2 new villagers with him.

Wang Hai used to help out in the fields with Yang Rui and a few other villagers, but with his old age he couldn’t really help much. So Yang Rui decided to put him in charge of registering new settlers, at the same time search for wild fruits nearby.

Wang Hai adapted to his new job rather quickly. He managed to register all the available settlers everyday and also managed to find a huge field of wild fruits, which could feed the village for a few days.

“Oh? We have 13 villagers already?” Yang Rui thinked for a moment and said, “We have enough villagers for today, get all the villagers to follow me to the fields!”

According to his estimates, Yang Rui had enough wood to last for 4 days of construction. However, the lack of food is a much more pressing issue, so he decided to put all his focus on food production first.

“Here’s my plan; we split into two groups. One group would be in charge of ploughing the land, then the other group follows behind to sow the sweet potato seedlings. Although it is not the most efficient method, we need to focus on guaranteeing harvest and faster food production! The faster we plant them, the earlier we can harvest them and possibly avoid a famine! Does anyone have anything to say? If not, let’s get to work!”

The villagers gathered around Yang Rui were stunned by his question. Did the village head just ask for their opinion? Taken aback, they answer hurriedly, “We will follow the Lord’s instructions!”

Accompanied by 11 other villagers, Yang Rui arrived at the north of the village and started working on the field. Wang Hai was sent to find more wild fruits and register new settlers along the way.

The land north of the government building was set aside by Yang Rui for farming. The residential buildings were built to the south-east side. The forest to the north-west of the village can be used as a makeshift sawmill.

The soil in the inner valley was of poor quality due to the large amounts of sand, but it was quite easy to turn into an arable soil. Not long after, an acre of soil has been cleaned out. Judging by their speed, Yang Rui quickly sent 3 people to plant the sweet potato seedling, the rest of them would continue ploughing the land.

With such an arrangement, the two groups of people got to work. When the first group were done ploughing, the second group quickly caught up and started sowing the seedlings.

Yang Rui took a short break in between to make lunch. He assigned the two brothers Chen Pin and Chen Li to lead the groups.

Xiao Hui was still online, but the breakfast Yang Rui prepared for her was finished. Looks like she had logged off once. Yang Rui knew that Xiao Hui would definitely like this game, so just he left her a portion of lunch and went online again.

When he came back, they have already finished ploughing 4 acres of land. The sowing of sweet potatoes was also going nicely. The size of the group has also increased by 3 people. Seems like they are the new villagers brought back by Wang Hai.

‘It’s only noon, could it be an overflow?’ Yang Rui thought. “What an opening day, looks like I have to prepare more straw houses. If overflow really happens and I have no room to accommodate them, I will lose settlers for nothing.”

Yang Rui left Chen Pin and Chen Li in charge, then took 2 villagers with him to build more straw houses.

‘Overflow’ was a common term on the game forums of his past life. Each territory receives around 11-12 settlers each day, if the number exceeds 15 it would be considered an ‘overflow’ event.

Settlers determine the productivity of a territory, so an ‘overflow’ was always welcomed. However, the chances of it happening was very low. It usually happens once a month, sometimes it would not happen at all for a few months.

To Yang Rui’s surprise not only was it really ‘overflow’, it also exceeded the usual numbers by a lot! In the afternoon, Wang Hai brought in a few settlers continuously. In the evening, he actually brought in 10 more! The village had 22 settlers in total, on the first day!

The village population grew to 25! If not for Yang Rui’s experience, he would have lost some of them. Even so the 4 straw houses and the government building could barely contain the 25 people.

After a whole afternoon of work, the farming fields expanded to 7 acres. All planted with a total of 700 sweet potato seedlings.

Although the sowing speed was slightly slower than expected, Yang Rui expected it to increase as the population grew larger. The 3000 sweet potato seedlings can definitely be finished, within 3 days.

With the ‘overflow’, Yang Rui had to rethink his plans. Some of the manpower used for farming could now be used to build sawmill. With enough wood, Yang Rui considered building a port and fishing boats at Black Dragon lake. Yang Rui also thought of building an army camp.

Thinking about an army camp, Yang Rui could not help but feel a little nervous.

A newly formed village have a protection period of half a month. During this protection period, there would be no attacks on the village. After this period, there would be a chance of monster raids.

Yang Rui was familiar with this. Every new territory were surrounded by 3 to 4 monster camps, these camps can either be a tiger or wolf nest. It can even be a humanoid NPC camp. Regardless, once the monsters within the camps reach a certain level, it would always start attacking any nearby villagers. They are very likely to cause huge damage to the new territories and even destroy some of them!

“We should start training soldiers, after the food issue is solved!” Yang Rui told himself.

The NPC villagers rest after sunset, but the players could still continue to play or hunt monsters to level up and such. Yang Rui was busy the whole day, even working for almost 24 hours continuously. After tasking Chen Pin, Chen Li and Wang Hai, Yang Rui decided to log off.

The gaming pod that allowed players to remain online indefinitely will be released half a year later. However, that device was extremely expensive, its price was equal to a real life luxurious bungalow. Not everyone could afford it!

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Translated by doodlebleh

Edited by Sage

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