Chapter 94: The Road to Development (4)

Among the more than 200 new houses, a few were built as barracks specifically for the soldiers; apart from Yue Ji's 30 guards who stayed in the small fort, Wu Zhuoyue's 100 archers were for the city‑defending troops, and both the small fort and the outer large fort were guarded by her people, leaving some to rest in the small fort while the rest stayed in the barracks under the large fort's wall. Thus, in the small fort the houses, besides the four near the gate used as barracks, one served as a clinic for Wan'er, and the rest were officials' residences.

The gate of the small fort is open to civilians 24 hours a day except during wartime, because the clinic is located here, allowing villagers to receive treatment at any time.

Li Bucai entered the freshly tidied clinic; the wooden houses in the small fort are all two‑story, and this one is the largest, with seven or eight rooms on the first floor. Apart from a few intensive‑care wards, each room holds four beds, and the comatose Wu Zhuoran has already been moved here, into the intensive‑care ward.

"Is her foot healed?" Li Bucai asked, having not seen the villager whose foot was injured last night among the wards.

"Hmm, she's fine; her family took her back before nightfall," Wan'er said, sighing lightly, "To be honest, we were so busy with the clinic today that no one thought of her. Others didn't know she was here, and her family didn't dare enter the fort during the day, so they had nothing to eat all day. It wasn't until evening, after finishing here, that I went back to see her and learned this. Have Rushi bring her some food."

According to the original system, Yan Qiu distributes one unit of food to each person every morning. This morning, the girl's foot had not healed, so she was absent from the food‑distribution site; her family, assuming she could not work because of her injury, did not ask Yan Qiu for food, and Yan Qiu, busy with fort construction and other duties, along with the other officials, did not think of her, so she did not eat that day.

"It seems the current system indeed has problems," Li Bucai said. "It was my negligence for not considering everything. Starting tomorrow, go to Yan Qiu and request a cook to come and stay here; from now on, whenever someone falls ill here, we will provide them with food."

"Fine, fine, but could this cause people to injure themselves on purpose, since an injury guarantees food?"

Li Bucai replied, "We can't just kill everyone outright; they are our people, and if they are injured here, providing food to the sick is proper. As for your concerns, I'll use other methods to prevent that. I'll inform Yan Qiu first; tomorrow you can go to her and request the person."

"Alright."

……

In Yan Qiu's room, she was currently coordinating the grain to be distributed tomorrow; when Li Bucai entered, she hurriedly invited him to sit and brought a pot of fragrant flower tea.

Li Bucai took a sip and said, "What do you think of our current method—giving them one unit of food daily and issuing rewards at month's end—how does that work?"

"Hmm… I've observed these past two days; there are good aspects and bad aspects."

"What are the bad aspects? Tell me."

"The good side is that everyone receives a stable food supply, which steadies morale; the bad side is… in the past two days I've noticed many people are not giving their full effort at work."

"What if we issue the rewards on the same day?"

"Our food is limited; if we give rewards that day, we'd have to distribute several hundred extra units in one day, and the tens of thousands of units wouldn't last until month's end, so they'd be exhausted."

Li Bucai pondered, "What if we split each food unit by weight into several equal parts, and instead of rewarding them with food, we reward them with currency—both wages and bonuses in money? Then we could turn a street into a market where they freely purchase with that currency. How does that sound?"

"But we've already spent most of our money; we don't have that much to distribute."

"What if we issue our own currency, circulating only here for the time being?"

Yan Qiu's eyes lit up: "Yes, that's a good idea; we can issue our own currency."

"Is there any special material that others can't obtain, so that once we produce the currency it can't be easily forged?"

Yan Qiu thought for a while, then shook her head: "We don't have any material for minting currency yet; copper ore would be useful."

"Do you know how to make paper?" Li Bucai asked.

Yan Qiu shook her head, having never seen paper. Even people from Sky City don't know papermaking; here the books are bound from thinly stretched cloth or animal hide.

Li Bucai had heard of a manual papermaking method and thought it worth trying. He said, "Tomorrow pick a few capable people; I'll take you to make paper. Until we obtain rare metals, we'll use paper money first."

……

After a peaceful night with no invasion signals from the beacon tower, early the next day Li Bucai sent Yue Ji to the beacon tower to deliver drinking water, and also took the hundred civilians from yesterday there to continue building the supply depot.

Road construction was overseen by the city‑construction officer; Yan Qiu gathered forty villagers, and Li Bucai sent them all out, with gatherers leading them to collect hemp stalks, ordering carpenters to forge two huge wooden barrels, leaving a builder on an empty plot to erect a massive stove, placing the largest pot on it. By the time the tools were ready, the villagers had already brought back a large amount of hemp stalks.

At the small dock by the river they cut the stalks into fragments; lacking a cleaver, they had to chop them piece by piece with a battle sword, which was very labor‑intensive. After chopping, they washed the fragments clean, soaked them in lime gathered from the mountains for a while, then steamed them in a pot for several hours. They took them out, pounded them into finer pieces, then placed them into the wooden barrels to make pulp. Once the pulp was ready, they poured the liquid onto wooden screens, let it dry in the sun, thereby producing many hemp papers.

Because tools were limited and they couldn't crush the wood, they could only use this coarse hemp paper, making it as thick as possible, then neatly cutting the sheets to uniform size, which was still fairly presentable. Since there was no paper here, no special patterns needed to be printed; each sheet had the same denomination, worth one copper coin.

Of course, this crude paper is only a temporary substitute for banknotes due to limited resources and labor; it won't be long before they search for ore deposits. The area is mountainous, so finding rare metals isn't difficult, and later they can replace these paper notes with currency made from more suitable materials.

The next day Li Bucai built a wooden house at the most convenient spot near the middle of the large fort, temporarily serving as a shop that sold the only two goods: Hornless beef and tender leaf grass. He restructured the unit system: one food unit now weighed three jin; within the Huachi Territory, the market jin would be used as the unit. The two foods had equal value, belonging to the same grade, priced at two paper notes per jin. Villagers earned a daily wage of five paper notes, with bonuses ranging from one to ten notes depending on performance.

To avoid unnecessarily increasing officials' workload, Li Bucai issued a week's worth of food at once; starting next week, no more food would be distributed, and people would have to rely on that week's performance and use their wages to buy food at the shop.