Chapter 46 (1/2)

The people working in the camp quickly realised that the “ancestor” from 700 years ago was a weird person.

The commoners and serfs did not think much about how the Cecil feudal lord changed from Ms Rebecca to Lord Gawain. In this day and age, the lower class would feel grateful for the feudal lord’s generosity and wisdom as long as their stomachs were more or less filled. They did not mind who the feudal lord was and to them the only thing that was worth discussing after Gawain had become the feudal lord was the weird rules set by this “ancient person”.

When it came to the serfs being able to be promoted to freemen and how they could receive salary for what they did, most people remained doubtful as they believed that it was just a way for the new feudal lord to show his benevolence. Under normal circumstances, they believed that such promises would be realised in stringent or sneaky ways. They thought it meant that probably only one or two serfs would become freemen and even if they got paid, their pay would be docked for all kinds of reasons and only a few lucky people would receive some symbolic coins so that the feudal lord could justify that he lived up to his words.

However, the commoners and serfs would not complain about it because a feudal lord who was willing to show benevolence was much better than the one who abused his people to show his power right after he inherited the position.

Some good things would eventually happen to them right?

As compared to those generous rules, all the so-called “rules and regulations” set by Lord Gawain were the most confusing.

They were grouped into small teams which had to compete against one another, they needed to register their work load and there were even “assessments”… those were really things which they had never heard of.

Some people were discussing secretly and guessing which part of the new regulations would become part of taxation even though everyone was too poor to pay taxes. Some other people were talking about how Lord Gawain turned simple labour work into complicated tasks, was it because ancient nobles had some weird habits…

No matter what, they still could understand certain things that concerned their own interest — The first team in everyday’s evaluation would get to eat meat while the second and third team could eat as much bread with meat soup as they wanted.

For those whose standard of work was mediocre, they could only get plain vegetable stew and black bread. Although those two items were filling, to those people who did not get to eat meat on the first day of “tent pitching evaluation”, the torture of watching others eat meat stew while drinking vegetable stew was simply too painful to go through again.

No matter if those wondrous tales about promotion and getting salary were true or not, at least it was true that the feudal lord provided meat for them to eat.

Therefore, on the second day, Herti saw the people working like never before. Both commoners and serfs were working crazily hard and they would complete their work very quickly even without anyone supervising them. As they were working in groups and not individually, they started to work together subconsciously, thereby increasing their efficiency.

For those who were the group leaders, most of them quickly realised that the only way for them to eat meat was to increase the efficiency of the entire group and let the entire group eat it. The minority who were not so quick-witted or became group leaders by using violence or scheming ways would probably be replaced soon.

Using incentives and not physical abuse to motivate them to work was an incredible sight.

The tents were pitched and Rebecca led a group of people to survey the nearby undeveloped land. The lumbermen went upstream of the White River in the west early in the morning. Before noon, a batch of timber would flow down the river to the flatter and broader area. To prevent the timber from being washed away by the river, Herti allocated the supervision job to Knight Byron before the stipulated time and waited by the river personally.

At the stipulated time, the first batch of timber appeared and they were tied together using thick ropes to form a raft. The bigger timber were at the bottom while the smaller ones were secured and piled on top in different directions, thereby making everything look like a big piece of ugly wood floating on the river. Two nervous looking serfs stood on the raft and controlled the path of the “wooden raft” by using long sticks: the flow of the White River at this part was already very slow, the river was still and there was no wind blowing. However, controlling a raft that was made in a rush was challenging and any careless mistake would cause the entire raft to fall apart. Therefore, they were anxious.

Very quickly, the two serfs realised that the raft started to drift closer to the shore. They saw a huge semi-transparent palm at the side of the raft and the hand formed using air pushed the raft to the shore gently and strongly. One of the serfs exclaimed subconsciously and the other serf slapped that moron’s head with the stick and pointed to Madam Herti who was standing at the shore.

They cooperated with their master and maneuvered the raft to the shore and let it rub against the rocks before it stopped stably.

Afterwards, the people who had waited by the shore for quite some time rushed to them. They untied the ropes, dragged the timber and prepared to turn them into the wooden houses which their camp needed.

Usually the timber needed to be dried in the shade, deinsectized and processed in order to become quality and durable material. However, they did not care about the details because many buildings in the campsite were temporary and they were in a rush to build them.

Gawain stood behind Herti and said as though he was thinking of something, “Magic is indeed very convenient…”

Just as Herti sighed, the voice that suddenly came from the back gave her a scare and she almost fell from the rock, fortunately Gawain pulled her up.