Chapter 80: Chapter 22: Su Li’s Right of the First Night
The territory welcomed several new free people, bringing more than just vitality but also stirring small desires in Su Li’s heart.
The Sulande Elector’s Territory is located in the eastern part of the Empire, famous for its indulgence in luxurious clothing and vanity. Their main exports are cattle, fashion apparel, exquisite porcelain, horses, leather goods, wine, and beautiful women!
The beauty of Sulande’s women is renowned throughout the Mortal World, characterized by fair skin, amethyst-like eyes, and signature flowing white hair.
Among these new free families is a seventeen-year-old young lady named Philis. She has a tall figure of one meter seventy, with plump and slender beautiful legs that gleam fair and smooth even without stockings, and a slim waist that invites a gentle embrace. Whenever she encounters Su Li’s intense gaze, she shyly lowers her head, making her full and snowy white bosom even more prominent.
This makes Su Li unable to help but wonder, who says ancient beauties were all village girls?
Besides, even if they were village girls without makeup embellishments, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, they are ivory-faced and tender.
Which high school or university doesn’t have a class beauty or campus beauty? Those are truly natural beauties, untouched by any polish or adornment.
As long as the population base is large enough, you can always find beauties, Philis being one of them. Her looks resemble a blossom blooming in the spring, fresh and extraordinary, full of life and vitality.
So, although Su Li knows the gap between them is too vast, making her a courtier is very inappropriate, he still can’t help but visit this gentle, shy young lady.
A noble Lord, leaving so many knights unchosen and selecting a farmer’s daughter, would surely be ridiculed.
This makes Su Li quite concerned. He can take the easy route and doesn’t want to activate the hard mode. Just like he can relax, enjoy life and beautiful women, he has little desire to engage in bloody battles for the throne, unless... there’s a shortcut to place the throne in his hands. To say he wouldn’t even want to be given an emperor title is too fake. Which man hasn’t fantasized about ruling the world?
Instead, Hilude encourages him, telling him to go for it if he likes. She thinks that even among the beauties of Sulande, not every one of them could have a head of silvery white flowing hair, right? It’s likely she has some special lineage from her father’s or mother’s ancestors just like herself. This is a white-haired beauty—what man could refuse?
If concerned about her lower status, she could first be taken as a maid, or transformed into a nun of the Dawn Church.
Su Li proposed this plan to the other side, but for some unknown reason, they refused to send Philis to the castle as a maid, a path ordinary people dream of.
This seems very peculiar, for a daughter from a commoner family, entering the castle as a maid could greatly ease the household burden, and she could even bring some leftover food and fruits from the castle back to supplement her younger siblings at home.
Besides the possibility that the girl may be overthrown by the castle’s master a few times, there are hardly any downsides.
But this downside doesn’t really count for women in this world, and they won’t be known or discriminated against by others. Everything within the territory is the lord’s wealth, and the Empire’s nobles enjoy the right of the first night. Theoretically, all young girls would be favored by the lord, breaking their purity.
If a maiden lost her purity before the lord entered her body, it would be equivalent to theft of noble property, and she and her lover would be hanged by the court.
Although Lord Su Li is merciful, he has yet to announce the abolition of the right of the first night since entering the Pioneer Territory. (Mainly because previously all were his serfs, with no marriage rights)
Thus, theoretically, all non-Apprentice Knight female commoners are keeping their chastity for Lord Su Li.
Therefore, Su Li hasn’t been in a hurry recently, especially since he doesn’t particularly lack women. To vent his desires, Hilude and Avril beside him can satisfy it, and they are knights with endurance far superior to Philis.
An important reason Su Li is hesitant about choosing Philis as a courtier is his concern about her lack of stamina. A fragile vase that cannot serve him once or twice in one night without passing out.
This also becomes a happy problem after becoming a lord—selecting a suitable female courtier just to satisfy his pleasure and enjoyment needs. According to the hierarchy of needs theory, he’s at least on the third level, something he could never have dreamed of when he was a beast of burden in his past life.
Of course, this period, Su Li has considered more than just this. After becoming a lord, he’s interested in more amusing things.
Besides pleasing himself and the women who fulfill his conquest desires, there’s also the power he manages and develops.
This period he has been lying flat, so the daily intelligence system is updated daily, assisting him in developing the territory very well.
The daily intelligence revealed the location of Purple Crystal Grapes three times nearby, with a maximum of 26 grapevines in one area. Vandar led people to transplant all these vines back and planted them beneath the northern Green Leaf land hills.
To care for these 60 precious Purple Crystal Grapes, Su Li specially allocated three ogre workers and twenty-four slaves to start constructing Bauhinia Manor beneath the Green Leaf Hills.
After the manor’s construction, Su Li will move out of the castle and mainly reside in the manor.
The great nobles do not stay in castles all day; the castle environment is not quite suitable for living in comfort. (Except for those of enormous scale and very luxurious style)
Additionally, the pastures in the territory have finally taken shape. The current pasture is located to the northeast of the farmland area, covering more than thirty thousand acres of fertile land. Shepherds of the Shepherd Tribe graze and harvest hay at the same time, accumulating nearly a thousand bundles of hay in the farm. Currently, the stables and fodder rooms are built with simple wood structures; in the future, conditions permitting, they will be converted to stone and brick buildings.
Although the pastoral facilities are simple, the number of livestock is vast. Knight Frederick, leading three teams of Impact Knights, finally encountered the herd of horned horses again in the northern Green Leaf Hills. This time, they were well-prepared, capturing over 30 horned horses in one go. The horse king of the herd, with the remaining horned horses, fled for its life and managed to escape, leaving only about forty horses. This was due to Knight Frederick showing mercy, as he didn’t want to harm the remaining horses, which are all future wealth for the territory!
Besides the horned horse herd, in the guidance of Su Li, the shepherds found a group of mountain goats in the mountains, totaling more than 80 heads.
This Shepherd, as a new army unit, performed beyond Su Li’s expectations. They have some scouting ability, able to use slings to throw stones at a distance, and when close, wield a shepherd’s long axe, popular in the Eastern provinces of the Empire, with small light heads and long handles. For thousands of years, the mountain people of the Empire’s Black Mountains and the Edge Mountain Range have carried such long axes, using them as walking sticks and weapons to fight against beastmen and bandits.
If they encounter small groups of roving inferior horned beasts, they can hunt a few by themselves. If they encounter large groups of bandits and beast herds, they can also report in time.
This is a kind of army similar to government soldiers, hiding soldiers among civilians, able to engage in production outside of battle. They take care of a total of 103 war horses, 24 foals, and 95 head of draft cattle, draft horses, and over 600 sheep in the territory.
As summer approaches, they have been busy shearing wool from the sheep and mountain goats. Lauren is also arranging to build a warehouse. He plans to establish a wool workshop in the territory to produce wool blankets and cashmere coats to prepare for winter warmth.
This Minister of the Seal is indeed remarkably talented, organizing everything Su Li considered and did not consider comprehensively.
Recently, Su Li personally participated in two governmental affairs: guiding the territory’s fishing and hunting and supervising the dyke construction project in Bjorn Shallow Bay.
In fact, the dyke construction project in Bjorn Shallow Bay is divided into two parts proceeding simultaneously. While building the dyke on the high side of the eastern part of the shallow bay, drainage channels are being constructed below. Once the water is drained, and the land below is dried, it will become fertile soft soil, where summer serfs with heavy plows can till at least two or three acres of good farmland per day with an ox.
At the turn of spring and summer, the sun is bright but not scorching, a gentle breeze blowing, grass swaying, and the air fragrant with flowers.
Su Li sat on the grassland to the west of the shoal, watching the slaves working zealously in the distance. They used iron shovels and pickaxes to load silt from the channels into bamboo baskets, and then an ogre exerting great strength lifted the wooden barrels and bamboo baskets filled with hundreds of pounds of soil onto ox carts beside them. Thanks to the developed pastures in the territory, many ox carts and horse-drawn carts participate in various projects, transporting all kinds of materials.
With the lord personally supervising, the excavation progress of the slaves is fast; within about three hours since morning, they have excavated a main canal trunk of 200 meters long, along with completing four branch channels, enabling the conversion of about twenty acres of land into arable land.
As Su Li was watching, Vandar, the Minister of Agriculture, strode vigorously, hurriedly approaching from afar.
This priest of the Dawn Goddess is now undoubtedly the most energetic in the territory. In every aspect, this burgeoning land perfectly aligns with the teachings of the Dawn Goddess.
Everyone feels that this Elder Druid seems to be living younger, with a spirit more vibrant than most young cattle and horses.
He quickly walked up to Su Li and said, "Lord, there’s good news to inform you. The monastery of the Dawn Goddess has been completed today. Do you wish to participate in the unveiling ceremony of the monastery?"
Su Li quickly waved his hand and said, "Congratulations to your Dawn Church for taking another important step on the path of propagation. I am not a follower of the Dawn Goddess, so I won’t attend."
His absence isn’t entirely due to disinterest in the Dawn Goddess’s teachings, but he worries his attendance might stir up discontent among the knights.
For an imperial lord to have not built a monastery for the Empire’s Spirit of Knights in his territory yet to ceremoniously attend the unveiling of a faraway divine monastery?
Is this Pioneer Territory no longer the knights’ land of honor?
Then, one by one, knights would demand the construction of their respective church monasteries and temples, leaving him no time for anything else. Refusing the knights’ proposals would severely impact the army’s morale.
So the completion of the Dawn Goddess’s monastery is best proceeded with in low-key.
Vandar did not mind. The Dawn Goddess is generous. Show appropriate respect, and she brings hope but never rewards greed. Therefore, the Dawn Church does not construct grand temples, but scattered across this land are various monasteries.
For Vandar, as long as the monastery can spread the teachings, it’s enough. When the breeze blows over the wheat fields, it’s the most joyous moment for the Dawn Church followers, as they believe it is the Goddess walking on the land.
Subsequently, Vandar took a wooden box from a pocket tied outside his robe and said to Su Li, "In the monastery, I felt the Goddess’s approval and divine grace, so I was suddenly inspired and successfully crafted three vials of the ’Blood of the Earth’ potion. These are high-tier potions that even the most powerful cultivators can hardly produce normally."