The harvest season of Year 38 of the New Calendar arrived.
This year, Longcheng did not organize a collective holiday for people to participate in the autumn harvest, because most residents now had regular jobs to attend to.
The majority worked in various factories — livestock operations, garment manufacturing, general manufacturing, shipyards, power plants, and the like.
If more than half of these people stopped working and went off to play in the fields, Longcheng's entire operation could easily grind to a halt.
Moreover, the population had grown considerably compared to the previous year, while the increase in cultivated land remained modest.
Over the past two years, thanks to bumper sweet potato harvests, several imperial courts had vigorously promoted their cultivation, causing grain output to grow larger and larger year by year.
There was now more food than people could eat — livestock had begun to be fed on it as well.
With full bellies all around and more livestock being raised, meat prices dropped accordingly.
So not only had the farmland around Longcheng barely expanded, the acreage devoted to sweet potatoes had actually decreased.
More land was being given over to rice, wheat, corn, and other crops, shifting the aspirations of Longcheng's people from simply having enough to eat toward a diet that was varied and nutritionally balanced.
A meal for thirty fen — a bowl of coarse-grain rice with a bit of cheap vegetables — had become a rare sight in Longcheng.
Outside of prison, you almost never saw it anymore.
If things were truly tight, one could always buy coarse grain at the market and cook it oneself — cheaper still; if all you wanted was a full stomach with no side dishes, ten or twenty fen a meal was enough.
The baseline these days was roughly fifty fen for a bowl of white rice with two vegetable dishes, or a bowl of noodles with sauce.
Add a meat dish for another fifty fen, and for one yuan you had a proper meal of two vegetable dishes and one meat dish.
Ordinary people here had once made do with a thin gruel for breakfast; once they became Longcheng residents, they could eat two meals a day.
Now more and more people had started eating three meals a day.
Three meals a day was something everyone could afford, and the sense of happiness it brought was immense.
When the southern harvest season passed and the weather gradually turned cold, the north was already locked in ice and snow, and the New Year was drawing near.
The Russians to the north remained relentless in their desire to seize the vast steppes.
In truth, the steppes were far poorer than their own homeland — aside from some cattle, sheep, and horses, there was virtually nothing there.
Although Russian territory lay even further north than the steppes, the mountain ranges meant that warm ocean currents reached their lands, making it milder than the grasslands.
No one could quite figure out why they were fighting so desperately for those steppes.
Perhaps the sight of every nation in the world scrambling to grab territory had gotten to them.
The feeling seemed to be: grab whatever you can, wherever it is, and sort it out later.
What else could you say — all brawn and no brains. Those dimwits should have gone to grab land in Africa, South Asia, or the Americas instead.
Among the world's great powers at this time, the three with the greatest overall strength were the British Empire, the German states, and Russia.
In terms of population and territory, Russia ranked first — yet their strategic judgment was poor. The steppe peoples' domain was barren and difficult to seize, yet they stubbornly insisted on battering their heads against it.
The struggle between the steppe peoples and the Russians had been going on for a long time.
The thick-headed Russians insisted on establishing footholds in the region.
In a straight fight the Russians held a large advantage, but the steppe people had grown shrewder — rather than engaging head-on, they simply destroyed whatever the Russians built.
The Russians would drive off the steppe fighters, rebuild, and then watch it all be destroyed again.
And so it went, on and on — a cycle of construction and ruin, life and death, without end.
But this was precisely the kind of spectacle that Ming Xin was delighted to watch.
It tied down Russia's advance and steadily drained the strength of the northern imperial court.
He, meanwhile, happily got on with his own construction in the north — growing Baihu City's population, making Taoyuan Street in the capital ever more prosperous.
The Lord's target of fifty thousand people for Baihu City this year had been met long ago.
He had also launched furious development of Taoyuan Street within the capital itself, bringing its population to forty or fifty thousand!
It was as though a prefectural city had been carved out within the capital — he had claimed one-eighth of it for himself.
An entire district had sprouted up from nothing!
It left the barbarian ministers and the Han officials alike somewhat dazed. Was this still the capital, or had they somehow wandered into Longcheng?
Walking outside, one moment a crowd of people would be bowing and scraping and calling out "My Lord." Then, stepping inadvertently into one of the new neighborhoods, old women with red armbands would stare you down and snap, "Watch yourself — don't stand in the middle of the road!"
And you had better smile and take it, because those old women would genuinely write you a fine.
Someone had refused to accept it once, and had actually hit one of the women.
He was a barbarian general, no less.
And he was still sitting in prison.
It was deeply unsettling — a powerful sense of dislocation.
The sense of belonging among Longcheng people was peculiar — at once weak and strong.
Weak, because none of them owned their own homes. They had grown accustomed to moving wherever life took them, settling down wherever they landed.
Strong, because they only needed to be somewhere that other Longcheng people had gathered. Anywhere without them, they felt profoundly out of place.
They were even reluctant to interact with people from outside Longcheng — when they encountered outsiders, they avoided them as though steering clear of a plague.
The reason was simple: wherever Longcheng people went, there was always somewhere to live. And so the deep-rooted traditional attachment to one fixed place simply never took hold in them.
People cling to what they lack and find difficult to obtain.
Anywhere under Longcheng's banner, you could find decent lodgings for twenty fen a night, and the conditions were good.
People like that — wherever they were needed, one call and they could be on their way.
If they all had their own homes, could they so easily leave, so readily contribute their strength to Longcheng?
Their reluctance to mix with outsiders was only natural. Having clawed their way out of a cesspit and scrubbed themselves clean, who would willingly go near those still wallowing in it?
There was a reek coming off those people — the stench of decay, of hierarchy and self-interest, of lives lived without conviction or self-respect.
Absolutely rancid!