Chapter: 14
2. The Finest Dinner Banquet
Good heavens…
Baron Porman felt as though he were sitting on a bed of needles.
This is bad…
His unease had become reality.
The warp gates had completely stopped functioning.
The central region was a basin surrounded by mountain ranges, and monsters had begun appearing on every mountain. The same was true of the hills that marked the borders of the territories.
Even if you hunted monsters, their meat couldn’t be eaten—it wasn’t edible.
With monsters around, people couldn’t even go up into the mountains. Even edible herbs became poisonous once touched by a monster’s saliva.
And merely encountering a monster was a life‑or‑death matter.
If only I hadn’t traded the horses for dairy cows… damn it.
One and a half months ago.
Baron Harwin had ordered all the horses to be taken to the western border and exchanged for dairy cows.
At first, everyone had been pleased.
“We can make porridge with milk and churn butter! And old cows can be slaughtered for meat!”
But problems soon emerged.
Dairy cows drank an enormous amount of water. Two cows drank more water than ten people.
The wells in Harwin Barony quickly began to run dry.
On top of that, cows ate far more hay than horses. Baron Harwin hadn’t known this.
He ordered water to be drawn from the river at Erenta, but the knights of Sayers blocked the way.
“You were the ones who cut off distribution along Jezel Street first.”
To make matters worse, dairy cows were sensitive to changes in environment and feed, so at first they didn’t produce milk well.
“Horses at least can haul things around, but this lot… all they do is increase the manpower needed for cleaning and milking. And if they eat even a little less feed, the milk output drops.”
The workers who had originally managed the horse ranch were deeply dissatisfied.
Cows consumed a month’s worth of horse hay in less than half that time. After that, people were forced to feed them food meant for humans.
“Feed them dried corn! That’s what we have the most of!”
The cows ate the corn well.
In fact, they ate an astonishing amount.
But before long, the cows began panting and collapsing. They had developed acidosis from the corn’s sugar content.
Naturally, milk production plummeted. And in the meantime, they drank even more water.
In the end, we’ll just slaughter those cows and be done with it.
But even that was an optimistic thought.
The physician warned that eating cows that had died from acidosis could cause food poisoning. They couldn’t even be used as meat.
In such circumstances, Baron Porman—who was still being fed regular meals—felt intense discomfort.
Even those meals were growing steadily more meager…
The human appetite is more frightening than I thought.
Baron Porman found himself wondering.
By now, even he could no longer eat his fill.
What about Sayers? They don’t even have salt over there, do they?
With knights guarding the territorial borders, Baron Harwin’s subordinates couldn’t even go and check.
They probably can’t even dig up potatoes yet, and fishing hasn’t been good. And surely their grain supplies ran out long ago, didn’t they?
“That… I hear they bought all the chickens from Jezel Street. A huge number of them. They bought every chicken the shops had.”
When a merchant from Jezel Street said that, Marquis Harwin snapped irritably.
“A foolish choice. Where are they going to get feed for all those chickens?”
“Well, they do lay eggs every day.”
“Then give some salt to the common households in our territory and bring the chickens back. We should raise some at the baron’s estate too.”
“Um… each household does have salt, but… I’m not sure they’ll trade it for chickens…”
“Then force them to trade!”
Because chickens were noisy, they were first locked up in a warehouse.
But unexpectedly, the chickens didn’t lay eggs every day. They were fed barley husks, and their weight dropped while egg production stopped.
“Why aren’t the chickens laying eggs?”
“Well… when we fed them proper feed at home, they laid one egg a day.”
“Then where is that feed?”
“We bought it before, so we don’t have any left. And with the warp down, we can’t get more…”
Then the chickens in that territory must all be in the same state!
In this situation, he quietly stared at the invitation.
The date of the invited dinner was approaching.
If I go, won’t I just become a burden?
Since when had Baron Porman begun worrying this much over a single meal…?
My grandson is the heir to the Duke of Nozen’s house…
In his twilight years, the old man felt dejected, living on cautious charity.
Should I just not go?
But he had been formally invited, and refusing would be discourteous.
He was also curious—and worried—about Sayers’s situation.
Fine. I’ll take a look at that territory first, then decide whether I should go or not.
In the end, he began disguising himself again.
The ones blocking travel are only people from Harwin Barony. I’ll just present forged identification from the west!
Baron Porman rolled up his sleeves and quietly slipped out of Harwin Barony.
“Wow.”
When Philip brushed away the soil with trembling hands, round potatoes emerged.
It had been a month and a half since the seed potatoes were planted—the minimum growth period to eat young potatoes.
Seeing the dirt‑covered potatoes, the corners of his mouth lifted on their own.
Success.
They were still only finger‑sized, but there were quite a lot of them. With a bit more time, they would surely grow plump and full. The leaves looked healthy and the tubers firm, promising a good harvest.
“Make sure to peel them and cook them thoroughly.”
Just in case, I emphasized this to the head chef.
“They’re immature harvests. Dig up only what we’ll eat today—enough for the territory’s people as well. Tell them there will be more potatoes tomorrow.”
Even for early harvesting, potatoes usually take two months to fully mature. But potatoes at an edible stage could be harvested starting around now.
It had been a month and a half since the territory was isolated. We had only one month’s worth of grain.
“We need to stretch this for another month and a half. Let’s eat sparingly.”
I had told the kitchen early on.
“But we’ll have eggs, and before long, chicken meat too.”
We had bought many chickens to begin with.
I instructed them to mix rice bran and wheat bran with crushed river clam shells. That was the chickens’ feed.
“Why mix in clam shells?”
“They need calcium. When we get eggshells, we’ll crush those and mix them in too.”
And during the day, I had the knights release the chickens into the potato fields or by the river.
The chickens naturally ate larvae—providing protein.
Normally, we would have used commercially distributed chicken feed, but this was the best we could do now.
Still, with their necessary nutrients stabilized even this way, the chickens laid one egg a day without fail.
“I’ll provide other ingredients too.”
A lettuce patch appeared on the roof of the marquis’s residence.
No land should go to waste.
There was a household that had saved lettuce seeds from early spring. In river‑side territories, lettuce was the most common crop in small fields.
Lettuce grew quickly and was easy to cultivate. Most importantly, you could keep cutting and eating it continuously.
Other things were coming in as well. Namely…
“Miss! Salt came in the most again today!”
“We received another basket of perilla seeds!”
Food supplies that were being smuggled in from Harwin’s territory.
The moment I heard Dalia say, “They’ve decided to raise dairy cows,” I foresaw all of this.
Dairy cows drink a lot of water.
And dairy cows are sensitive to environmental changes.
They weren’t livestock that people who had never raised them before could easily manage.
Milk production will be poor, and water shortages will follow.
People can’t survive without water.
And both Jezel Street and the Beron region had been part of Sayers Marquisate just a month and a half ago. It was obvious they would casually come to draw water from the Erenta River.
That’s why I stationed knights—to make sure they couldn’t take water.
Of course, it wasn’t that we truly denied them water. We only forbade it by rule.
“Officially, it’s prohibited. But secretly giving it is fine—just attach conditions.”
I said this after gathering all fifty households of the territory.
Though they were now separated, they had all once lived as neighbors and relatives.
“Tell them they need to bring something—anything—to bribe the knights with food. And this must never reach Baron Harwin’s ears.”
With only about fifty households, it was easy to manage.
“Listen carefully to how things are over there too. No matter that it’s now another territory—no one should starve to death.”
When I heard that dairy cows had collapsed after eating corn, I deliberately had word sent to a physician in that region.
“Don’t eat the meat of dairy cows that died from acidosis. You’ll get food poisoning.”
Dairy cows were livestock with a long history. There were many studies and records about them.
Moreover, the dairy cows here were even more vulnerable to acidosis than those on Earth in my previous life.
I wasn’t kind enough to explicitly tell Dalia, “Don’t raise dairy cows.” But I didn’t want innocent people to die either.
