Farm Girl's Manor
Chapter 824 Threat (1)

Chapter 824: Chapter 824 Threat (1)

The holiday had just ended, and the temperature still hadn’t risen; farm work was not in abundance, so it could be attended to a bit later without issue. Thus, when the Mo Family sought people to reclaim mountain land, paying able-bodied laborers thirty wen per day, women twenty wen, and even older children could earn ten wen, news spread rapidly throughout the village. Adults and kids alike eagerly descended upon the homes of several village heads, scrambling to be the first to sign up for land reclamation in Liu Yang Village.

Some families had numerous members capable of working, so sending three to five people to reclaim land was no trouble at all. As a result, the combined total of men, women, and older children able to spare the time for this task from several villages reached roughly one thousand two hundred people.

Although village heads hoped that everyone from their own villages would be selected, as this would substantially increase local incomes, the wasteland wasn’t theirs to control, nor were they the ones paying the wages. It wasn’t possible to meet every single one of the Mo Family’s demands, so after recording the names of those who had signed up, the village heads handed over the lists to Mo Yan.

MO Yan indeed didn’t need so many people for the reclamation, but apart from the villagers from Liu Yang, she was unfamiliar with those from other villages and didn’t know who was hardworking and who was prone to skiving. In the end, she simply let all of the twelve hundred volunteers work on the reclamation.

On the twentieth day of the first lunar month, villagers set aside their thick cotton clothes, wore worn-out shoes suitable for fieldwork, and armed with sickles and hoes, they arrived at the Mo Family’s more than twenty barren hills, rolling up their sleeves and busily starting the hard work.

The barren hills were covered with withered yellow grass and shrubby trees not worth timbering. Burning them would be easy, but that would not only pollute the air but also risk uncontrollable fires due to strong winds, potentially spreading to deeper woods. Fire was absolutely out of the question.

Therefore, it was necessary for people to manually remove the grass and shrubs using sickles and axes, then dig out the roots, and prepare pits for trees. Once the weather warmed up, the fruit seedlings would be planted.

The robust laborers were tasked with chopping trees and digging roots, women used sickles to cut the grass and unearth the roots, and the older children gathered branches, weeds, and the like, piling them up in designated areas. Tree branches and roots could be used as firewood, and the weeds and grass roots would be composted on-site, providing fertilizer for the fruit seedlings.

For the work on the barren hills, Mo Yan asked familiar figures like Lin Da to keep an eye out, retaining those who worked diligently and straightforwardly. Those who tried to cheat or slack off were simply paid and sent away. After three days, of the twelve hundred people who had come from other villages, fewer than seven hundred remained.

Those who stayed began to grasp the situation and worked even harder, only stopping to drink water during the designated break times.

Among the dismissed were a few troublemakers, who couldn’t accept being turned away so easily and banded together to make a scene at the Mo Family’s place. Mo Yan released Mao Tuan without even showing her face, and those ruffians were frightened off, never daring to show up again.

With the Beast Badge conferred personally by The Emperor, it wasn’t just about intimidation; even if the Mo Family’s Rui Beasts truly killed someone, the death would be on the deceased’s head. If you hadn’t come looking for trouble, why would the Rui Beasts bite you specifically?

The work wasn’t overly demanding, and the Mo Family paid better wages than what was offered in the city. Additionally, because there were so many people, meals were not provided for those from other villages. However, each day the Mo Family gave the older children a cooked egg.

The Mo Family Chicken Farm was producing nearly two thousand eggs a day, and going through an extra hundred or so wasn’t significant. But for peasant families, eggs were treasured commodities. Even if they raised chickens at home, they wouldn’t afford to let their children eat an egg each day.

Thus, this gesture from the Mo Family deeply moved the children and their families, spurring them to work even harder.

With many hands making light work, the more than twenty barren hills were cleaned up in less than a month. The pits for the trees were dug appropriately according to the fruit seedlings’ varieties, with the correct depth and width, which greatly pleased Mo Yan. When the time came to settle the wages, she paid each person three days’ extra wages.