MM Racing Chapter 25 Differences
Chapter 25 Differences
After leaving Shrek City, while within the territory of the Heavenly Soul Empire, Huo Yuhao rarely revealed his soul power and martial soul, except to avoid causing any unnecessary trouble, such as what Bei Bei told the people of the Body Sect.
At the same time, this is also a way for the young man to see what is happening on this land from a more realistic perspective.
Although sometimes unpleasant things happen in these villages, these things are not the norm. After throwing a few mud balls into their mouths and letting them smear the mud, the boy didn't do anything else.
After all, when you get to this point, other people in the surrounding farmland will also be attracted. They will watch or come over to persuade you, and that's about it.
Looking at the farmers' attire, Huo Yuhao wouldn't treat them like bandits. Instead, he noticed their frugal lifestyle and the place they lived.
The boy understood something more internally.
After finishing his work, he would often sit under a tree or on a rock by the field and eat with the other farmers. They would eat coarse grain cakes or cornbread mixed with bran, which were not particularly delicious.
Only after finishing their work, when they were hungry, did they feel a sense of satisfaction while chewing. Occasionally, they would add some pickled vegetables and water, and that would be all they had for a meal.
He would chat with the farmers around him while eating, and what the boy heard most often was that the farmers hoped the weather would be better this year and that the harvest would be more plentiful, which was no different from the farmers in the wasteland.
However, the boy also saw that although Soul Masters existed in Douluo Continent, those who could truly command the wind and rain, such beings would not appear in the fields and bend down, or even glance down at the ground.
Those powerful forces do not exert their influence on these farmlands; the harvest is entirely due to the farmers bending over and cultivating the land.
The boy visited many villages along the way, where he did a lot of farm work in exchange for food, and also talked a lot with the farmers.
He also learned about the condition of this land from the farmers' accounts and what he saw with his own eyes.
When talking to each farmer, he always mentioned his hope for a bumper harvest this year, which is perhaps the wish of every farmer engaged in farming.
However, as the boy learned more about the situation, he also discovered that behind this prayer lay a real problem.
Within the Heavenly Soul Empire, and indeed within all empires, even in areas controlled by certain organizations in the wasteland, paying taxes is a normal practice.
Farmers pay taxes primarily in the form of grain, and there is nothing wrong with this practice.
After all, within the vast empire, the nobles and soul masters, academies and sects, and even towns of a certain size, are all extremely difficult to be self-sufficient in.
Nobles disdain farming, and Soul Masters are too busy cultivating to have time for it. These people reside in academies, sects, or towns.
These regions cannot be self-sufficient in the food they consume and inevitably need supplies from surrounding areas.
However, grain doesn't appear out of thin air, but nobles and soul masters don't care or do these things, so a large part of the grain paid by farmers is used to supply this group of people.
Of course, the empire's army and the city's residents also consumed the grain transported from the countryside.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this; it's a normal supply. Farmers hand over grain to supply these areas, while the Soul Masters and personnel in these areas are responsible for resisting potential beast tides and ensuring safety.
Of course, for most regions, there are very few areas that are likely to be affected by the beast tide in this era, since the forests where the soul beasts live are no longer as numerous as they were at the beginning.
The security provided to the village had long since become a mere formality by this time.
Just like the rural areas Huo Yuhao encountered along his journey, the empire's own management capabilities had created a huge problem.
In the boy's eyes, the Heavenly Soul Empire, or the other two that originally belonged to the Douluo Three Kingdoms, could only have the area directly managed by the royal family within its nominal territory up to the town level, while a large number of rural areas were under the control of nobles.
Of course, the same applies to sects, since the food and supplies they need also require someone to produce them.
The villages that Huo Yuhao had seen were all controlled by nobles. Often, a noble family could control not just one village, but several or even more.
The higher the rank of a nobleman, the more villages he can control. Sometimes, even these noblemen themselves don't know exactly how many villages they control or how many people live in them.
All they know is how much income they can earn each year in the area they control.
These nobles controlled the largest area of the entire empire and were the grassroots of society. Even the territories directly under the royal family were just different names and had little difference in essence.
In this situation, if the empire wanted to maintain its rule, it had to rely on the support of these nobles. The grain they paid and the large-scale recruitment of soldiers in the face of war were sent by these nobles and then handed over to the empire itself.
The empire itself recruits soldiers in towns and some cities, but this proportion is relatively small compared to the total number. It is sufficient to deal with small-scale conflicts in peacetime, but in the face of a real large-scale war, it is necessary to mobilize nobles to recruit soldiers from these villages.
The empire itself had set a standard for the amount of grain to be paid each year, but it was difficult to issue and enforce this order down to the village level.
Therefore, these nobles could set standards according to their own wishes, and in order to accumulate more wealth and resources, they often set the proportion of grain to be paid, collecting it based on the largest amount of harvest in recent years, while they did not care about the specific situation of the harvest below.
Therefore, farmers can only hope for a bumper harvest this year; otherwise, after paying their grain taxes, they will not have much left over, and may even owe some grain.
Although noble landowners would allow farmers to make up for the shortfall in grain the following year, this payment would incur interest.
This is why farmers are often in a state of long-term debt, with the debts incurred by their parents being passed on to the next generation.
As a result, many families do not have much chance of getting a cure when someone falls ill, and they do not have the money to hire a soul master with healing abilities.
Because a sick person can only consume without working, the burden on the indebted family becomes even heavier, and in the end, they can only leave the sick person outside the village or in the woods.
If they can recover, they will come back. In most cases, by the time family members check on them, they have already become corpses and are then buried.
This was not an act of indifference, but rather a situation that forced them to do so; there wasn't enough food to feed a sick person who had been unable to work for an extended period.
A few days or a week is fine, but if the time becomes longer, then in order for the whole family to survive, this is the only option.
Even if some farmers work hard to pay off their debts, or even buy or cultivate a piece of land themselves.
They cultivate their own land and even pay taxes according to the amount issued by the empire.
However, through various overt or covert means, it is difficult for these farmers to retain their land for the long term.
After paying off their debts and terminating their employment, these self-employed farmers do not have much resilience when faced with a poor harvest, family illness, or unexpected events.
Any unexpected event could be a fatal blow to these self-sufficient farmers, not to mention the bandits in the mountains who could attack and plunder these individual farmers at any time, as well as the noble landowners who were constantly annexing land.
In the end, the land was often bought by local nobles and landowners, and the surviving people had no choice but to be employed as laborers to continue farming.