Chapter 9: Starlight Rice Seedlings
Kaelor stood just beyond the town walls, hands buried deep in his coat pockets, eyes fixed on the sprawling valley before him.
Now that he could take it all in properly, he found himself marveling at its size. The valley was vast, easily large enough to house several thousand people, with ample farmland that stretched outward before sloping gently up along the natural hills. Green, gold, and damp brown marked where old terraces still clung to the memory of better days.
It was the season of rain, he could still smell the wetness in the soil from the last downpour. The ground, soft and rich, would be perfect for planting. And indeed, the town had wasted no time. A scattering of people, mostly women and children, were already working the land, helping a dozen men haul thick bundles of rice stalks. The golden-yellow grains swayed gently in the breeze, dangling tantalizingly from the stalks like jewels in the sun.
That was rice.
Real rice.
To Kaelor, it was like watching peasants walk around with gold on their backs, oblivious to the treasure they were carrying.
A single sack of top-grade rice could sell for seventy gold coins, sometimes more. That alone was a highly-paid peasant’s annual salary. Even if the rice grown here wasn’t of the finest quality anymore, it could still fetch ten to twenty gold coins a sack, easily.
And judging by the scale of the field, stretching west from the town like a golden sea, it had once been cultivated for serious production.
But now?
Now the land showed signs of neglect. What had once been a prime rice estate had dwindled into something modest, half-wild. The stalks were thinner, the soil patchy in places. It was clear that whoever had originally nurtured this land was long gone.
"This town was founded by a powerful Acranist," Mildred said softly, her voice almost carried away by the wind. She stood beside him, hair and skirt fluttering in the breeze. "They came here to study the devil beasts. They built the walls, started the rice farms... but that was over a century ago. They left and everything else began to wither."