The pest control army that the Purcell clan sent, were dispatched into the places where Zhao and Green had cast the pests. They were given an area of jurisdiction.
The detailed actions of the pest control teams that were composed of the slaves were recorded on the district relay stations they belong to. This way, the reports were easily passed from the relaystations to the Purcell clan.
Meanwhile, Nate was left behind in Fort Benniu as he would just slow down the pest control army that were composed of magicians and warriors with a higher level of cultivation than him.
Normally, the clan won't send a magician, and five magicians at that, to a case of pest infestation. But now, the situation was different. These magicians were known to have an inferior set of single-attack skills, but has a very good area-of-effect attack skills. In case of a normal pest plague, they can can use several magic skills and instantly suppress the infestation.
However, upon their arrival, they were shocked to see that the fields had become like a battlefield. It seems like there's a war between the slaves and the pests. Although they were only slaves, it was still surprising to see how fierce they were while fighting the insects.
Everywhere on the field, all they saw were the same scenes. Large fat insects gnawing on wheat plants while the slaves attacks any pests they see and stomped them to death. There were even slaves who looked pale and were lying down, they were obviously tired and had fainted.
As the pest control army observed more, they were again astonished as they saw the scenes from distant fields. Along with Nate's district, it seems like several other districts were also affected. The army can't even imagine how large the damage was.
The leader of the army, a fire magician, saw the situation and immediately ordered a warrior and said: "Immediately return to Fort Benniu and report the situation to the elders. Tell them to raise the emergency level to the highest and ask fore more reinforcements immediately, otherwise, there won't be any harvests this year from the Ica plains."
The warrior was a team leader in the pest control army, a level six warrior practitioner, immediately rushed towards Fort Benniu.
The lead magician didn't immediately ordered the army to start the pest extermination, instead, he turned around and gave an order. He said: “Everyone must step back fifty meters away from the wheat plants and establish a ten by ten meters buffer zone. Winger, go and cure the slaves that had been injured or exhausted. Afterwards, order them to help with the formation of the buffer zones. Message relay team, go around the Ica plains where there were infestation and pass the order to them.”
The message relay team immediately complied, rode their horses and went to different locations. Meanwhile, the other warriors went immediately to the field. At the same time, Winger, who was a water magician, went to the area where the slaves that passed out and were injured. The army leader, after seeing everything was proceeding according to his instructions, started to recite several incantations in a low voice. Suddenly, a snake salamander appeared and immediately flew towards the fields as he positioned himself to the buffer zone.
The other magicians also started casting their magic skills on the fields that were infested heavily while avoiding damaging the fields that were already secured from the pests.
Looking at how smoothly he instructed the army, the leader seems to be very experienced in handling cases of insect plagues.
Then, the rest of the warriors in the army had also taken out their weapons and started to form the ten by ten meters buffer zone. Since the buffer zone was wide, it was hard to avoid wasting a lot of wheat fields.
Unfortunately, these magicians didn't know that the infestation was artificially induced and started attacking using the normal method of extermination. The method was extremely useful in cases of normal insect plagues, but now, they saw that their method was not effective against these pests.
***
Zhao and Green weren't too tired today but still decided to go back into the space after they reached the windbreak zones. Since they were concerned about what's happening outside, they used the screen to observe what's happening within a radius of five hundred meters.
What they saw was really something beyond their imagination. Those big bugs gnawing on the wheat so fast it seems unnatural, leaving only the culm.
Then, after gnawing a wheat, the large bugs would immediately hop onto the next available wheat. Green took a deep breathe, smiled and said: “Now I know why the Purcell clan has sent a large army.”
Zhao nodded while leaning against the sofa, took a deep breath and said: “We should rest for two days and observe. If they can exterminate the pest within two days, we will cast more. If in case they won't be able to solve this within two days, Grandpa Green should visit the Purcell clan and break the engagement.”
Green nodded and said: “Master, we might as well go back to the Stony Mountain and just return here after two days to see the results.”
Disagreeing, Zhao shook his head and said: “First, we need to go back to the Black Wastes and deliver the extracted oil to Casa City. Then we will ask Laura to buy sacks which we can use for the packaging of the processed corn. This time, we're not expecting any income from the sales of the corn to help ease the burden of the slaves and commoners throughout the Duchy of Versailles. Since this is the case, we need to place several slaves to the Stony Mountains to extract oil.”
Green nodded even though his hate for the Purcell clan was deeper than Zhao's, he did not want their actions to cause the general populace to be starved and even die.
In the Ark continent, people believes in gods except those dark magicians. This was the reason why there's still restraint on people's actions, as they believe they will be punished by the gods if ever they do something bad.
After reaching an agreement, they returned to the castle in the Black Wastes wherein a giant corn processing plant now works full time. There's two ways in which the corn were processed. First, was what the Northeners called corn, in which they peel the husks and process the corn to be edible. The second one was making corn flour. This was done by grinding the corn which was relatively troublesome. These flour were the ones to be made into cornmeal.
In order to hasten the processing of corn, Zhao has recalled back a large number of undead that were stationed in the Stony Mountains. Undeads don't require rest and can continuously work, that's why Zhao was confident that he can supply the needs of the Duchy of Versailles in case the effect of the Ica plains infestation starts to manifest.
Since the slaves' capacity to do work were limited, they were assigned on the technical parts of the processing, while the undead does any other physical-related work.
Also, Zhao had to raise 100 scaled wildbeasts in the space, ten of which would be used to pull the carts for delivery while the rest were used to assist matters related to grindstone milling.
There's a total of ten grindstones and twenty rollers which were inadequate if the normal processing schedule were to be followed. Thus, Zhao decided to order all the male slaves to focus on working with the milling process and assigning undead for the other steps.
Dealing with all of these made Zhao unable to check on the situation on the Ica plains after two days. Further, he doesn't have much people available for use since they were already assigned to different tasks such as guarding the Black Wastes and the Stony Mountain. Zhao then decided to reduce the undead defending Stony Mountain by half, transferring the ordinary mercenaries that were turned undead to the Black Wastes.
Following that, Zhao contacted Drunk, who was in the Carrion Swamp, inquiring about the situation there.
Drunk returned a message which stated that the Carrion Swamp was not actually only a swamp. There were places that looks like islands where tree grows and some Magic Beasts lives.
Drunk's team had occupied a small island. They made it their base while catching weak and low leveled Magic Beasts as well as gathering and picking up seeds of the plants growing there.
At the moment, Drunk's team had been deep into the Carrion Swamp, around a few hundred miles away from the border. Continuing to go deeper looks quite difficult, thus they prepared deliver what they had accumulated first.
Zhao agreed to Drunk's decision. Compared to the threats of the Purcell clan, the Carrion Swamp poses a lot more danger. After all, even if the Purcell clan attack them, they could hide in the space. This was not the case with the threat of the Carrion Swamp.
If they wanted to live in the Black Wastes for generations to come, they should solve the problem posed by the Carrion Swamp.
Because of these thoughts, Zhao was now very anxious, ordering Drunk to go continue observing. Getting more information about the Carrion Swamp was the most important.
NOTES:
-I have no idea where the fire magician (army leader) and Winger came from, based on the MTL, they only sent five wind magicians and a hundred cavalry. Since this was the case, I removed wind on the wind magicians part in chapter 139 to avoid further misunderstanding.
-This chapter was MTL'ed. Translation and editing was done solely by me. Please leave a comment for constructive criticisms and advice. Thanks.
-Please don't copy this content without permission from the translator, author.
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