Chapter 449 Riot·Thirteen
Although she was preparing for a war with the heretical sect, Purficott did not forget why she went to the outer city slums.
She moved the compressed biscuit manufacturing technology from the north, established a compressed biscuit production factory in Xiacheng District, and began to produce compressed biscuits with an output of dozens of tons a day.
These cookies, which look like just a small piece of biscuit, can turn into a large bowl of thick paste just by soaking it in water. After drinking it, you will not feel hungry for at least a whole day. For ordinary people, Said to be an excellent choice to satisfy hunger.
After all, the city of Langton now offers decent bread and food, and it is already difficult to eat even bran, rice bran and the like.
A considerable part of the people in Lower Langton relied on the relief provided by the empire and the church to survive.
At this time, Purficott began to distribute compressed biscuits. For ordinary people...actually the impact was not great, it just made them feel a little fuller than before when they received wheat porridge. That's all, it has not improved the lives of ordinary people.
Of course, for the Langton city government and the empire itself, the compressed biscuit technology developed by Purficott has undoubtedly greatly improved the bad status quo faced by the empire's center.
At the very least, the administrative staff of the Empire Center no longer need to worry about food issues, and they also have the spare capacity to use part of the compressed biscuits to relieve the slums in the outer city.
This is just the beginning of Purficott’s plans for the slums.
After feeding some of the poor people in the outer city with compressed biscuits, Perficott began to recruit these poor people who had recovered a certain amount of physical strength to serve as laborers to build fortifications for the Guards stationed in the lower city.
Perfect's consistent principle is never to feed the people and let them have nothing to do. This is true in the north, and it is also true in Longton.
After receiving relief, people in the lower city will invest in the construction of church shelters, energy towers and underground cities, and of course the poor in the outer city will also put them to use.
It’s just that these people do not belong to the high-quality labor force. It is unrealistic to expect them to do some technical work. It is just right to send them to repair fortifications for the Guards.
Of course, the fortifications of this era cannot be compared with the extreme development of fortification construction in Purficott's cognition.
In fact, even with the help of Perficott, workers and technicians of this era would not have been able to build fortifications like the Maginot Line. At most, they would have dug some trenches and piled up some barricades.
Although it is not impossible to build more defensive fortifications such as bastions, the Guards are only stationed in the lower city of Langton, and they do not intend to turn this place into a battlefield.
So digging some trenches and building some barricades and bunkers is enough.
The poor people in the outer city responded with great enthusiasm. Although these fortifications were to some extent designed to deal with them, they still devoted themselves to the construction enthusiastically.
In this season, it is a blessing to have a job to support your family. Who has the extra time to care about so much?
What's more, these uneducated poor people don't have much knowledge to think about whether the fortifications built by the Guards are used to deal with them. Their knowledge and knowledge are not enough to support them in understanding such complicated things.
Because of relief and work, the situation in the slums in the outer city has begun to improve. At least people are no longer dragged away from the streets one by one to starve to death. There are also corpses lying on the roadside that are comparable to living corpses. Much less.
Most of the poor are working on the city government's relief projects and working for the Guards to barely make ends meet. This is already a very happy thing for the vast majority of the poor.
This also caused a considerable number of them to no longer follow the heretical sects that caused trouble, but to come back and live peacefully.
For ordinary people, faith and everything are empty. What really makes them obey and follow is often just a bowl of porridge that can fill their stomachs.
With this bowl of porridge, they can be the most obedient citizens, or the most lawless rebels. What determines the difference between the two is just who distributed the bowl of porridge, and who made them not even have a bowl of porridge. Can't drink.
When the empire ignored them and allowed them to freeze to death and starve to death, these poor lower-class people would naturally follow those heretical sects with obvious ulterior motives just for a bite to eat.
Even if they know that these heretical sects want to turn them into sacrifices and cannon fodder against the empire, they will be willing to follow these heretical sects as long as they have something to eat.
However, when the empire provided them with jobs and brought them relief food, they who could fill their bellies would naturally not risk being killed as sacrifices or being killed by the empire's war machine. The risk of massacre is to follow the heretical sect for a bite to eat.
The vast majority of people just want to make a living, and do not really believe that belief in gods advocated by those heretical sects can lead to salvation.
The church also preached that faith in the All-Father could obtain protection and salvation, but the people did not see that when they were about to starve to death, the All-Father's angels came to redeem them.
So for the vast majority of people, no matter how nice the words are, they are not as real as a bowl of hot porridge.
And when they can have a bowl of porridge to fill their stomachs without risking their heads and lives, do you expect these ordinary people to resist the imperial war machine for the so-called beliefs promoted by heretical sects?
Somewhat overthinking.
Of course, although the empire has started relief operations and given jobs to a considerable number of people so that they can support their families, there are still some people who cannot enjoy this treatment.
After all, the total resources are limited, the job opportunities are limited, and Purficott does not want to support these people in vain, so there are always some people who are still lacking that bowl of porridge.
This group of people naturally and inevitably turned to those heretical sects, becoming their sacrifices to the gods, as well as accomplices and cannon fodder against the empire.
Of course Purficott knew about these things. Whether it was the brotherhood, the church, or the empire's intelligence agency, they all reported the relevant content to Purficott, letting her know that there were still some poor people. Fell to heretical sects.
But there is nothing we can do about it. Although the compressed biscuits are made using alchemy and we try to save as much raw materials as possible, the production capacity is still limited.
There are hundreds of thousands of people in the outer city who are waiting for food. Even if Purficott really sends all the compressed biscuits produced by the compressed biscuit factory to the outer city, it will not be enough to feed everyone.
And compared with the hundreds of thousands of people in the outer city, the millions of people in the upper and lower cities combined also need food. Although human life is not a simple addition and subtraction, nor does it depend on who has more people, who can survive, but we have to admit that the people in the upper city and lower city are better than others in terms of the work they can undertake and the value they generate. People from outer city areas.
This is a cruel fact, and it also shows that Perfectcott must abandon part of the population of the outer city.
In fact, if Princess Anne hadn’t begged Perficott to discover the activities of heretical sects in the outer city, she might not only have abandoned this small part of the outer city population, but would have The entire outer city was abandoned.
This is actually another cruel fact, that is, the empire will not be able to feed so many people when the end comes.
Even if Purficott has now come up with a technology that is almost out of thin air, such as using alchemy to produce compressed biscuits, it still cannot feed the nearly three million people in Langton City.
The official registered population of Langton City is more than 2.3 million, while the actual population is almost 2.7 million, not counting the floating population.
You can imagine how much food so many people consume every day.
So the compressed biscuit factory only produces tens of tons of compressed biscuits a day to feed hundreds of thousands of people in the outer city? I can only say that I think too much.
Based on two hundred grams of compressed biscuits for one person per day, at least two tons of compressed biscuits are needed to feed 10,000 people, and hundreds of thousands of people can eat at least hundreds of tons of compressed biscuits a day.
Even though the technology used by Purficott has been created almost out of nothing, it is still consumed, especially the alchemists who maintain the operation of the compressed biscuit making machine. They are the key to restricting the production of compressed biscuits.
Perfect is already short of alchemists. Even if she sends all the alchemists Langton can find to work, the output of compressed biscuits will still be limited. As a supplement to normal food.
After all, even if many people have starved to death during this period, the remaining people in Langton still have to eat nearly a thousand tons of food every day. One can imagine the food supply that Perficott is facing now How serious the problem is!
In this case, even Princess Anne could not say anything demanding about Perfectcott, and it had become inevitable to abandon the excess population.
"Look on the bright side, at least we don't have to watch them starve to death." In the office, Purficott joked to Princess Anne in a darkly humorous way.
Princess Anne also felt particularly helpless about this.
She wanted to save these people, but there was nothing she could do.
The food problem is the biggest problem plaguing the empire now. The food produced in the overseas colonies is no longer enough and cannot be transported in. The food produced in the empire has the same limited output as Purficott's compressed biscuit factory...< br>
Now just feeding the people in the upper city and lower city every day has already stretched the food reserves of the empire's center. Adding this to the outer city is simply forcing the Minister of Agriculture in charge of food issues to hang himself.
In fact, the Minister of Agriculture has wanted to hang himself more than once. There is almost no solution to the lack of food.
"You don't have to watch them starve to death, but you have to watch them die in other ways. This is really a terrible situation that makes people laugh!" Princess Anne couldn't help but shook her head, her tone full of unwillingness and anger.
Although she wanted to rush to the outer city immediately to hunt out and kill all the heretical sect members, Princess Anne also understood that doing so was meaningless.
It’s not that it’s meaningless to kill people from heretical sects, but it’s meaningless for her to rush to the outer city to kill those people from heretical sects.
On the one hand, this is not the entire manpower of the heretical sect. It can even be said to be just the cannon fodder and peripheral personnel thrown out. The real core exists. So far, Purficott has only found one Mrs. Babalon. Don't know who exactly.
Therefore, it is meaningless to simply kill these people on the surface. This will not prevent the other party from telling the conspiracy. On the contrary, it will alert the snake by clearing out these exposed people. Losing the opportunity to uproot the other party.
"Compared with this, I'm more worried about what the other party is planning." Purficott was also worried about this matter, but the content of her worries was different from what the eldest princess thought: "According to current information, Judging from the information obtained, these heretical sects are probably planning something big, which is likely to be related to summoning the gods they believe in. It is very likely that we need to face the power of the true god who comes.
No one has really seen it, even in the church's files there are very few relevant records in this regard.
So I am very worried. I am worried that the empire does not have the power to suppress a true god at the moment. Things are getting out of hand. "
The heretical sect can summon the true god to descend, which is as unsettling as a sharp sword hanging above your head at any time.
No matter how hard Purphycott maintained her sanity and calmness, she was still upset by this incident and couldn't even calm down to think about how to deal with and break the situation.
"If something like that really happens, the entire outer city and even the lower city will be reduced to a battlefield and beaten to pieces. This will be a devastating blow to Langton. It doesn't even need the apocalypse to come to Langton. "Perfect's attitude was very pessimistic, and she was obviously not optimistic about fighting the enemy in Longton.
"Yes, fighting in the city is not only a disaster for the warring parties, but also a disaster for the entire city." Princess Anne, who was born in the military, has been on the battlefield herself, and she knows know the devastation war can bring.
She still clearly remembers that when she was in the desert kingdom, an ancient temple with a history of thousands of years was attacked by local resistance forces. The entire ancient temple suffered serious damage. Even the civilians living around the ancient temple were massacred.
A small town that was lively and bustling yesterday turned into ruins in just one night. Under the ruins were buried a large number of people who were killed without knowing what happened.
In war, civilians are often the most miserable among tens of thousands.
"Let's not mention this for now. Let alone hold back or defeat the gods after their descent, even the defense lines that can resist the attacks of the gods are very weak. How can we block the attacks of the gods?" When thinking of this question, Po Ficott felt like his head was getting big.
Fortunately, the attendant at the door reported to Perficott in time that Dr. Jones, whom Perficott sent to the desert kingdom, came back alive.
(End of this chapter)