So the Medieval Age Has a Split Inheritance System…
Translator: Tsukii
Editor: Ai
Read at Watashi wa Sugoi Desu!
Chapter 60 – Follow Up
Wheat season had finally returned to the Carling Kingdom. Somehow, it managed to overcome the famine, but the food situation was still quite terrible. Eating crop seeds to fill the stomach for the day instead of sowing it for food couldn’t be helped, and slaughtering the horses and cows that plowed the field as food was also painful. Their harvest this year was predicted to be 80% of last year’s and will drop even further the following year.
On the other hand, the total harvest yield in the Deal Kingdom wasn’t very large, so luxurious living wasn’t possible. I had increased the variety of crops; the food self-sufficiency rate had reached 110% to 120% of the required amount, with wheat in particular at 150% of the required amount. On the other hand, the self-sufficiency rate of some crops was quite low. Fruits had even gone onto the verge of extinction.
But even if the fruit’s yield was small, it wouldn’t affect survival that much. The most painful thing about the food was the stock of salt that was running out. At this rate, we would run out in two to three years. The clearest time limit seemed to be salt. For the time being, we collected some rock salt, but there was no way it was enough for the whole territory. It was extremely unfortunate that my territory didn’t face the sea. I was unable to eat fish as well.
The Estoa duchy within the Deal Kingdom did have a small lake, but as a freshwater lake, there were only a few types of fish, either of which tasted bad or were poisonous species. Well, even if it was poisonous, those poisons wouldn’t kill me. At best, they were a stomachache, but that much for me translated to death for those untrained.
Perhaps it was the parasites doing something terrible inside me, but I wanted to eat sashimi. There was no soy sauce here, so I just ate them with salt, and it was tasty enough. It must be because I was a former Japanese. Not only was such a dish unpopular in this other world, but I was seen as a pervert for trying to eat fish raw. I couldn’t stop, though.
…Now that I think about it, there were many fictional stories depicting otherworlders making soy sauce, but wasn’t it amazing that all of them could remember how they were made? I barely managed to remember how to make mayonnaise. Soy sauce and miso were impossible for me. I knew it used soybeans and yeast, but I had no idea how exactly they were made.
In the worst-case scenario, I might need to cross the Carling Kingdom to procure salt from the sea. Or perhaps I should request it from Duke Schult? When I went to the Schult duchy last time, I saw the sea from a distance, and they didn’t seem to make good use of it. There wasn’t even a big port there, it felt like a waste.
While the reconstruction work from the earthquake was steadily progressing, information on the Borghardt Kingdom arrived. Apparently, the damage from the earthquake was just about the same as the Deal Kingdom. But more pressing, an epidemic had begun to spread there. Now that I thought about it, the reason that king of lust ended up becoming the king of the Borghardt Kingdom was because of the plague with a high fatality rate in the palace.
The epidemic was supposed to subside when Alfred’s legal wife, the fourth princess, inherited the throne. Why did the pandemic recur after the earthquake? I thought the pandemic died out because the infected had passed away… but it seemed like the earthquake destroyed many of their structures and worsened their daily living. Perhaps things only got worse from there and with their debilitated environment, the peoples’ immune systems had weakened?
…I should locate the person who relayed the information and the person they got the information from. And then they should be isolated to reduce the people they’d end up contacting. If the pandemic spread here, it would be a severe blow and if things went badly, even I might die from it.
But it seemed like those people were already voluntarily quarantining themselves before I gave the instruction. Huh? Had I already created a protocol on how to deal with pandemics that were prevalent in neighboring nations? …Ah, I did, when I declared independence. My past self was very competent. My last life with the coronavirus didn’t go for nothing.
Fortunately, those isolated people were safe so far, as they didn’t seem to have the symptoms — high fevers, trouble breathing, diarrhea, nor have they collapsed at all. The pandemic should be something similar to typhus. It was contagious, but not airborne. Otherwise, there was no way the pandemic was limited to specific places like the Borghardt Kingdom’s palace.
There was a high possibility that the disease originated from small animals like rats, or through fecal route like excretion. That said, demanding people to wash their hands after using the bathroom was too much to ask for ordinary people in this world.1 A sewage system existed in this world, but no water supply, so the only people who could use water without risk were water element magicians or those who had artifacts with similar effects.
Other people had no choice but to draw water from wells or rivers, so even if I told them to wash their hands after going to the toilet, they couldn’t do it. People in other territories flushed their feces into the sewer, but in my territory, they were raw material for gunpowder after all…
…Did that mean all the other spies I sent to the Borghardt Kingdom got infected by the disease? Ah, in the spy’s handbook I wrote a long time ago, I had written, “Should you contract a disease from the nation during your infiltration, then you are not to return until you are completely healed.”
I guess that meant everyone was sick. I wondered if they were all using the same toilet. That was possible, and for now, I should think about how to prevent a plague in my kingdom.
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