Ch.278278. Famine (3)

In truth, even while conducting relief efforts in this village, I had been harboring some doubts.

However, these doubts weren’t about the village pretending to be starving when they weren’t. More precisely, I questioned why this village was suffering from hunger and famine in the first place.

After all, there were quite a number of villages in the vicinity… yet none of them were experiencing such large-scale famine.

Of course, chronic food shortages are an inevitable element in the countries of this world, but even considering how barren these mountainous regions might be, it seemed strange that an entire area would be dying off like this village.

No matter how far apart villages might be in the northern mountainous regions of the Kingdom of Kore, famines typically occur within localized areas.

Moreover… the fact that the Kingdom of Kore has rather effective countermeasures against famine only amplified my doubts.

The Kore Kingdom’s government offices operate a national low-interest grain loan service called “Hwangok” to prepare for famines, and although it might be abused in the future, for now at least, it functions as a factor in reducing starvation deaths.

Additionally, it’s not as if there’s no food around the village.

Unlike the lords of my homeland who strictly regulate their residents’ hunting rights, the king of this country allows any of his subjects to hunt and gather in the mountains he owns (90% of the country).

Furthermore, while the current drought is somewhat harsh, it’s not severe enough to dry up food supplies completely like in my old homeland. With a little effort, one could find sufficient food.

They could use the beastkin’s innate hunting skills to catch rabbits or small birds in the shallow forests. If they managed to catch animals like foxes or martens, they could eat the meat and sell the fur to obtain a considerable amount of food.

Even if not meat, forests contain a higher proportion of edible plants than one might think, and in fact, people in the Kingdom of Kore routinely process and consume these plants, calling them namul.

In the worst case, they could process arrowroot or pine tree inner bark to make them edible, so in that sense, this situation seems strange even to someone as uninformed as me.

To put it bluntly, I couldn’t think of any reason why these people would have fallen into such dire straits.

When we arrived, the village was a living hell filled with the unique gloom emanating from the corpses of those who had starved to death. The entire village was covered in desolation and malevolence, as if something terrible could happen at any moment.

Moreover, the time when people in the Kingdom of Kore would be most likely to starve—the barley hump—had long since passed.

To put it in real-world terms, the barley hump is roughly between May and June. Rice is harvested in autumn, barley is planted, and then rice is planted again in spring. This period refers to the time until the barley planted last autumn properly ripens.

Usually, harvested rice runs out around May or June, while barley takes quite a long time until harvest. Therefore, during this period, chronic food shortages are inevitable until the barley is harvested…

But now… I’m not sure of the exact date, but it’s around August, when early autumn is beginning to set in.

It’s well past the time when barley should have been harvested, and depending on the farming situation, it wouldn’t be strange to be harvesting rice already.

That’s why I was truly curious about the reason and ended up asking…

“Village chief. How… did this village end up like this?”

“…It’s a long story.”

The village chief opened his heavy lips and began to reveal the complicated inside story of this village.

※ ※ ※

The chief’s village was originally just an ordinary rural village in a mountain valley, he said.

There were no special local products unique to this region, nor was there anything special about the land compared to others.

Although it was in the middle of quite rugged mountains, it was small enough to be reasonably livable, with an environment that could sustain itself with local specialties from the surrounding shallow forests and farming.

However, the most fundamental reason why such a village fell into this state was because a certain mountain near the village called “Geumdan Mountain” became famous throughout the country.

This Geumdan Mountain, which I had set as my first sightseeing destination, was an independent otherworld like other mountains in the range, but perhaps due to tangled magical forces within the otherworld, it boasted a unique environment where all four seasons coexisted in one place.

While mountains with a single fixed season aren’t particularly hard to find, what made Geumdan Mountain especially unique was that all four seasons coexisted there.

Thanks to this, Geumdan Mountain was originally only known among nearby residents, but after becoming known due to some incident, it turned into a tourist attraction where idle noble scholars from all over the country gathered in search of scenic beauty.

Of course, looking at just this, there doesn’t seem to be anything strange, nor any reason why this rural village would suffer from famine.

After all, this village wasn’t particularly connected to tourists or the tourism industry, and if anything, with a famous tourist attraction nearby, one might think it could position itself as a resort.

Especially since this village was located midway between Geumdan Mountain and Hanyang, if they had set up an inn, there would inevitably be demand for it, but…

“That’s when those bastards appeared…!!”

Around that time, the group that would become the cause of this famine revealed themselves, he said.

They were the sons of wealthy yangban families from Hanyang, scholars who belonged to the innate privileged class thanks to their parents’ bloodline and family wealth.

In terms of their own abilities, they were mediocre at best, if not crude, but they were born with the status of yangban and wealth thanks to their parents.

Even in Hanyang, the view toward them wasn’t particularly favorable, which involved complicated reasons.

Under the Kingdom of Kore’s laws, yangban status only applies to those who passed the civil service examination and their first-generation descendants. As a result, there are yangban in this world who maintain their position solely through their parents’ influence, without any abilities of their own.

Such individuals naturally cannot even pass the initial examination, let alone dream of holding official positions, so all they do is hang around with similar types, drinking excessively…

Or they engage in vile and base acts of power harassment using their position—their privileged status as yangban—to satisfy their own falling self-esteem.

And they behaved just as viciously in this village, he said.

They might claim they were just having a bit of fun with a village they saw on their way to play, but from the perspective of the villagers who actually experienced it, it was no different from being plundered by a band of thieves.

“They, they took everything! Rice, barley, meat, livestock! Even when we collected pine bark powder, they said they would use it as kindling…!”

“…What absolute garbage people.”

“That’s right!”

No wonder there weren’t even chickens or other livestock that would inevitably exist even in the most impoverished village. They must have been completely robbed in the process of these people’s one-sided plundering.

“Forming gangs… this is complete trash!”

“Th-that’s what I’m saying!”

What’s worse, these people didn’t even visit sporadically but formed their own gangs and visited regularly, going so far as to treat the plundering of this village’s property under the pretext of their status as a ‘game.’

Of course, strictly speaking, yangban status doesn’t typically grant any legal authority or right to commit such acts, but ordinary farmers in a rural village wouldn’t know that, so there wasn’t much they could do.

“Have you filed a complaint?”

“Of course I have, but they didn’t even pretend to listen!”

He says they’ve tried visiting government offices to protest and file complaints, but even the officials there have no way to deal with these people.

Despite appearing like good-for-nothing hooligans (which they actually are), the parents of these gang members are likely serving in quite high official positions…

A newly appointed official who might at best be a county magistrate would be unable to do anything about these idle young men if they wanted to advance their career.

Well, in the end, it’s just innocent ordinary people who are dying because of this.

“Hic, huuk…”

Perhaps because so much had built up, the village chief finally broke down in tears while making his appeal. I silently comforted him and stayed by his side, when…

“…?”

Just then, as a group of life forces began to register within my life detection range—

“—Huh?”

Through the dragon horns that had somehow sprouted between my head, celestial information began flowing into me in a somewhat disorganized form.

Most notably, the information that the people approaching from beyond were actually the idle young men we had been discussing.