Chapter 396: Change In Farming System

However, Adrian did own multiple large scale shops in the city. The main one being his wildly successful restaurant chain which went from serving just one to two dishes, to expanding their menu to over thirty items.

It literally just had a massive wooden sign over the door that said: Prosperous Food. ℴ

It was almost like someone who was really, really bad at coming up with creative names had decided to be the one who named the entire restaurant chain. Adrian cringed internally every time he saw the sign, knowing full well it was his own fault.

But despite the terrible branding and multiple name changes, the business was booming. It had rapidly expanded from one single, cramped shop to over twenty different locations scattered across a single small town. It made getting cheap, hot food a lot easier for the working class people.

There were also dozens of private shops strictly for selling raw groceries.

They were all small, cramped wooden stalls. They definitely weren’t the massive, brightly lit, air-conditioned supermarkets that Adrian had seen in his past life on Earth. But these local, family owned businesses were doing pretty well for themselves.

The merchants basically just sold the fresh produce that they personally grew inside the agricultural layer of the dungeon and kept the profits to themselves. And since they were only selling their crops locally to other citizens inside Oresfall, they didn’t have to pay any export taxes to Adrian either.

As Adrian looked at the thriving grocery stalls, he couldn’t help but smile.

His dungeon had a very specific, carefully managed agricultural system.

When he first unlocked it and set it up, it originally featured a few very primitive, basic settings for farming at the start. But as time passed and he had time to think, Adrian had added a few extra functions to the whole system.

And even though the current farming system was not quite as massively profitable for the individual peasant families as it had been right at the very start, it was much more stable.

The very first harvest they did months ago was plenty for everyone. The yields were insane.

But the dungeon had gotten a massive software update after that first harvest. Adrian had basically introduced a lot of new environmental control features that made the act of farming a lot easier, but it also meant slightly lesser profit margins, at least for the smaller family farms.

The older, primitive dungeon settings allowed small peasant families to claim an instance, farm entirely on their own without relying on anyone else, and keep all of the crop profits to themselves.

But now, while they could still do that, the dungeon system itself automatically issued them a mandatory ’Quest’ whenever they started a new agricultural instance for a small farm.

It was basically an automated tax of a small, flat percent. For small farmlands, it was 10 percent.

This meant that the farmers would have to donate exactly 10 percent of their total final harvest directly back to the dungeon’s storage reserves before they were allowed to leave the instance with their crops.

The fundamental reason for this mandatory tax was pretty simple.

Unlike farming outside the dungeon in the real world, where the weather was unpredictable and completely out of their control, this dungeon instance was pretty much literal heaven when it came to farming.

It did not have strong, destructive winds that randomly blew through the valleys. It did not have torrential, flooding rains that randomly hit the fields and drowned the plants. And it also did not have extremely harsh, blistering sunlight that dried out the soil.

It was an absolutely perfect, controlled environment.

So it was almost like they were farming the exact same way as before, but they were just being charged a small premium fee for the guarantee of a perfect harvest, but this was something that was available before too. The real difference was something else.

It wasn’t a complete financial loss for the farmers either, since they now had the ability to manually change the exact settings of the weather for that specific farming instance. The only catch was that they could not change it later on. If they set the weather parameters for a particular crop instance once, it was locked in and could not be changed again until the harvest was done.

And on top of that environmental control, this single extra feature gave Adrian a completely valid, logical reason to ask them for taxes indirectly.

The reason for him taxing them was pretty simple capitalism. They were making way too much money through this foolproof method. And since Adrian was the one providing the land, which was prime real estate when it came to risk-free farming, he felt like taking a small percentage tax in the form of raw crops was not unfair at all.

But then, the small family farmers aside, things scaled up rapidly.

As the size of the farm land grew bigger and bigger for the merchant guilds, the mandatory automated taxes also grew bigger. The tax scaled all the way up to a staggering maximum of 50 percent of the total harvest.

But this massive 50 percent tax bracket was only a case for extremely huge farms.

But surprisingly, even though this massive tax bracket was the case, a lot of wealthy merchant groups and noble families ended up eagerly going with the biggest sized farms anyway.

The reason for this behavior was much simpler.

While the actual act of planting seeds and taking care of the plants was done almost entirely passively by the dungeon’s automated systems, they didn’t have to pay any real money for that labor. After they did the initial investment to open up the instance, they only had to pay with their own personal mana reserves to keep the instance running.

They did have to pay another chunk of mana again when it was finally time for the harvest.

But this is exactly where things changed for the big corporate farms. The base mana cost to harvest from a massive instance was very similar to the smaller ones.