Chapter 397: Prosperous Food

But of course, this simple investment of a little bit of extra mana was obviously not enough of an incentive to make the wealthy people eagerly go for the bigger lands and accept a 50 percent tax rate.

The real reason was completely different.

It was basically the fact that Adrian had secretly spent a little bit more of his own system mana to permanently upgrade his farmland area. He basically gave the instances higher mana density, which would increase based on the amount of mana invested.

So, the larger the land you rented, the greater the ambient mana density in the soil became.

And having a higher mana density directly increased the RNG chances of randomly growing a mutated plant that had raw, concentrated mana trapped inside of it.

It went from a zero percent chance in the small farms, up to a flat one percent chance in the massive farms.

It was not a big percentage amount at all. It was incredibly rare, but the little bit of highly concentrated, mana-infused produce that they did manage to harvest? That rare, glowing vegetable could easily fetch a ton of money in the open market.

And that was exactly it. That was the one simple reason why greedy people eagerly went for this huge amount of land and were perfectly ready to pay a huge fifty percent tax on their normal crops to Adrian.

It was simply because of the gambling ability to get access to ultra rare, mana infused ingredients.

Adrian had originally expected the merchants to try and export these rare mana infused produce to the capital or to other greedy nobles for massive sums of gold. But the reality of the local economy was completely different.

The other territories did not have a magical dungeon that just magically produced whatever perfectly grown food they wanted. Adrian was the only Lord on the entire continent who had a system like that.

So, in his eyes, the value of these glowing ingredients was honestly no different than just printing money. It was just a rare commodity to be sold.

But for the local farmers and the awakened knight citizens of Oresfall, this produce was basically treated like divine, holy food.

If they carefully cooked these rare ingredients up and ate them, the dense mana trapped inside the food would actively aid them with their knight training a lot. It acted like a natural, edible stamina potion.

So, instead of exporting it, this rare food was basically just being heavily traded and sold entirely amongst themselves. Especially the newly wealthy knight families. They were the ones buying them the most, aggressively hoarding the mana crops to feed their children, instead of the merchants selling it out of the territory to make a higher profit.

And Adrian, honestly speaking, did not mind this at all.

As long as the rare, magical produce of Oresfall wasn’t going out across the borders, and other rival territories weren’t basically taking advantage of his people, he was perfectly fine with it.

He nodded slowly to himself as he continued walking down the stone road, looking at the small grocery stores displaying their normal, non-magical cabbages.

’Yeah, who the hell are those capital bitches to take advantage of my people?’ Adrian thought to himself. ’The only one allowed to take advantage of these guys is me. They are my cash cows.’

He smiled as he walked over happily and finally entered the bustling, loud streets of the main central market.

It was extremely crowded. Thousands of people were just walking all over the place, bumping shoulders, carrying crates of food, and laughing loudly.

Seeing this massive human traffic just made Adrian think about one single, annoying thing.

’Man, I really gotta order the construction crews to make these main market roads wider,’ Adrian thought with a sigh. ’But looking at how dense these stalls are packed in, I think it’s a bit too late for that without tearing down half the buildings.’

He stopped walking and looked around.

He noticed that Claire and Serena had stopped behind him and were both looking intently in one single direction down the street.

Adrian turned his head and looked in the exact same direction they were.

He immediately saw the flagship location of the Prosperous Food restaurant.

This specific building was entirely different than the original, smaller ones he had seen before on the outskirts of town. The other franchise locations were usually just smaller wooden restaurants with a little bit of cramped space to eat inside. They usually only had around six small tables with four wooden chairs each.

This one, on the other hand, was extremely huge.

It stood a towering four floors tall. This was the one single commercial building in this entire market square that was actually constructed using expensive cut stones and thick mortar instead of wood.

It also had a massive ground floor with wide glass windows.

All of the loud, chaotic cooking was done out of sight in the massive underground basement floor. The first floor, second floor, and the third floor were basically just massive, open dining halls completely filled to the brim with wooden tables and chairs.

The fourth and highest floor, however, was strictly reserved for the VIP guests.

Because of that strict entry requirement, the top floor was mostly just empty right now, since most of the wealthy VIP guests actually ended up preferring to eat in the loud, lively lower floors just to be part of the festival atmosphere.

The reason for the top floor being empty was pretty simple: only awakened knights were legally allowed up there. That was the strict rule of the establishment.

And since not every single knight in Oresfall had their whole family awakened as knights yet, it wasn’t exactly a nice way to spend quality time with their unawakened wives and children if they came to this place and had to split up.

But during normal, grueling workdays, the tired soldiers regularly headed straight up to this floor to eat their lunch or dinner in peace. A lot of official after work military meetings and casual after-work get-togethers; just for drinking, entertainment, and unwinding away from the civilians, were literally done exclusively on the fourth floor.

Adrian turned his attention back to the girls and saw them staring expectantly at him.