LOL: Summoner of Goddess Janna

Chapter 276 The Life of Demacian Serfs

Seraphine's words made Lux and Sona's cheeks turn red.

Are the Crownguard family and the Bouvier family who adopted Sona considered good people who treated farmers favorably?

At this moment, Lux and Sona were too embarrassed to say yes. Because they have personally experienced the hard work of workers at the bottom, and how meager the salary rewards for this hard work are.

"But the problem is..." Seraphine's tone became serious: "In Demacia, the Crownguard family and the Bouvier family are really good people who treat farmers favorably."

In Demacia, being able to feed, clothe, and still have money for the tenant farmers like the Crownguard family can certainly be regarded as the conscience of the nobles.

"This is the most helpless and terrifying thing." Seraphine said.

Lux, Sona: "......"

The two girls were now trapped in complex emotions of shock, shame, entanglement and confusion, unable to extricate themselves.

Their worldview was shattered.

Lux even instinctively couldn't believe it: "Are the tenant farmers in Demacia really, really living so hard?"

It was obvious that all the tenant farmers in her family looked happy.

They were all smiling when they met her, and she couldn't see any pain on their faces.

The pastoral life of studying and farming is a kind of spiritual sustenance comparable to Bandle City in the aristocratic circles of Demacia. It is even a paradise imagined by some people.

Therefore, Lux never thought that the life of farmers in Demacia would be difficult.

After all, the life she was experiencing today was that of a Zaun apprentice, not a Demacian.

Is there a possibility that Seraphine made a mistake?

Is the income of Demacia's tenant farmers really only one-tenth of that of Zaun's apprentices? In other words, maybe the income of Demacian farmers is less than that of Zaun apprentices, but their daily work may not be so tiring, right?

"Happiness comes from comparison." Seraphine said: "Your tenant farmers live better than 99% of the farmers in Demacia. Of course they will feel happy."

"But Lux, have you ever thought about how most Demacians live?"

Lux was silent again. She had never seen it before and couldn't imagine it at all.

Could it be that it could be more tiring and desperate than the job she experienced today?

"Alas..." Looking at the confused look on the little girl's face, Seraphine knew that her wake-up call was not loud enough.

Metamorphosis changes nothing. An aristocratic lady experiences the life of a lower-class worker for half a day. In the final analysis, it is just a quick glance.

Her original thoughts could change so quickly not only because of Levi's theoretical guidance, but more importantly, because she had the ability to listen to the voice of the soul and the suffering.

"Lux, Sona." Seraphine thought for a moment, then asked solemnly: "Are you willing to see how an ordinary low-level Demacian spent the first half of his life?"

"Abba?" Sona raised her head curiously.

So does Lux. She couldn't wait to find out whether the Demacians were really as hard as Seraphine said.

So she asked anxiously: "How do I know?"

"It's very simple." Seraphine stretched out her hands and gently touched the foreheads of Lux and Sona: "Close your eyes and listen to the voice of the soul."

The origins of the Zaun people are very complicated. They basically came to Piltover from all over the world. As a result, they were unable to gain a foothold in Piltover, and thus became poor people in the lower city.

She happened to be doing frontline propaganda work these past two days and came into contact with a serf who had escaped from Demacia across the ocean.

The life memory of this former Demacian serf can be used to shatter the last illusions of these two noble ladies.

"Are you ready?" Seraphine asked.

"Yes." Lux and Sona both closed their eyes and nodded seriously.

A dream begins.

You were born.

Born in the coastal city of Demacia to a peasant family in the countryside of Dornhold.

Demacia's farmers generally have two identities, free people and serfs.

The bad news is, you were reincarnated as a serf.

The good news is that after hundreds of years of land annexation in Demacia, most of the free people in the countryside are just bankrupt landless farmers, indebted tenant farmers who can only survive completely dependent on the noble landlords.

Therefore, there is actually no difference in economic status between free men and serfs.

Your rebirth was not good, but it is not too bad.

You are a girl.

This is bad news.

Because not only do girls need to pay the poll tax just like boys, but when you grow up:

If you marry, your family will need to pay a fine to your knight lord to compensate for the loss of labor.

And if you, as a woman, remain single after adulthood, you will also have to pay a ransom to the lord.

Because the marriage of female serfs was actually mainly decided by the lord, and they would usually be betrothed by the housekeeper as soon as they reached adulthood. If you want to make your own decision, you have to pay for it.

In short, in the countryside of Demacia, girls are losers. What's more, your natural physical fitness is not as good as that of boys, so you are not a useful laborer.

That night, your parents held you by the river and thought for a long time. In the end, they felt pity for you and did not throw you into the river.

Relying on your mother's insufficient milk and the lakes made of black bread soaked in water, you grew up with difficulty.

When he is about 5 or 6 years old, he can help with some work.

You started working with your father.

Every morning, you and your father get up early, brave the morning cold, carry various tools such as hoes, shovels, axes and sickles, and drive the bulls to work on the lord's farm.

You are hungry but don't want to eat breakfast. Because breakfast was an unheard-of interstellar knowledge for serfs who had two meals a day.

It wasn't until you went to the lord's house as a maid later that you realized that people also need to eat in the morning.

Just like that, you were hungry, helped your father carry a hoe that was much taller than you, led the bull, and came to work on the lord's farm with your father.

Gentlemen and literati in Xiongdu imagined that farmers' pastoral life was free, but in fact, as a serf, you, like a worker, must report to the lord's farm on time in the morning.

Today you and your father were a little late, and the housekeeper scolded you and took you out, saying that you were going to be punished in public.

Fortunately, your father is sensible. He privately said that he was willing to bribe the housekeeper with some things, such as the eggs that your family had been saving for half a month but you hadn't even eaten a bite.

Punishment escaped. But the work itself felt like a punishment.

There are generally two types of jobs that serfs need to serve their lords on an voluntary basis. One is to cultivate the lord's public land, and the other is to help with some chores.

For example, cutting firewood, planting trees, installing fences, pruning the branches of fruit trees and grapevines, making repairs, building houses... In short, you are obliged to do all the chores on the lord's territory.

Today you and your father were not assigned these chores, but were assigned to work in the fields.

Together with your father, you yoke the horses and oxen, fasten the plowshares and coulters, and then go out into the plowed fields and plow the fields.

In order to make the animals work as ordered, you and the other serfs must keep shouting. You screamed at the top of your lungs, your throat burning. The sun has already burned your and your father's skin black and red, making you so numb that you can't even feel the burning.

The good news is:

As a serf, you only need to perform work such as cultivating public land for the leader's duties three days a week.

The rest of the time you can work with your father on your own farm.

After all, serfs are better than slaves. Compared with slaves who completely lost their human rights, serfs at least had economic freedom.

The output of these allotments belongs to you and is the private property of your family.

So even though you and your father are tired after working for the leader, you have to work for yourselves the rest of the time, and work harder and harder.

But the bad news is:

Most of the harvest from your family's farming will be used to pay various taxes and fees.

There are taxes collected by the Kingdom of Demacia, such as military expenses, land taxes, poll taxes, etc.

Most of them are various taxes and fees collected by the lord, such as:

As long as you live, you will have to pay another poll tax to the lord.

To hold a tenancy right, you must first pay a manor land rent.

You have to pay to live outside the manor.

To use Lord's Mill, you have to pay.

You have to pay to collect firewood.

You have to pay to fish in the rivers within the territory.

You have to pay to raise livestock in the woods around the village.

When a lord's eldest son becomes a knight, your father pays a tax to celebrate the ceremony.

When a lady from a lord's family gets married, your family also has to pay taxes on her dowry.

.......

Gradually, you grow into a young girl and become sensible.

At the same time, you also find that after more than ten years of hard work by you and your father, your family's financial situation has still not improved at all.

Almost all your family's income is used to pay various taxes and fees to the lord.

The little money your family had left was all lost because of a minor illness you had when you were a child. After more than ten years, not only did he not save any income, but he also owed a debt to the lord.

You are finally desperate and want to escape from it all.

But serfs were not free people after all. If you wish to leave the estate for an extended period of time, you must pay for permission to do so; without permission, you become a fugitive.

You have no legal recourse to fight these terms that bind you in court, because the law is the law of free men.

So you can only continue to endure it silently after suffering and hesitating day after day.

Your life seems to be forever limited to this territory. The lord is your heaven, and the steward and overseer are angels, great beings that you cannot disobey.

You can't run, but you still instinctively yearn for the distance.

You listened to the sailors who returned from running the ship for the lord's family and told many stories about the outside world.

For example, Piltover, the city of civilization and progress that everyone longs for;

For example, the Noxus Empire is the most violent and evil one according to the knight.

Sailors said that while Noxian serfs had a harder time than their Demacia counterparts, they could escape.

Because after the serfs of Noxus ran into the city, there were factories that could accommodate them.

Generally, the lord's supervisors and thugs cannot catch up to the city. And even if they come after them, factory owners will not allow these country people to do too much in the city in order to preserve their labor force.

But the serfs of Demacia are different.

Demacia's industrialization rate is almost zero.

You know that even if you run away and enter the city, there will be no jobs left for you in the city.

You can only become a beggar because you have no legal status. Either you are kidnapped by gangs and sold into a brothel, or you are kicked out by the city guards and live in the wilderness, or you take the initiative to be captured by the lord and receive a few whips.

Moreover, as Noxus was an expansionary military empire, their serfs could also change their destiny by joining the army.

Although this road is dangerous, it is at least a road.

But in Demacia, only free men are eligible to serve in the military. As a serf, unless you are gifted enough to be chosen by the knight as a squire, you will not even have a chance to go to the battlefield, let alone risk your life to gamble on your destiny.

So, the more stories you hear, the more desperate you become.

You decide to live like this, just like your father who raised you single-handedly.

Maybe you can also have a child. If this child grows up to be successful, maybe it can save your family from the fate of being serfs.

But before your long life has officially begun, your father seems to have had enough.

His body had long been completely hollowed out by endless labor and pain.

Do you remember that when you were a child, he still had a fairly solid tendon. Although he is thin, he still has energy.

But in just ten years, your father turned into a skinny human skeleton.

The pastor of the Illuminator Order in the town kindly gave him medicine and also gave your family a lot of food to replenish his body.

You're grateful, but the good Samaritan's help isn't decisive.

The pastor said a final prayer for your father, but it was of no use. Because the goddess of the Order of the Illuminator, the legendary Angel of Justice, has not visited Demacia for hundreds of years.

You know very well that the priest is only showing mercy to a dying man.

Finally, at the last moment of his life, after eating two eggs with rare indulgence, your father closed his eyes with satisfaction.

"Father, now you don't have to pay taxes to the lord."

At your father's humble funeral, you suddenly thought this absurdly.

Perhaps only by dying can a person escape from this desperate fate of having to pay the lord to even breathe, right?

At this time, the lord's butler came to the door.

The steward tells you that your father was the property of his lord, and that upon his death he was indebted to his lord for his best cattle.

So he wants to take away your old bull.

Oh, by the way, the land where your father is buried also belongs to the lord's family.

Did the thin wood coffin your father used come from the lord's house?

So, should it be cash, accounting, or deducting vegetables and potatoes?

Lux and Sona: "..."