After four days, in the farmlands located on the outskirts of Whitlock fiefdom, a high crowd was gathered in front of the fiefdom's grist mill.
Beneath the blazing sun, an old man was tilling his field when he noticed the crowd gathering before the grist mill. He immediately hurled his hoe and straightened up his clothes. With the power of a fierce dragon, he lifted the bags of wheat by the side of his field and sprinted towards the gristmill with all his might.
Despite sprinting the old man was late because many competitors were vying with him. If one were to gaze down on the farmlands from the sky he would see dozens of people dashing frantically regardless of their gender with bags of wheat in their hands towards the gristmill. One thing was certain that today luck was not in favour of the old man.
Every year civilians pay their taxes in this world.
The taxation process consisted of sending wheat harvested in the fiefdom's gristmill to ground it into flour. The officials would take a portion of it away as tax before putting a tick beside the family's name.
This year specifically had the longest line as all the farmers ran with such desperation that anyone who didn't know that today was tax collection day might think that a grim reaper was chasing behind them.
The reason behind this difference was the newly appointed travelling tax official of the Whitlock fiefdom–Zlatan Whitlock.
Zlatan Whitlock, the young master and the rumoured successor of the Whitlock house, was 15 years old boy when the old man heard this he snorted in disdain. He thought that it was just another noble toying around as usual but soon, he heard some news that quickly drove his previous scorn from his face away.
It was common knowledge that the farmers have to turn the millstone themselves to prevent farmers from underpaying their taxes, they were expected to grind the wheat down on the spot.
Simple words wouldn't be enough to describe how painful was to turn the millstone manually with hands.
However, rumours were heard that in the gristmill Zlatan Whitlock was collecting taxes was different. The farmers were asked to hand over their wheat to the officials and wait by the side of the gristmill where their wheat gets turned into flour magically.
The farmers majorly consisted of old people with little to no education as they were the stubborn type. They only knew how to count money and calculate taxes and with the method introduced by the young master Zlatan, the farmers were genuinely happy and even agreed to pay 10% more taxes than usual. Some people protested against it but their voices died while the majority of people agreed to it.
MC POV
Money Money Money Money Let it rain.
So this is how Jeff Bezos would feel every day.
Foolish people, Foolish management and foolish world. I may sound arrogant but that's true. This world has modern knowledge but not to the rate dead people can be revived or any diseases can be cured.
There is no automatic flour mill machine because it was never required. As nobles didn't need to grind their wheat into flour so they didn't think of this matter and the old farmers who were uneducated and only knew about farming followed the same old tradition of manual processing it.
I just used a simple theory that I used in my first life. The theory of demand and supply. For example, there are three supermarkets in your area and there is a product which is available in all of these and somehow supermarket A knows that will be in high demand after some time. So supermarket A brings all that product from other supermarkets and sells those at an additional price with a bit of discount feature to easily fool the customers.
I knew how a flour mill works so I made it with the help of the engineer present in our Duchy and gave the credit to him and I only took the credit of its idea.
If I had taken all the credit then it would invite a lot of trouble.
I couldn't give the amount of money streaming into my pockets in these 4 days. Approximately fifty thousand people had come here to grind their wheat and just imagine 10% extra from each person which would come toy pocket and the original 20% would come to the Duchy.
I was currently sipping tea while Halona and Christy were by my side.
Christy sticked to me like glue as she said it was for security reasons and Halona was busy maintaining all the records. I was thankful to both of them in this matter because when they worked they took it seriously.
While we were drinking tea a lock of my hair was obstructing my way to drink the tea. So Christy woke up from her seat and started doing me a ponytail.
Suddenly a teacup flew straight to Christy's face but she blocked it pretty easily.
"Bitch don't you dare touch him in front of me, I only agreed that we would be allies in front of Zlatan's mom only."
"Who the fuck are you to order me?"
The room temperature was starting to drop. This would be a disaster as Halona was already stressed that we couldn't spend any intimate time together.
Looks like I have to mend their relationship.
Women are only good when they behave well and not when they are behaving like wild cats but in my case, they are 2 lionesses.
God help me if you exist.
Note: I tried my way to show that Mc is a smart guy and he can be dumb sometimes based on the situation and was this good comment about it.