Chapter 276: Life of Demacia Serfs

Seraphine's words made Lux and Sona's cheeks blush.

Are the Mianwei family and the Buwell family who adopted Sona considered to be kind people who treat farmers well?

Lux and Sona were too embarrassed to say yes at this moment, because they had personally experienced the hardship of the lower-class workers, and the salary they received in return for their hard work was so meager.

“But the problem is…” Seraphine’s tone became serious: “In Demacia, the Crownguard family and the Bouvier family are really kind people who treat the farmers well.”

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

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

Lux, Sona: "..."

The two girls were now trapped in a complex emotion of shock, shame, entanglement and confusion and could not extricate themselves.

Their worldviews were shattered.

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

Obviously, her tenant farmers all looked very happy.

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

The pastoral life of reading and farming is a spiritual sustenance comparable to Bandle City in the aristocratic circles of Demacia's capital, and is even imagined by some people as a paradise on earth.

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

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

Is there a possibility that Seraphine was wrong?

Is it true that the income of Demacia's tenant farmers is only one-tenth of that of Zaun's apprentices? Or, maybe Demacia's farmers earn less than Zaun's apprentices, but their daily work is not necessarily that tiring, right?

"Happiness is something that can be compared," Seraphine said. "Your tenant farmers live better than 99% of the farmers in Demacia. Of course they feel happy."

"But Lux, have you ever thought about what kind of life most Demacians lead?"

Lux was silent again. She had never seen it before and could not imagine it at all.

Could there be any job more tiring and desperate than the one 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.

The Metamorphosis can't change anything. The aristocratic lady experienced the life of the lower-class laborers for half a day, but in the end it was just a cursory experience.

The reason why her thoughts changed so quickly was not only because of Levi's theoretical guidance, but more importantly, she had the ability to listen to the voice of the soul and listen to suffering.

"Lux, Sona." Seraphine thought for a moment before asking solemnly, "Would you like to see how an ordinary, low-level Demacian spent his first half of his life?"

"Appa?" Sona raised her head curiously.

Lux was the same. She couldn't wait to find out whether the Demacians were really as hard-working as Seraphine said.

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

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

The origins of Zaun people are very complicated. Basically, they came to Piltover from all over the world, but they couldn't gain a foothold in Piltover and thus became poor people in the lower city.

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

The life memories of this former Demacia serf can be used to shatter the last fantasies of these two noble ladies.

“Are you ready?” Seraphine asked.

"Yeah." Lux and Sona closed their eyes and nodded seriously.

A dream began.

You were born.

Born into a peasant family in the countryside of Dornholde, a coastal city in Demacia.

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

The bad news is that you were reborn 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 tenants who can only rely entirely on aristocratic landlords for survival.

So there was actually no difference in economic status between free men and serfs.

You didn't have a good birth, but it's not too bad.

You are a girl.

This is bad news.

Because girls not only have to pay the poll tax like boys, but also when you grow up:

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

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

Because the marriage of female serfs was actually mainly decided by the lord, and usually they would be betrothed by the steward as soon as they reached adulthood. If you wanted to make your own decision, you had to pay to redeem them.

In short, in the countryside of Demacia, girls are money-losing goods. What's more, you are not as physically fit as boys, so you are not a good laborer.

That night, your parents held you by the river and thought for a long time. Finally, out of pity for you, they did not throw you into the river.

You grew up with difficulty, relying on your mother's scarce milk and the paste made from black bread soaked in water.

When he was about 5 or 6 years old, he could help with some housework.

You start 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 very hungry, but you don't want to eat breakfast, because breakfast is something that is completely unheard of in the interstellar knowledge for serfs who eat twice a day.

It was not until later when you worked as a maid in the lord's house that you realized that people also need to eat in the morning.

So, with an empty stomach, you helped your father carry a hoe that was much taller than you, and led the bull, and went to the lord's farm with your father to work.

The gentlemen and literati of Xiongdu fantasize that the peasants' pastoral life is free, but in fact, as a serf, you must report to the lord's farm on time in the morning just like a worker.

Today, you and your father were a little late, and the housekeeper dragged you out scolding you, saying that you would be punished in public.

Fortunately, your father is a sensible person. He privately said that he was willing to bribe the housekeeper with something, such as the eggs that your family had saved for half a month but you had not eaten a single bite.

The punishment was escaped. But the work itself felt like a punishment.

There are generally two types of work that serfs need to do voluntarily for their lords: one is to cultivate the lord's public fields, and the other is to help with some odd jobs.

For example, chopping wood, planting trees, installing fences, pruning branches of fruit trees and vines, repairing and 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 yoked the horses and oxen, fastened the plowshares and coulters, and went out to the fields to work hard.

In order to drive the animals to work according to the command, you and other serfs had to shout constantly. You shouted until you were hoarse and your throat was burning. The sun had already burned your skin and your father's skin black and red, making you numb and unable to feel the burning.

The good news is:

As a serf, you only need to do this kind of work of cultivating public land for the lord three days a week.

You can spend the rest of the time cultivating your own land with your father.

Serfs are still better than slaves. Compared with slaves who have completely lost their human rights, serfs at least have economic freedom.

The produce from these plots of land belongs to you and is your family's private property.

So even though you and your father are tired after working for the lord on a voluntary basis, you will still have to work for yourself in the following period, and work even harder and more laboriously.

But the bad news is:

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

There are taxes collected by the Kingdom of Demacia, such as military expenses, land taxes, head taxes, and so on.

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

As long as you are alive, you will have to pay another head tax to the lord.

To have the right to lease a property, one must first pay a manor rent.

You have to pay to live outside the estate.

You have to pay to use the Lord's Mill.

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 the lord's eldest son was knighted, your father had to pay a tax to celebrate the ceremony.

When the lord's daughter gets married, your family has to pay taxes on her dowry.

…

Gradually, you grew into a girl and became 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 not improved at all.

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

The little money your family had left was squandered by a minor illness you had in your childhood. After more than a decade, not only did you not save any income, but you even owed the lord a debt.

You finally despair and want to escape from it all.

But serfs were not free men. If you wished to leave the manor for an extended period, you had to pay for permission to do so; without permission, you became a fugitive.

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

So after day after day of pain and hesitation, you can only continue to endure it silently.

Your life seems to be forever confined 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 away, but you still instinctively yearn for the distance.

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

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

For example, the Noxian Empire, which is described by the Knight as the most tyrannical and evil.

Sailors said that although the Noxian serfs had a harder life than their Demacian counterparts, they were able to escape.

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

The supervisors and thugs of the general lords could not chase them into the city. And even if they did, the factory owners would not allow these country people to do too much in the city in order to protect their own 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 go to the city, there will be no jobs left for you there.

You can only become a beggar because you have no legal identity. You will either be kidnapped by gangs and sold to brothels, or be driven out by city guards and wander in the wilderness, or be captured by the lord and beaten.

Moreover, as an expansionist military empire, Noxus' serfs could 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 join the army. As a serf, unless you are gifted and chosen by the knight to be a squire, you will not even have the chance to go to the battlefield, let alone gamble your life with your life.

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

You decide to just live like your father who raised you.

Maybe you can also have a child. If this child has a promising future when he grows up, he may be able to save your family from the fate of being serfs.

But before your long life officially begins, your father seems to have lived enough.

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

You remember when you were a kid, he still had some solid muscles. Although he was skinny, he still had some energy.

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

The pastor of the Illuminati in town kindly gave him medicine and also sent your family a lot of nourishing food.

You are grateful, but this kind person's help is not decisive.

The priest prayed a final prayer for your father, but it was of no use, because the goddess of the Illuminator, the legendary angel of justice, has not descended on Demacia for hundreds of years.

You know very well that the priest was merely showing pity to a dying man.

Finally, in the last moments of his life, after eating two eggs in a 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 simple funeral, you suddenly had such absurd thoughts.

Perhaps only by death can a person escape this desperate fate where he has to pay the lord for even breathing?

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

Your father, the steward tells you, was the property of his lord—and upon his death he owed his lord his best cattle as a death liability.

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.

Was the thin wooden coffin your father used made from wood cut from the lord's house?

So, should we pay in cash, or keep it in accounts, or use vegetables and potatoes to offset the amount?

Lux, Sona: "..."