Boundless Family Upgrades For The Deadbeat Lord

Raymond stood tall atop the newly constructed wooden observation platform, one hand resting lightly against the rough railing as the cool morning wind swept across the eastern basin.

For several quiet moments, he didn’t say anything. He simply stood there and looked.

Before the platform, several hundred townspeople had gathered across the open ground, filling the space between the basin entrance and the first rows of crops.

A month ago, the sight of this many people gathered in one place would have looked like a congregation of walking corpses.

Their faces had been hollow, their skin yellow and lifeless, their bodies so starved that even standing beneath the sun seemed to require effort.

The children had been the worst of them, with thin arms, swollen bellies, and patches of missing hair caused by long-term malnutrition.

They were still far from healthy now. One month of controlled rations could not erase years of suffering, but the difference was impossible to ignore.

There was finally some color returning to their faces. Their cheeks were no longer completely sunken, their shoulders weren’t hanging as though the weight of their own bodies might drag them into the dirt, and their eyes had regained a faint brightness that Raymond hadn’t seen when he first walked through the town.

Some of the younger children were gathered farther behind the adults, chasing one another between the crude baskets and wooden tools prepared for the harvest. They couldn’t run for long before slowing down to catch their breath, but the fact that they could run at all made Raymond pause.

His gaze lingered on them for a moment before slowly moving past the crowd.

The fifteen-hectare basin stretched out behind them.

Raymond had watched the crops grow throughout the entire month. He had inspected the field almost every day, listened to Gideon and Harlan report on the progress, checked the irrigation pump, watched the workers rotate through their shifts, and even personally walked through the rows more times than he could count.

Yet standing above everything from the observation platform gave him a completely different view.

The basin looked like a giant island of life sitting in the middle of an endless dead world.

Beyond its boundaries, the Althoff Barony remained exactly what it had always been. Cracked reddish earth stretched toward the horizon, broken occasionally by pale rocks, dry ridges, and twisted patches of dead vegetation. There was no natural green anywhere.

No forests. No open grasslands. No fertile valleys. Just dusty soil and barren stone beneath a pale sky.

And then there was the basin.

Rows of golden wheat moved softly beneath the morning wind, their heavy heads bending and rising together. Tall corn stalks stood in dense sections nearby, their broad green leaves rustling against one another while thick ears of corn bulged beneath their husks.

Several plots were covered in low vegetable vines, crowded with bright red tomatoes so large that some branches had been supported with crude wooden stakes to stop them from snapping under the weight. Green peppers hung thickly from nearby plants, while rows of onions and carrots pushed against the rich black soil.

Farther away, shallow rice fields shimmered beneath the morning light, their golden-green stalks forming neat lines across the damp ground.

The different sections were so clearly separated that Raymond could distinguish most of the crops even from the platform.

For fifteen hectares, there was life.

Outside those fifteen hectares, there was almost nothing.

If someone were somehow looking down from high above the barony, Raymond imagined the basin would resemble a bright green jewel dropped into the middle of a desert.

His fingers tightened slightly around the wooden railing.

A month.

It had only been a month.

When he first woke up in this world, he had been lying in a filthy bedroom, poisoned, hungover, and seconds away from having his throat cut by mutinous mercenaries. The treasury had been nearly empty, the population had wanted him dead, there had been no food, no viable farmland, no rain, and no realistic chance of surviving the approaching winter.

Now hundreds of people were standing before him waiting to harvest food grown from land that had once rejected everything planted inside it.

Raymond let out a slow breath through his nose.

Not bad.

For a man who had died because of laundry soap, this was definitely not bad.

His lips nearly curled into a satisfied grin, but then he noticed the hundreds of faces turned toward him.

Right.

He wasn’t alone.

Raymond immediately cleared his throat and straightened his back.

The casual satisfaction disappeared from his face as though somebody had flipped a switch. His shoulders settled, his chin lifted slightly, and his expression slowly transformed into the same solemn, composed look he had perfected over the last month.

Internally, Raymond sighed.

Here we go again.

Raymond stepped away from the railing and moved toward the center of the platform. The low conversations among the townspeople began fading almost immediately.

Those still speaking nudged the people beside them, and within seconds the entire basin had become quiet enough for Raymond to hear the wheat moving in the wind behind them.

Raymond slowly raised both hands.

”My brothers and sisters of Althoff,” he began, his voice carrying naturally across the crowd. ”Before we begin today, I believe there is something we must do first. During these past weeks, all of us standing here have witnessed things that many people outside this territory would refuse to believe even if we placed the truth directly before their eyes. We watched barren earth become fertile beneath our feet. We watched rain fall from a clear sky over land that had forgotten what water felt like. We planted seeds into that earth, and now we stand before a harvest none of us believed we would live long enough to see.”

The people remained quiet, but Raymond could already see several of them lowering their heads.

He continued, his tone softer now.

”So before we take even a single grain from these fields, we should offer our gratitude to the one whose blessing allowed us to reach this day.”