Aztec Civilization: Destiny to Conquer America!-Chapter 1752 - 1254: The Crop That Determines North Asia’s Fate, You Arrived Just in Time!

"The Wa People's Rice God, has it been obstructed? Hmm, didn't that four-fingered translator Watanabe once tell me? 'In a grain of rice, there are seven gods'... Yes! The Wa People greatly revere rice, just as we revere corn. He also recited an interesting little poem to me: 'To the small rice fields in the mountains, the silt-clogged paddy water. Now the relationship between the two is no more, it's been days without communication, truly saddening'..."

"Listening to the captured Wa People, in the southern villages of the Wa People, farmers must build long canals, allowing the mountain spring water to flow slowly, warm up before irrigating the rice fields. Otherwise, the Rice God will be upset, and the rice won't grow. From this, it's clear that the Rice God of the Wa People doesn't like the cold..."

"Hmm! The white rice and yellow rice they grow, also known as 'rice' and 'millet' according to Wa captives, can't survive on Maoshili Island? ... So, is it because the climate is colder? That's it, the Far North Peninsula only thaws in May, and snow falls in October, with the coastal areas even colder than inland! And the Kuril Islands just south, Maoshili Island, can't be much warmer either!..."

"The nomads here on the Peninsula are the same, they have never grown crops, surviving on deer herds and fishing and hunting. The sweet potatoes, corn, and squash we brought cannot survive either, only the most cold-resistant pigeon egg-sized potatoes can grow! ... And even these most cold-resistant small potatoes can only yield one for three, growing very slowly..."

The ice and snow are white and clear, and the spring of the Peninsula remains a pure white. Long grass, moss, and shrubs are covered by accumulated snow, hiding life underground. On the hills west of Shinnan Mountain Port, there's a particularly flat patch of snow, which is the potato field reclaimed by the port. And this is the most precious and important thing brought by the Kingdom Fleet, far more valuable than the two thousand jin of gold in the cellar!

"The potato is a gift from the southern Hummingbird... Its multi-colored skin is like the feathers on the head of the male bird. And that lightly white flower is like the pregnant belly of the female bird. The underground tuber, the size of a bird's egg, is the Hummingbird's gift left in the human world, an edible life force..."

Exploration Captain Zuwaro held the girl in his arms, gazing at the potato field under the snow, solemnly chanting the inherited mythological poem. At this moment, he suddenly realized the uniqueness of the potato, truly understood the importance of this cold-resistant crop! Yet, the true importance of this "Hummingbird's gift," this extremely cold-resistant crop, far exceeds even his wildest imagination at this moment...

The potatoes planted by the Kingdom are different from the commonly seen later-generation yellow-skinned large potatoes, having multi-colored skin, each only bird egg-sized, closer to the originally domesticated wild potato. And this cold-resistant crop that descended from the cold mountains of the Andes will completely transform the land beneath his feet, and change the fate of all tribes on the Northeast Asian continent! 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"The rice and millet of the Wa People can't survive, so their settlements can only stay on the south side of Maoshili Island. The Mountain Part, Rokube, and Tent Part on the Peninsula have no crops and can only migrate with the deer herds... And further west? What about the Jurchen tribes in Your Majesty's prophecy, the Mongolian Tribe Alliance? What can they plant? What do they live on?... Even beyond these tribes, further west? Further west!..."

Zuwaro released the girl in his arms, suddenly looking towards the west. His eyes seemed to want to peer beyond the snowy mountains, to see through to the end of that vast land, to see the vast Eastern Siberia, Western Siberia, to see thousands or tens of thousands of miles beyond!

At the end of this Fifteenth Century, in this era entering the Little Ice Age, there is no hardy crop on the entire Old Continent that can be cultivated in extreme cold! Rye domesticated from Central Asia can only be cultivated on the warm shores of the Baltic Sea, unable to cross the Ural Mountains to the East, nor conquer the colder White Sea to the North. They would need two more centuries to domesticate generation by generation to cultivate hardy rye that adapted to the North Sea shores, let alone the vast and frigid Eastern and Western Siberia!

In fact, before the introduction of potatoes, "planting potatoes in Siberia" was merely a cold and merciless fantasy. Even the most cold-enduring Russian agricultural slaves could not establish settled villages on the lands of the nomadic tribes. They would have to live like the nomadic tribes, being assimilated by them to survive...

And southern rice, even if the Koreans and Wa People have domesticated cold-hardy varieties, still has its crop limits, far from reaching the cold resistance capacity developed through targeted breeding in later generations. Latitude 42 degrees, with May snow in Maoshili Island, and White Mountain Black Water at the same latitude, is its limit of extension!

At this moment when the Little Ice Age began, there was no foundation for agricultural development in the Outer Northeast. On the contrary, as the climate got colder, the Ming Dynasty kept shrinking, abandoning the increasingly cold, impossible-to-cultivate garrison land in the North. The Nuer Gan Metropolitan Authority along the banks of the Heilongjiang River had been abandoned for more than half a century. And the Jurchen tribes under Northeast's governance were gradually slipping away under the Ming's southern retreat, starting the initially inconsequential, unnoticed chaos, annexation, and slaughter...

In terms of the crops themselves, whether Eastern rice or Western rye, they are fruit-bearing grasses. Even if the crops survive, if the temperature is too low, suddenly dropping, it is common for there to be no harvest, resulting in an empty yield. However, potatoes, as fruit-bearing Solanaceae, domesticated by the indigenous people, are one of the greatest crops, naturally more adapted to severe cold than grasses! As long as they can survive, there will inevitably be tuber output, it's just a matter of yield size!