"Take it, this is the custom." Susan of course didn’t stand on ceremony, she picked out a few, but it wasn’t for free; she still paid for them.

But at this moment, a very strange phenomenon appeared.

The fishermen who had just been bragging nonstop were now busy talking down their own catch.

"There’s a lot of seaweed tied on this one, it’s actually not that heavy."

"Mine’s not that fresh anymore, make it cheaper."

"This one’s too small, not worth much."

Such a scene was really contradictory from front to back, almost absurd, but it had its own special reason.

Offering up one’s catch wasn’t anything new—in the past, when they came back after all that effort fishing, they’d be squeezed dry in all sorts of ways.

If you caught something good, you’d better pray no one noticed, otherwise someone would definitely come looking for you, but there was no way you’d see a single coin. The lord taking something from you was him doing you an honor.

This didn’t only happen to fishermen. Hunters’ game, farmers’ crops... once they had their eyes on you, the best choice was to cave. Otherwise you’d lose your goods and still get a gratuitous beating.

But now in Hamlet, there was no such thing. Even if the Lord needed something, it was all paid for at market price.

At least the current batch of Bureaucrats in Hamlet didn’t dare stick out their hands, because the Lord really would drag them out to do hard labor.

Even if they tried to offer things up on their own, it wasn’t allowed; on the contrary, if it was serious, it would be treated as bribery.

Alongside the generous treatment the Bureaucrats got came a lot of nitpicky rules; no one was going to break the Lord’s regulations over a bit of petty gain.

The harsh rules were built on one negative example after another; quite a few people had already gone off to "dig the earth" for this.

So the fishermen who were chosen this time didn’t refuse and just took the money—but the prices they named were very low.

Because aside from doing this, there wasn’t much way for them to repay the Lord.

The Lord’s favor is more than we can ever repay!

Susan only smiled at this. She’d been sparring wits with these guys for more than a day or two, so by the Lord’s suggestion she rotated her purchases instead of buying from just one family, and she still paid what ought to be paid.

By the time she walked out of the docks, the basket on her arm was filled with all kinds of seafood—crabs, shrimp, and all sorts of shellfish.

And that was only part of it. Sometimes she also had to go to the slaughterhouse to see whether they’d killed pigs or cattle that day, or to the farm to check the new batch of berries and vegetables.

What could she do—the Lord just had that big of an appetite.

In her eyes, the Lord was frugal, so he chose the cheapest shrimp, crabs, and clams. What a hard life~

And just as she stepped off the docks, some noise came from behind her.

"Wait! Auntie, wait for me..."

Susan turned around and saw a kid of about seven or eight running toward her, both hands lifting the front of his shirt like he was cradling some kind of treasure.

"What is it?" Susan greeted the child who had run up in front of her, thinking something had happened.

"Huff... huff... I picked these, I want to give them to My Lord."

The child ran up and, not even caring about his ragged breathing, opened his hands. In the shirt he had bunched up was a small pile of shells.

Susan was a local, not to mention she dealt with those fishermen all the time, so of course she could tell that these mismatched shells were nowhere near as good as the carefully selected ones from the fishermen.

But without a doubt, these were shells the child had dug up himself at the shore. His rolled-up pant legs were soaked by seawater, the gaps between his fingers and toes were packed with sand and mud, and the tender face already bore traces left by wind and sun.

"My..." The sight tugged something in her memory. Looking at the little boy in front of her, a maternal smile unknowingly surfaced on Susan’s face, and she raised a hand to reach out.

"Auntie?"

The child’s puzzled voice snapped Susan’s mind back to reality. She might have realized her own slip, and her expression turned complicated; she could only give an awkward little smile.

The hand she had extended instead went to take those shells, as she asked:

"Why give them to the Lord?"

"Because..." As soon as he began, the child’s eyes inexplicably turned red, and his words stuck in his throat.

Very soon, as she listened to him, Susan understood. His family wasn’t from the earliest batches of refugees; they had made their own way here.

They used to live by the river, but war had destroyed their home, and they had no choice but to flee.

There had been five in the family. His Big Brother was taken away by the conscription officers, and his mother died on the road while they were fleeing.

The only ones who made it to Hamlet were his father and the two children—him and his older sister, who was a few years ahead of him.

After arriving here, his father went back to his old trade. He couldn’t afford to rent a boat, and he couldn’t get a loan, so under the Lord’s policies he joined the official fleet to fish.

It wasn’t anything great, but at least the family had settled down in Hamlet, and their past suffering seemed to have become something behind them.

The pressure of raising two children made the father take on another job in the patrol team to make ends meet. It was tiring, but the money kept adding up, and soon he would have been able to rent a boat of his own.

That was when the accident happened: monsters attacked the coast. His father wasn’t on the roster for that day’s patrol, but when he heard the bell, he still grabbed his harpoon and went out.

And that one step out the door, he never came back...

What they got was a death notice, and a bloodstained harpoon, because his father’s mangled body could no longer be identified.

Despair once again shrouded this pitiful family; hardship seemed determined not to let them go.

"But the Lord won’t forget you. Have you run into some kind of trouble?" Susan seemed to feel the child’s pain, but she didn’t sink into it; instead, she stressed this point.