Bon voyage

"However..."

The eldest son still had some doubts. "Over at the lord's demesne, are the beehives really being moved that fast?"

"Of course fast!" The father nodded heavily. "That group of serfs led by Master Andrei don't even have to work during the day anymore; they're moving beehives every single night!"

"Yeah! Very fast!" The younger son joined the discussion. "When we passed by the lord's demesne on our corvee duties, that plot of buckwheat was already in bloom. It was still fine when we came by last night, but by tonight, a brand-new path had already been cut through it. Come tomorrow morning, they'll definitely have beehives set up all along the sides."

"In that case—" The eldest son quickly recalled the plots that were already fitted with beehives, compared them with the scope of the demesne in Eccles Village, and soon reached a conclusion. "Won't it take just a few days to finish all the beehives the lord's demesne needs?"

"Mhm!" The father nodded gravely. "Looks like it should be about that time."

"I heard from the neighbors—" The younger son said uncertainly. "By then, won't there still be quite a lot of beehives left in the forest?"

"Yeah—" By the hearth, the mother chimed in. "When I took the children out to gather firewood this morning, I saw several more. And that was during the summer corvee when we couldn't dawdle, so we just skirted the outermost edges of the forest. If you go deeper inside, there must be even more."

"Good!" The father clapped his hands heavily. "That's wonderful!"

"Wonderful!" The eldest son was equally excited. "Father, we might just be in luck!"

"Very likely!" The younger son was also filled with yearning. "He went out of his way to take a detour, a huge detour, just to come past our side! There has to be a reason for Los to do that, right?"

"What reason?"

The left-behind girl could barely understand any of the conversation between her father and brothers. It wasn't until she heard this line that she asked in a daze, "Reason? Didn't Brother Los already say so? The path over here is a bit easier to walk on!"

"Ha, a bit easier to walk on!"

Father, eldest son, and younger son all burst into laughter simultaneously.

Patting the girl's head, the father said, "A path is just a path. What's there to be easy or difficult to walk on?"

"However—"

After laughing for a moment, the father rubbed his chin. "Since Los said those words, we still need to think it over carefully."

Similar conversations were taking place in other wooden houses that Wu Qingchen had passed by that day.

"He stood right by the edge of our family's strip field and watched for quite a while?"

In another wooden house, listening to the report of yet another left-behind child, another parent wore a smile.

"When passing our family's strip field, Los shook his head?"

In yet another wooden house, a parent's expression changed drastically.

"What? When he was about to reach our strip field, Los took a detour onto a different path?"

In yet another wooden house, the smile on the parent's face froze.

The next morning.

After eating breakfast in the cowherd's mansion and finishing his workout in the secret kitchen, Wu Qingchen began walking briskly along Eccles Village's future "village loop road."

"Los! Brother Los!"

Passing by the wooden house designated as Village Loop Road No. 1, the left-behind girl stood up from afar and waved in greeting.

"Good day. What is it?" Wu Qingchen responded with a smile.

"Nothing, Brother Los." The girl stood there with her hands behind her back, shaking her head vigorously.

"Oh, then I'll be going ahead." Wu Qingchen nodded and continued forward.

Wu Qingchen did not notice that behind him, the girl kept her eyes fixed firmly on his movements. The moment Wu Qingchen rounded the corner, the girl immediately dashed forward onto the path, walked to the spot where Wu Qingchen had swept the debris aside with a wooden pole and carefully inspected, and waved her sickle, quickly hacking away at the weeds and bushes on the ground.

Village Loop Road No. 5 wooden house.

"Los! Brother Los!"

At the intersection of two paths, just as Wu Qingchen was about to make a turn, the left-behind boy from the neighboring wooden house rushed over rapidly and grabbed Wu Qingchen's arm unceremoniously. "Where are you going?"

"Didn't I tell you yesterday?" Wu Qingchen found it a bit strange, but still replied, "To the lord's demesne!"

"If you're going over there, you can go past our family's strip field!" The boy pulled on Wu Qingchen and refused to let go.

"I told you that yesterday too!" Wu Qingchen felt even stranger. "The path over there is a bit easier to walk on."

"No, the path by our family's strip field is just as easy to walk on." The boy tugged hard on Wu Qingchen's arm. "Come on, Brother Los, follow me."

"All right."

Physical training was a long-term endeavor; missing a few steps on a given day wouldn't have any impact.

Since this fellow was so enthusiastic, Wu Qingchen followed along.

"Holy crap!"

Rounding the corner and taking just one look, Wu Qingchen couldn't help but exclaim.

"What?" Coming from the 21st century on Earth, the exclamation uttered in Chinese was naturally incomprehensible to the boy. "Brother Los, what did you say?"

"No, nothing." Wu Qingchen instinctively waved his hand, his eyes wide as he stared at the path before him.

The uneven ground had been leveled with stones and soil. On both sides of the path, weeds had been cleared away completely, and any branches from roadside trees extending over the path had been thoroughly chopped off.

"W-what is this all about?"

"To make the path easier to walk on!" the boy replied.

"I mean, why did you guys do this?"

Wu Qingchen took a look around. This section of the path was about a hundred meters long; while the workload for clearing it wasn't astronomical, it definitely fell into the category of time-consuming and labor-intensive.

"To make it a bit easier for you to walk, Brother Los."

"Is that so?" Wu Qingchen tilted his head and asked.

"Mhm." The boy nodded hesitatingly.

Hmm.

Pondering for a moment, Wu Qingchen began employing the secret trick for tricking children taught by the Earth training team.

A few minutes later, Wu Qingchen's mouth was wide open. "I'm looking for strip fields suitable for moving beehives?"

"Mhm." Realizing he had probably been tricked into spilling the beans, the boy looked somewhat dejected and simply confessed everything. "My father and my brothers all said so."

"There's no such thing!" Wu Qingchen shook his head vigorously. "I really was just taking a casual stroll, and it truly has nothing to do with where the beehives will be placed later."

Village Loop Road No. 11 wooden house.

A boy and a girl stood together at the fork in the path, glaring angrily at each other.

"Brother Los!" "Brother Los!"

Seeing Wu Qingchen appear, the two children charged forward together.

"Don't pull me!"

Before the two children could get close, Wu Qingchen raised both hands. "I know the paths beside both of your strip fields are quite easy to walk on, and I'll walk down both of them. Besides, remember to tell your fathers tonight: I really was just taking a casual stroll, and it truly has nothing to do with where the beehives will be moved later."

"Did you hear? Los is looking for a suitable place to move beehives."

"Yeah! And Los refuses to admit it."

"He claims he's just taking a casual stroll."

"Haha, a casual stroll."

Earth.

"Careless, sloppy, self-righteous!"

In a certain conference room, the moderator slammed the table so hard it rattled.

"Just taking a stroll, modifying the pace of a brisk walk to turn it into a fairly ordinary walking style—the indigenous people of the medieval world would never develop any bad associations—"

After mimicking the presenter's speech from two days ago with striking similarity, the moderator slammed the table hard once more. "And the result? The result? What was the result?!"

The attendees sat in absolute silence.

After a very, very long time, someone finally spoke up timidly, "Well... well, the consequences aren't that serious..."

"You call these consequences not serious? Wu Qingchen has walked past all those strip fields; can we afford not to place beehives there now? Those indigenous people were out there in the middle of the night, rallying friends and family, mobilizing the whole household—they were practically ready to pull up grass roots to eat, practically ready to lick the mud clean with their tongues! If we don't give them some sweetness after all this, will anyone ever go to such painstaking lengths to butter up Wu Qingchen again?"

"Well... well, when we do the planning later, we'll just give them the beehives then."

"Give them beehives?!" the moderator roared angrily. "You make it sound so easy to 'just give them beehives'! Yes, our department can propose certain recommendations—just recommendations, do you understand? The specific planning has to be done by other departments, do you know that? The beehive planning department and the road planning department have already cursed my ancestors down to the eighteenth generation, do you know that?!"

"It's one thing for the beehive planning department to curse people, but what does that have to do with the road planning department?" the speaker asked, feeling quite aggrieved.

"Is your brain flooded with water?!"

The moderator roared, "The roadside is going to be hung full of beehives! If it were you, would you choose to do your village loop road fitness workouts in a place like that?"

"I—"

The speaker slumped back into his seat despondently.

"Forget it."

A colleague beside him patted his shoulder and comforted him, "Actually, you can't entirely blame him. Who could have foreseen that when Mr. Wu Qingchen was asked to casually check out the road conditions, he would absentmindedly pick up a wooden pole and carry it in his hand?"