Born As The Daughter of a Lowly Concubine - Chapter 72

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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I was born as the daughter of a lowborn concubine.
Chapter 72
“Greenhouse farming? You speak of Winter Vegetable Cultivation? What sudden thought led you to such an idea?”
“Father, I came to this realization while watching Grandmother’s vitality fade, as I pondered what foods I might prepare for her. In that moment, enlightenment came to me.”
It stands to reason that the ill should eat well.
And surely this principle is not confined to the royal household alone.
Aging and sickness visit all equally, regardless of station. Good food and good medicine make people healthy.
Especially in winter, when nutrition grows scarce—if greenhouse farming could increase our food supply, it would be a blessing for the elderly and the infirm.
After that thought took root in the quarters of the Queen Dowager, I soon sought out the King with this logic and attempted to convince him.
In an age that prized filial piety, it was the strongest hand to play.
“You intend to oversee this yourself?”
“Naturally, I would hire a farmer experienced in growing vegetables, would I not?”
As for land, I have the means to procure it—I should be able to find suitable fields within nearby Gyeonggi Province, lands already used for cultivation, or locate an appropriate site to work within. The same holds for securing a competent farmer.
“Hmm.”
“Furthermore, I intend to teach the people at Siyeongwon a trade. Though I offer them support, they too must find work and become self-reliant, must they not?”
“Not an unwise thought.”
I cannot simply pour money at them endlessly.
“And I am already teaching writing to everyone at Siyeongwon.”
“……Everyone, you say?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Better that I reveal this myself than have it discovered later that I teach writing even to commoners.
Even outside the palace, though rare, there are commoners who can read and write.
Sometimes it stems from a master’s whim, sometimes from natural talent, but it seldom transcends such limits.
Though the King surely knew this, he asked me nonetheless.
“What is your reason for teaching writing even to commoners?”
“Are they not subjects of Joseon? Should they not receive education to master Confucianism and become virtuous people?”
“Even slaves and women?”
“Did Your Majesty not personally teach me writing and have me read books for that same purpose?”
“……That is true.”
Yes, I can see it written all over your face—that’s not quite what I meant.
‘When I was small, you likely held me in your lap and taught me for amusement. Later, you had me learn refinement because I am royalty. You hardly harbored some grand purpose in it all.’
But if I frame it this way, how could he say “No, that is not what I meant”?
“Do you truly believe it meaningful to teach writing to such people?”
“How could learning and study be wrong? If they know writing, they can accomplish more, and it becomes easier for me to assign them tasks. When I wed, I cannot take all the palace maids who now attend me—so I must prepare them beforehand.”
“……Well, I suppose that is true.”
The King wore an expression of slight reluctance. The Crown Prince has not yet married, so the wedding is still a distant matter.
“Moreover, does not agriculture itself require understanding the laws of nature? And surely those who can read will be able to study Agricultural Manuals and record their observations?”
“……That point, you are right about.”
I may have scattered my reasoning somewhat carelessly, but if the King is satisfied, that is all that matters.
Whether greenhouse farming truly benefits all common folk remains uncertain, but if nutrition improves even slightly, it is good work.
And we stand to profit from it.
Besides, greenhouse farming is not the only method of agriculture, so we shall also cultivate vegetables for everyday use.
We might sell them in the market, or supply Siyeongwon directly—it will prove useful in many ways.
‘I ought to charge a premium when selling greenhouse produce to the nobility.’
If word spreads of fresh vegetables in winter, I imagine they will buy without needing to be hawked.
Being scholars, some may refuse to eat what defies nature’s order.
‘If my sick mother wishes to eat such things, would it be filial piety to forbid her? Or would it not?’
One might argue that guiding parents toward the righteous path is itself filial, but could any child truly refuse good food to a sickly parent?
“Your intentions as yet a young princess are admirable. If this is your wish, then proceed as you see fit.”
“Thank you, Father!”
The rest would be confirmed in time; with the King’s approval now secured, implementation did not take long.
Indeed, having the King’s consent made matters far simpler than acting independently.
The royal household possessed both experts and texts on greenhouse construction.
Building a greenhouse on palace grounds without permission would have drawn unwanted attention.
And should anyone later object, I had at least the primary defense that the King had granted verbal approval.
‘Among those at Siyeongwon, children vastly outnumber adults, but adults are not absent. I should select a few from among them. Ah, there are also servants to consider.’
Once the work takes proper shape, I must arrange for the children to participate as well.
Though I teach writing at Siyeongwon, there will surely be those unsuited to it.
Forcing instruction on such people accomplishes nothing.
Better to impart basic reading, writing, and practical knowledge, then assign them to work requiring more physical labor.
‘Even farming requires a decent head on your shoulders, or you’ll botch the whole thing.’
That’s fine. Even if I teach everyone the same way, there will surely be someone who shows promise and works diligently—if that person learns well and leads the rest, it’ll work out somehow.
Of course, in that case, I’ll have to pay that person proportionally higher wages. Treating two people equally would feel unfair to them.
And physical labor wasn’t limited to farming alone, naturally.
***
By the time preparations for Greenhouse Farming were complete, I broached another major undertaking with Ga-i.
“Chickens, you mean?”
“Yes. We can start small at first, but I’d like to raise them in large numbers.”
“Whatever for, in such quantities?”
“I’m thinking of doing some business with eggs and chicken meat.”
Watching the sorry nutritional state of people in this era, it pains me as someone from the modern world.
Of course, wealthy households eat well enough, but how can anyone survive without protein? Especially for growing children, meat is essential.
And the most accessible sources of protein are eggs and chicken meat.
The most common meats in this era are beef and chicken.
Cattle are kept on farms because they’re needed for agricultural work, and chickens are useful both for their morning crow and, even apart from meat, for the eggs they produce—so most households raise them.
Pork, by contrast, is an animal raised solely for its meat, so it’s not kept commonly.
The royal court does operate dedicated ranches for feasts and such, but even there, large-scale raising isn’t widespread.
Cattle eat grass, but pigs are omnivores, so their feed overlaps with human food—making pork a luxury meat.
‘Beef being more common than pork… I still can’t get used to it.’
Given that agricultural output has already risen thanks to the Rice Transplanting Method, it’s not impossible, but it would look like such a waste of grain that I decided to shelve it for now.
I also considered raising rabbits, which I actually attempted at Siyeongwon around the same time as starting the poultry operation, but it failed.
“So there’s a reason people don’t raise rabbits.”
“They jump right over the fences and escape.”
Seong Yoon, who had actually brought the rabbits in, laughed as he spoke beside me, clearly disappointed.
And the children were delighted.
“So, can we eat the rabbits?”
“Well, if we can’t raise them, there’s no choice.”
Though if we had managed to raise them, we would’ve eaten them eventually anyway.
The rabbits of this era aren’t the domestic rabbits I know, but wild mountain hares that have to be caught, and they’re so swift that even capturing them alive is difficult. And even when penned in, they escape.
Their jumping power… it must be nearly two meters.
“Hmm. I thought it would be good—they reproduce well, their hides are useful, and the meat is edible too.”
“Young lady. To think you’d go to such lengths just to feed the children meat…”
“Well, if I’m the only one eating it, wouldn’t that seem a bit off?”
I turned away from the gleaming looks of the Siyeongwon people and abandoned my plans for a rabbit farm.
Our ancestors must have had good reasons for not raising them.
There’s a method of finding less energetic individuals and breeding them selectively, but it’s too much trouble.
For now, I decided to focus on raising chickens in large quantities alone.
Of course, I started by testing chickens at Siyeongwon first.
Since farming couldn’t be done inside the Capital City, greenhouses had to be in Gyeonggi Province, but chickens could be raised even on a modest scale within the capital.
I recruited workers from among the children at Siyeongwon who had actually tried raising them—from hatching chicks all the way to full-grown birds.
It’s simply more efficient to have interested children do the work than to assign it to those who don’t care.
Since no task is completed in just a month or two, I wasn’t rushing the process.
It’s work that takes time, so we’d proceed with it alongside everything else.
‘As long as it works out.’
I had a feeling the number of people at Siyeongwon would grow soon.
***
As expected, winter passed and the population at Siyeongwon swelled dramatically.
Many arrived because of the cold, as I’d anticipated, but there were other reasons too.
“Another baby was left again?”
“So it would seem.”
At Min Sanggung’s words, greeting me on my regular visit to Siyeongwon, I let out a sigh.
In truth, even outside of winter, there were no shortage of people abandoning infants at Siyeongwon. It seemed they came here to leave their children and reduce their mouths to feed when life became too difficult to manage.
“Wait, if people can’t raise a baby, don’t they usually leave it in front of some wealthy house or a noble’s residence—somewhere that looks like it might care for the child?”
“If they do that, the child might simply become a slave in that household, mightn’t they? Here, we raise all of them as free commoners.”
“That’s why they should scout out homes without children and leave the baby there. That way, the family would adopt them as a foundling and raise them properly.”
In the modern era, it’s a practice that has largely died out, but in the past, unwanted infants were wrapped in blankets and left secretly on the doorsteps of other homes.
That foundling was then treated as a blessing delivered to the household—a child who brings good fortune—and raised by that family.
In essence, it was a semi-coercive adoption, intended to make the household raise the abandoned child by reasoning that caring for such a child accumulated merit and brought blessings. After all, once you find an abandoned child on your own doorstep, you can hardly set them back out again.
Yet while some foundlings truly became members of their adoptive families, others were simply kept and worked as slaves, so it was largely a matter of luck.
“But why do you report every single case to me?”
“The children have been insisting that they must receive a name from you, Princess—or rather, from you, young lady.”
Though I received regular reports on the various projects underway, I still made periodic visits to Siyeongwon.
And each time I came, I was besieged with pressure to name the children.
It wasn’t as though a child arrived once or twice—every single time, they all begged me to give the child a name.
“Why do they all want names from me like that?”
“It is because they rely upon you, Princess. Moreover, Ji-a has not yet glimpsed your true station.”
“There may well be others among the sharper ones who’ve caught on.”
This was less a matter of deliberate concealment than a disguise built upon assumption—that a person of such noble rank could never actually visit such a place in person. Could it even be called hiding, really?
In any case, many of the servants were raising children of their own, so the newborns who arrived that way were being raised communally, or so I heard.
Surprisingly, even the younger children looked after the infants well enough, and it proved genuinely helpful.
But I found something about the arrangement unsettling.
‘The memory of my own bleak childhood comes back to me—I couldn’t play because I was too busy caring for a much younger sibling.’
My sister in my past life had faced much the same, I was told, so there was nothing to complain about, unfair as it was…….
Drawing on my own experience, I made sure to instruct Min Sanggung that the children must not fall behind in their studies on account of tending to infants.
It wasn’t as though I were preparing them for the civil service exams—it was only basic, elementary education, after all.
“By the way, what became of what we discussed before?”
“It has been prepared according to your instructions.”
While I was in the midst of conversation with Min Sanggung, a familiar song sung by children’s voices drifted in from beyond the door.
“A~baby, doo-roo! Doo-roo-roo-doo-doo.”
Oh no……!

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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