At the beginning of November, the first snow of the year fell in the far northeast.

"Scud" Parker, a special correspondent of the "Balle Weekly", took the morning train to the valley village commune for a three-day trip to the countryside, despite the wind and snow. The four leaders of the commune in the valley – Malik, the commune's director, Peter, the repuber, Nikolai, the sheriff, and the druid-druid Pavra – are of course the protagonists of Peter's interview, and the recently thriving "brewery" is also featured in the article.

The next day, Parker returned to the town of Big Rabbit's Nest and published a newsletter entitled "A New Look for the Country," which was first published in the weekend issue of Balle Weekly, and then won a silver medal in the "Country Style" essay contest organized by the headquarters of the Fatherland Daily in Krasburg. As a result, Parker "Scud" received a whopping 500 gold tale. The grant allowed him to buy a mansion with a basement and attic in Big Rabbit's Nest and become a nationally renowned young journalist.

The winning works of the "Rural Collection" essay contest were successively published in the social edition of the "Motherland Daily", and then reprinted by other regional newspapers and periodicals. Surprisingly, the famous scholar Liszt Keynes also read Parker's award-winning report, and wrote a special article to extend it, launching the initiative of "developing township enterprises" and "invigorating the township economy".

Liszt Keynes's writings have been recognized by academics as the "bellwether" of Far Eastern economic policy, and they have stirred up a thousand waves of academic articles on the fashionable topic of "township enterprises", written by independent scholars such as Liszt Keynes as well as government officials and advisers by literati. Zhengming, the academic magazine with the largest circulation in the Far East, devoted a special feature to "Township Enterprises" and selected insightful articles for publication. Another magazine with a greater influence on the business community, Transaction, launched a similar call for articles, the former remained at the level of academic discussion on paper, with more depth of thought but little to do with ordinary people, and the latter had a more action-oriented readership. The day after Liszt Keynes's article was reprinted in The Transaction, several business owners engaged in food processing and sales hurriedly boarded the train heading north to the valley village commune to inspect the village brewery.

Just a month later, corn syrup and shochu labelled "from the village of the valley" were on the shelves of Krasbourg's grocery stores. Roland specially bought a bottle of soju from Valley Village to taste, and the taste was quite good.

In previous years, the countryside was deserted after winter, and the countrymen had nothing to do but drink, brag, play cards and gamble in taverns. This year, there was a change, and the front page of the Fatherland Daily reprinted Mr. Liszt Keynes's article on promoting the development of "township enterprises", and attached an editorial to affirm it. Anyone with the slightest political sensitivity knows that the editorial of the Fatherland Daily represents the official position of the Kolas government, and the agricultural processing workshops that have grown spontaneously in various places have been officially recognized, like a hormone, doubling up their activity, and all kinds of strange village workshops have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain.

Roland is well aware that most rural enterprises will be eliminated in the cruel market competition, but this is the inevitable price to pay for the economic transformation of small farmers in towns and villages, and those enterprises that survive the test will inject new blood into the national economy of the Far East and deliver lasting and strong growth momentum!

Roland's promotion of "township enterprises" has only followed the trend and has not invested much energy, and his current focus is mainly on the "census office" to prepare for the upcoming national census.

The complexity of the work can be seen from the "questionnaire" prepared by Lyudmila and Tonya. The table was repeatedly revised for more than half a month, and the survey items were added, deleted, and merged several times, and finally summarized into two categories: "conventional" and "unconventional", with a total of more than 100 census items.

The "routine census items" refer to the number of family members, place of origin, race, age, gender, education level, income level, etc., and do not need to be explained to the respondents.

"Unconventional census items" are relatively few and their content is more subtle. For example, one of the options for "paranormal features" asks whether the other family member, mainly teenagers, has abnormal psychiatric symptoms such as visual and auditory hallucinations, special skills such as memorability and rapid mental arithmetic, or strange hair color, eye color, and other rare physical characteristics, such as horns on the head and tails.

What is the purpose of such a survey?

If this is not clearly explained, the families surveyed may have some misgivings, such as speculation that the government is going to put the deviant teenagers in an insane asylum, and thus resist the investigators.

It is true that abnormal mental states, speech behaviors, and physical traits may be manifestations of pathologies, but Roland's purpose is not to do this, in fact, to select talents with the talent of casting spells or supernatural abilities through the investigation of anomalous traits.

For example, if a child often claims to be able to see strange creatures or hear strange movements, but normal people are unaware of what he has seen, this may indicate that the child has some kind of disease that causes hallucinations, but it is also less likely that the child has a particularly developed perceptual talent for the existence of natural spirits or virtual ghosts, and if cultivated, may grow into a druid, a priest, or a paladin in the future.

Extraordinary memory or calculation often means superhuman intelligence, and such teenagers are good seedlings for mage training.

Abnormal physiological characteristics, such as golden eyes and blue skin, may be due to their special bloodlines, such as dragon veins, demon descendants (Tevelyn), and divine descendants (Asmo), the blood of their ancestors is manifested in them, and the special physiological structure is often accompanied by extraordinary charismatic attributes, such teenagers are suitable for training in the direction of careers such as warlocks and poets.

There are also a very small number of respondents who have shown the talent to perform "tricks" or low-level psychic abilities at a young age, which proves that they have awakened the potential of warlock talents or psychic abilities, which is worthy of vigorous cultivation.

Roland designed the census project with the purpose of searching for talents with spell-casting and manifest potential in the Far East, and when the statistics obtained from the census were collected in his hands in the future, he could summon these teenagers suspected of having special talents to come to Krasbourg for interviews to confirm with their own eyes whether they had the special talents of intelligence, perception, charm and other spiritual attributes, and even obtained the talent of casting spells or supernatural abilities through bloodline inheritance.