Normalizing the North (5)
With a Domain Expansion lasting a mere 0.2 seconds, I had locked down the North and rooted out the crooked merchants who had sunk their claws into good Northern folk. But that was nowhere near the end of it.
Because the North was already broken in more ways than I could count.
So broken, in fact, that I genuinely had no idea where to start.
"This is… a grand duchy?"
I had shaken down five mid-sized merchant houses and walked away with two hundred fifty thousand shillings for the public coffers plus twenty-five thousand in personal operating funds. I had zero intention of stuffing any of that into my own pockets. The plan was to put the territory's manpower to work and use the money as seed capital to jump-start the entire Northern economy.
Problem was, two hundred fifty thousand shillings was a drop in the ocean when it came to salvaging a sprawling mass of land—most of which was worthless frozen dirt.
Worse, the disasters hitting this place day in and day out were piling up too fast to ignore.
For example—
"Young Master. Word from Egen Village: a monster raid killed roughly ten people and left more than thirty wounded. Several are still missing…"
"Young Master. In Terondo Village, three children who went out for water have vanished. The territorial soldiers found tracks, but by the time they reached them, the kids were already frozen solid…"
"Young Master. Contact with Big Sur Village went dead. When a party finally got there, they found the entire settlement wiped out by a snowstorm that rolled through…"
"Young Master. Mapri Village ran out of food. Every able-bodied adult male who went out hunting has disappeared. The survivors are begging to migrate to another village before the deep freeze kills the rest of them…"
Can you believe that?
Those were the reports from the past month alone.
Four villages hit by catastrophe in a single month. Two of them had effectively ceased to exist.
And that was just the important stuff, never mind the minor incidents.
At this point I honestly couldn't decide whether to despair at the North's hellish environment or marvel at the sheer survival instinct of people who still lived on land like this.
But the real head-scratcher was this:
"Hahaha! Young Master, praise for you is spreading through the capital of the territory."
"For me?"
"Indeed. You put a stop to the continental merchant houses' extortion and restored fair trade. Several villages that opened dealings under the new terms have seen their income surge, and when they learned it was the fruit of your negotiations, they rejoiced and even sent additional tribute."
And the truly staggering part was that this counted as an improvement.
"Looks like the Zeros Merchant Group and the other four houses are moving fast."
"They did sink a considerable sum into the initial outlay, after all. They'll have to scramble if they want to recoup it."
Max, the old butler who managed the tax ledgers, couldn't wipe the smile off his face.
Was this relativity theory in action?
The reports stacking up on my desk still painted a picture of unrelenting misery, yet fixing a single trade category by a modest margin had sent Max's happiness index rocketing upward.
Which only proved how utterly bottomed-out the North's situation had been.
So why, exactly, had the North's environment gone this catastrophically to hell?
Climate? Population? Local specialties? Technological lag?
You could list a dozen problems, but the biggest one was singular.
"With this, the volume of support goods we can ship to the Great Wall should ease as well."
The Great Wall.
The reason the North existed—and the reason the North was dying.
It all came down to that thing.
"Is Father still stationed at the Great Wall?"
"Yes, he is. He had intended to come down briefly when he heard you had collapsed, but once we informed him that you had recovered and distinguished yourself in the negotiations with the continental merchants, he was quite satisfied and said he would continue directing the front line from the Wall as planned. Apparently this monster wave is even more severe than the last."
Originally, the North hadn't even been part of the Empire.
At the Empire's founding, the northern reaches of the continent had been the domain of barbarian tribes—that was the North. The great chieftain who ruled those lands cut a deal with the Empire's first emperor, and from that bargain the current Northern Grand Ducal House—the Wintershield family—was born.
There was no Wintershield family back then, and no grand duchy either. Just a vast wasteland and a handful of tents.
The first emperor had lured the chieftain into the Empire with enormous concessions. Not only did he bestow the title of Grand Duke—a rank so rare that even after a thousand years of continental hegemony, only two such seats still existed—he poured massive funds, technology, magical resources, and manpower into building the grand duchy as it stood today.
I'd wondered how a halfway decent city could even exist on a frozen hellscape with no native technology or magic. Turns out it was all Imperial engineering.
With the grand duchy built, Northerners who had been little better than savages finally tasted the benefits of civilization. Even now, when a village could vanish overnight, survival rates had jumped dramatically compared to a thousand years ago. That said enough on its own.
But there is no such thing as a right without obligation.
The first emperor and the first Northern Grand Duke had sealed a single pact.
To guard the Great Wall.
The Great Wall was this world's answer to the Great Wall of China, built with even more capital and labor than the grand duchy itself. Its purpose was the same as its earthly counterpart: to shield the Empire from northern incursions. The difference was that Earth's wall had held back northern peoples. This one held back monsters.
Beyond the Great Wall lies the White Snowfield—a demonic realm even colder than the North.
The North already had more than its share of monsters specialized in making human life miserable. The White Snowfield was home to the real nightmares—creatures that made those ordinary monsters look like house pets.
Even the Empire, which had somehow planted cities in the middle of permafrost through sheer capital and technology, had never dared attempt a full purge. The best they could do was sink a fortune into a colossal wall and grind endless manpower against it in pure defense.
In blunt terms, the North existed to take the beating so the rest of the Empire wouldn't have to.
And even that was the better option.
Before the Wall, the North itself had been an inhuman hell where people died for sport. Imperial aid and the construction of the Great Wall had finally carved out land fit for human habitation—but the cost had locked the North into a permanent cycle of poverty.
No matter how much money you make, it all gets sucked straight into that Wall. How is any household supposed to get ahead?
It was like a mother working every odd job under the sun, only for a gambling-addict, alcoholic father to smash the furniture every other night and leave nothing. And if a child raised in that house somehow grew up straight? That would be a miracle.
After roughly a thousand years of that, our North had turned into the twisted delivery-boy ace who skipped home training during his rebellious years and learned underworld craft in juvie instead.
Trying to reverse that now? Good luck.
Even when relief funds arrived, the people who could buy rice, kimchi, and side dishes and prepare for a solid tomorrow were the ones who still had a shred of hope left. The ones grinding through a pitch-black present blew it on Häagen-Dazs they could never afford and impulse-bought the Jordans they'd only ever window-shopped. That was the reality.
Even if I had wrung out aid money with negotiation skills that would make a legendary hard bargainer weep, at this rate the North would just fling itself back into the same vicious cycle on its own.
"This won't work."
"Pardon? What won't, Young Master?"
"The military supplies headed for the Great Wall. Send half. No—send a quarter."
"Y-Young Master?! What are you saying?!"
The beaming smile Max had worn while calculating how his bonus would buy chicken for his grandson froze solid—like a mid-level manager who'd just been told the department head's birthday was this month and everyone needed to chip in, bonus or no bonus.
But it couldn't be helped.
No. It wasn't that it couldn't be helped—it shouldn't be helped any other way.
"Even cut that far, it's still twice what we sent last quarter, isn't it?"
"Th-that is true, but…"
"Besides, I earned this money. I'll spend it how I like."
Technically it wasn't mine—it was money earned under my name. Still, putting it to use myself looked a lot better than leaving it to them.
"A commander makes decisions for the whole. The Wall? They can still hold."
That wasn't my thought. That was the original owner's, still lingering in this body.
According to the memories left behind, even this wave had people fretting that it would need twice the usual supply. Which meant anything over double was enough to scrape by.
"What we need to worry about is how to put this money to work."
"Are you saying there is a more meaningful use for it than sending it to the Great Wall?"
"Of course there is."
The North's chronic problems were stacked like mountains—so many I couldn't get a grip on where to start. Looked at another way, though, that meant there were fixes lying around everywhere I put my hands.
This flavor? I'm familiar with it.
The military had always been like that. Decades of rot and bad habits piled high, but chip away at them one by one and somehow things got fixed. A unit's chronic problem that looked unsolvable for thirty years? Send in a division commander and raze the place if you had to—it got resolved one way or another.
"Butler. Gather some people for me."
"People, Young Master? Where are you planning to go all of a sudden…"
"Where do you think?"
I pointed at the nearest village marked on the map.
"The North's problems are everyone's problems. Times like this, you have to get out there on your own two feet."
My favorite frontline main event, no matter how many times I did it.
Division commander's visit. Time for an on-site inspection.
If I had to rank the most miserable events from my time on the front line, the periodic division-commander visits would top the list without contest.
It was the ultra-scale event where a boss mob that belonged quietly in a hunting ground decided to invade the village in person.
The problem? At least a boss mob took damage when you hit it. A division commander you couldn't hit, and no damage numbers popped up either.
So what did you do?
What choice did you have? You just took it on the chin.
It was an event designed to strip a unit bare, so the officers emptied their minds and prepared to get fleeced. That was the fate of a frontline unit.
In that sense, the North was one giant frontline unit—a place that spent its entire existence leaning on a single Great Wall and accepting a lifetime of getting wrecked by monsters.
I wasn't about to leave that alone.
And for all the talk of comparing the North to a frontline unit and the division commander to a boss mob, the truth was that division commanders didn't actually go out there just to thrash their troops.
Take my old three-star octopus general, for instance.
"You want to know why I keep dropping in on the frontline units?"
Once I'd gotten a little closer to him, I'd told the three-star octopus general straight to his face to stop tormenting the kids. His answer:
"Sitting in a high seat doesn't mean you can see everything from above. Sometimes there are things you only notice once you walk down on your own two feet—and only then can you fix them."
The teacher I had once respected most. His answer had been a masterpiece.
And he was right. The things that got fixed because of those visits weren't one or two.
Whatever else you said about him, the words of the man I'd once called my mentor had been true. They had become the backbone of my entire military life.
And those words applied this time too.
"Wait… so you're saying people live here?"
"Heh heh. A bit shabby for the Young Master to stay in, isn't it?"
Shabby?
For fuck's sake, was "shabby" really the word for this level?
What the hell was the Ministry of Health doing? What about the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family?
"Waaaaah!! Daddy!!!"
"Woof woof woof! Hrrrk-hrrrk!"
"Oh dear, just a moment, child. Hey, you! Stop standing there and calm Rox down!"
I had come to the nearest village to start tackling the problems scattered across the North. And instead of the village chief's house, I had walked at random into an ordinary commoner's home.
This was the result.
Under a single roof, people and livestock lived together with no real separation of space. They were greeting the second young master of the grand duchy from what amounted to a dirt floor—and right there on that same floor lay a child's sleeping place. Straw, basically, scattered across the ground.
Is this a house people live in, or a livestock pen?
In the most literal sense, it was a complete mess.