Build a Human Empire by Creating Clans

“Did you feel the wrath of God?”

Leo trembled, but narrowed his eyes and shook his head cautiously.

I laughed and slapped him on the back to send him away, looking at each one of his gazes focused on me.

gulp······

At the smell of boiling meat, someone could not resist their instincts and swallowed in hunger.

Could it be just saliva? I could hear a growling sound.

‘What value is a belief that can’t even satisfy hunger?’

I laughed silently.

“I said I would protect you who live in my land. Humans in my land do not serve wolves. Humans may serve humans, but they do not serve animals. If you cannot follow these words, leave immediately.”

“…”

No one answered my words.

Instead, her eyes trembled, her shoulders trembled, and her legs trembled to let her fear out.

It must be the appearance of refusing to abandon the remaining faith until the end.

I erased my solemn expression, cast a benevolence, and lowered my voice.

“I am different from the self-proclaimed god that you all believe in, who does not reveal his appearance or voice. I am here in front of you. And I promised to protect you from being hunted. And I will give you land so that you will not starve and eat your neighbor. Are you still worried about this?”

The shaking stopped.

Pioneers looked at each other and carefully received the meat.

And when someone puts a piece of meat into the boiling water like Leo, they follow suit.

The action ceased when the pot was so full that it overflowed with water.

“…Horbid.”

Belatedly, someone else muttered the wolf’s name out of anxiety.

Wouldn’t there be some punishment for the crime of committing a child of God?

Like Leo, they were afraid, but soon, when nothing happened, the anxiety disappeared, and a relief as if a heavy burden had been lifted appeared on everyone’s faces.

It convinced me that their faith in wolves was gone.

‘Man is a free being. Even if you have no choice but to serve someone, you should do it for the same human being. How can you serve an asshole?’

Watching the well-cooked meat being taken out and shared, I leaned against the fence.

A boy came up to me with a slightly frightened expression and handed me a bowl of porridge.

“D-eat it…”

I looked down at the porridge bowl.

It was a piece of wooden bowl.

It contained porridge made from oats and wolf meat.

In my previous life, oatmeal was oatmeal, and oatmeal was a healthy food.

But here oats were a symbol of poverty.

It was a crop used as livestock feed, and if there were no livestock, it was used as food.

Even now is the time to start sowing oats.

The oats in the bowl must have been harvested and hidden last year.

It’s obvious what kind of taste old grains taste.

I took the bowl and took a bite.

‘It doesn’t taste good.’

It just tastes like grainy oats and tough meat that lingers in your mouth.

I inadvertently swallowed, holding back my face from crumpling.

‘I’ll make one for you.’

Calliope’s thoughts were read.

‘done.’

I saw pioneers sitting on the dirt floor and eating.

They were laughing at how good it was.

Eating this fishy meat?

Or because I promised to protect them?

Either way, confusion welled up in me watching them.

It was a feeling I hadn’t felt when accepting Deus Ex as a game.

From a distance it is a comedy, and from close up it is a tragedy.

Now that virtual reality has become reality, I was just a human being.

In a world where humans live unhuman lives.

‘Is it natural to be taken as a slave if necessary, to be hunted but not to have the right, and to be bitten to death by a bastard for religious reasons? How funny do humans look?’

It wasn’t simply because humans were weak or because the heterogeneous race was tyrannical.

It was because humans themselves gave up resistance and sold each other to protect themselves.

‘Even a hare bites a fox when cornered. But humans in this world. Kings, nobles, and priests have never been bitten. When I had to bite and resist, I sold my own people to seek safety. With such a heart, how can I say that I am a king, a nobleman, and a proud tribe and not a monkey?’

Suppressing the boiling disgust, I put the lukewarm oatmeal into my mouth.

‘Humans should never be treated like this. Humans were not born to be enslaved. Human potential is limitless. If only I could gather the skills that I cut from the inside and send them out there. No race will ever look down on humans.’

Therefore, mankind must unite.

We need to get rid of the parasites that eat away at humanity and unite the divided world.

‘And I’ll have to do that.’

wind of change

###

After a few days, Kistler returned to Olymus.

A group of pioneers followed in his footsteps.

A pioneer who ran away when Laeragon came hunting.

Pioneers who heard the proclamation and joined from each village.

The total number was close to 300.

‘That’s too many.’

Kistler didn’t show it outwardly, but inwardly he was worried.

The defectors were originally villagers of Olymus, so it didn’t matter at all.

The problem was the people who joined from each village.

Olymus was the smallest of the frontier villages.

Whether they could be accommodated, that was Kistler’s concern.

‘If it had been before the lord came, I would have refused. Since the lord is here, I can’t stop the migration on my own…’

Some came from each village to check whether the proclamation was true, but most of them moved to Olymus to settle down.

‘I must have thought that it would be safer around the lord.’

Kistler saw a man pulling a cart loaded with children.

What is the reason why they decided to move when they had children and needed to plow the field?

Raeragon’s hunting was due to heavy plunder that he took lightly.

Kistler let out a small sigh as he recalled the village burned and destroyed by the hands of a different race.

‘Horvid. Why do you only give us trials?’

In my heart, I recited a complaint that had nothing left to say about religiousness, as a habit.

When Kistler was a young monk of the Wolf Church, he was a promising talent in the Church.

However, he suddenly had a dream of becoming like the prophet who led mankind to the western land.

‘I wanted to be like a prophet who received God’s revelation and became a shepherd of mankind.’

It was a vain dream, and it did not take long to realize the sharpness of reality.

‘I should have listened to the dissuade of the brothers.’

More than 10 years have passed since I became a pioneer from a monk.

The fierce faith and strong passion that I had at the age of 20 have lost their luster.

Kistler’s life is just living one day and living the next.

He was just going through life because death hadn’t taken him yet.

‘However…’

Kistler remembered Edar.

A young lord who remained aloof even when a horse’s hoof brushed his face.

I recalled the image of him proudly claiming his title in front of the elven prince.

‘Why did I feel faith at that time?’

Power went into the hand holding the reins.

The forgotten spiritual response at that time stimulated one side of my heart again.

The shudder spreading from my chest made my body tremble, and I tried not to show it by straining my neck.

‘no. Now is not the time to think in vain. When I arrive in Olymus today, I will tell the lord about the migrants…’

Kistler pulled the reins and stopped the horse.

“huh?”

“What’s going on?”

Those who followed stopped and tilted their heads.

Anxiety appeared on his face as if something had changed.

“no···.”

Kistler, who was about to reply that it was nothing, opened his mouth and blinked.

‘How did this happen?’

I saw the changed scenery of Olymus.

Kistler was confused enough to wonder if he had come to the wrong place.

‘It’s not one or two buildings that didn’t exist. Is that house… a permanent residence?’

There was a wooden house on the outskirts of Olymus.

It was a one-story, square, fairly large house.

Wouldn’t the four houses of the villagers be similar when combined?

It was divided into long and wide areas in a checkerboard format centered on houses.

It did not block entry and exit like a fence, but a furrow was dug to mark the boundary.

‘what···?’

This was rare in the frontier as well as inland.

Whether it was public land or private land, the manor was a community.

It was rare to clearly demarcate the land.

In particular, it was the first time I had seen farmland divided into rectangles.

“hmm···.”

Unable to guess the young lord’s will, he lowered his gaze down the furrow.

The furrowed area extended to the river in the south, and there was also a wooden building on the river.

Kistler found a villager just coming out of the building.

The villager was holding a bowl in both hands, and the bowl contained white powder.

Kistler noticed that the powder was ground wheat.

‘Did you fix the mill?’

When the elves came to Olymus and forbade them from entering the forest, it was the mill and the public stove that they destroyed along with the smithy as an example.

Unlike blacksmiths, mills and furnaces were facilities that could be repaired without a blacksmith, if there was something left.

However, due to the plundering of tribes such as goblins and orcs that followed, they could not play their arms.

There was not enough food to last until the next harvest.

They had to search for food to satisfy their hunger by searching nearby forests and riversides.

It has been over two months since I filled my stomach with oats soaked in cold water.

‘Smoke… access to the forest is possible, so I must have found firewood.’

Smoke was rising from what appeared to be a fire pit.

Just looking at the smoke gave me the illusion that I could smell bread baking.

It’s been a long time since I couldn’t even eat meat, but when did I eat freshly baked bread?

It seemed that life, which had been heading for an endless downhill road, was returning to normal, so Kistler smiled faintly, forgetting about the worries of a moment ago.

“You’re already using your hands like this. That’s amazing.”

“Maybe it’s real.”

“Umm… I wish that was the case.”

The village chiefs who accompanied him in the neighboring pioneer village were sukdeok.

They, too, had been familiar with Olymus’ situation.

Mutual exchange is indispensable in frontiers where everything is lacking.

When the defectors came from Olymus, they thought that something had come.

However, I heard that the lord had arrived and kicked out the elves.

I wanted to believe it, but it was hard to believe, and I accompanied him to see it with my own eyes.

‘It was hard to believe even I saw it in person, but how can people who haven’t seen it believe it?’

Kistler did not regard the chiefs’ suspicions as foolish.

From noble mtl dot com

Even if you are careful and careful, losing everything with one small mistake is the life of a pioneer.

Rather, it was unusual to see them already trying to relax.

“Who are those people?”

“Looking at the clothes, it looks like the lord’s vassal…”

If you follow the gaze of the village chiefs, you can see the villagers and some others.

They were distinguished from the villagers by wearing quilted armor or wearing armor around their waists.

Among them, Kistler found the man who accompanied Edar when he was appointed in the field.

‘A vassal working in the field?’

Is it just a field?

A person setting up a makeshift kiln in the field and baking bricks, a person stacking lumber cut down in the forest next to the manor house, and a person holding a wooden hoe at the far end and making a furrow to draw a boundary.

The people who moved twice as fast as the villagers and did their job were Edar’s retainers.

‘To think that a vassal who is no different from an aristocrat is doing things that only lowly people can do.’

I was as surprised as when I witnessed the change in the village.

Kistler lived as a child of border nobles before becoming a monk.

Therefore, he was a knight in his own way, a vassal of the lord, so he knew better than anyone how much those with high noses hated getting dirt on their bodies.

He was a quasi-noble brat who hated digging trenches or even entering them during confrontations between territories.

No matter how much hands were lacking, it was possible to move so enthusiastically, Kistler doubted the vassals’ identities.

‘Are you a mercenary?’

While thinking about it, as soon as I headed to Olymus, I saw the young lord.

“Edar.”

As Kistler dismounted and approached, a woman in armor stopped him.

He recalled that she was a knight who had the upper hand in a duel with Raeragon.

It was beautiful, but there was no expression on her face, and when her blue eyes turned to Kistler, she seemed to realize what it was like to have a cold soul.

###

“hmm. for a moment.”

At Calliope’s call, I knew that the village chief had returned with a group.

After making them wait for a while, he tapped the floor with the stick he held in his right hand.

There was a drawing I had drawn on the dirt floor, and Griff was looking down from the side.

We were talking about urban planning.

Now that the Yeongju Hall was completed, it was necessary to briefly explain what would be built around it, where and how far the walls would go, where the roads would go, and how the farmland would be divided.

“Did you remember?”

“mmm! I remembered.”

Grif grabbed his chin and shook his neck from side to side with a grunt.

Because it was drawn on the dirt floor, I had to cram it into my head before the blueprint was erased.

“How come, it seems like I’m only doing things that are completely different from my job…”

I ignored Grif’s grumbling and stared at the dirt floor where the plans were drawn.

‘It’s very inconvenient because there is no paper.’

In my previous life, it was paper that I did not feel burdened even if I used it like water.

In the present life, the very act of using paper has become proof of one’s own wealth.

It was because the raw material for paper was made through the hands of elves.

In a situation where the representative system extremely proposed exchanges between humans and other races, it was not easy for the elves’ hands to reach the humans.

The vast majority of humans used wooden tablets, papyrus, and parchment as recording media.

‘The only way to get the paper of the goblin is through the smuggler.’

The problem is that it is difficult to obtain sufficient quantities through smugglers.

The problem is that even if you get it, it is too expensive to see it as a benefit.

‘If you think about the future, it’s better to invent papermaking.’

Not the elves of this world, but the human papermaking that was invented on Earth.

Thanks to his achievements, he clearly remembered how to make it.

I looked at Kistler when I was counting on paper development.

“You brought a lot of unknown faces, Kistler.”

“I apologize.”

Glancingly, Kistler gave notice to the group behind him, and everyone prostrated themselves.

“done. stand up.”

Among the crowd that stood up, there were those who were looking at them very closely.

It was obvious who was the one whose expression was tense as if he was guilty.

“Are those the people who ran away?”

“That’s right.”

Seeing that Kistler was about to prostrate again, I raised my hand to stop him.

“I forgive everything in the past. There will be no punishment, so live your life faithfully.”

“thank you!”

“And the rest?”

“People from each village came to see the lord. Other than that…”

It’s obvious if it’s not a defector or a village chief.

“Are you an immigrant?”

“···yes.”

When I counted, it was half of the number of people brought.

Kistler’s expression, which had been straightened because the defector was not punished, hardened again.

Isn’t it like bringing more migrants than residents without any countermeasures?

It was a serious matter that could lead to the collapse of the estate.

I gestured to Griff, who was standing idle.

“Determine the area and help build a dwelling right away.”

“oh. It’s worth the hard work.”

Griff blew a whistle and called the people who were doing their jobs together.

The people of Kistler’s family divided the people brought by Kistler into defectors and immigrants.

The defectors were sent into Olymus to live as before, and the migrants were dispersed by designating the area drawn on the outskirts for each household.

And materials that had been piled up around the Yeongju Hall were brought in and distributed.

Since the settlers were all pioneers, makeshift homes were easy to build.

All they needed was materials to raise the house, and I expected the immigrants to come, so I prepared them in advance.

‘Everyone must have brought something. There are also smoked meats. No problem until the next harvest.’

The leftover uneaten meat in the village warehouse was cooked with smoke.

Since there was no salt, it could not be stored for a long time, so it had to be consumed right away.

Anyway, when I think of the immigrants, I have a sheep that will soon run out, but I had Calliope.

If you catch it, it was meat that was replenished the next day.

Beasts that bred without natural enemies were everywhere, and to Calliope, beasts of prey were no different from ants.

‘It must be faster for the next harvest to come than for the wild beast to dry up.’

I gave caution while looking at the heads of each village.

“We are no longer accepting relocations within the territory this year. I will accept it only if it is impossible to maintain the village.”

“Yes, Lord.”

It won’t be a problem if you relocate more.

If the ban was not issued, it was good to see that a great migration would take place at this time.

‘I have to accept only those coming from outside my territory.’

“Looks like you have a question for me. Things are busy, so ask briefly and clearly.”

Among the village chiefs, the eldest came forward.

“You are honored…”

“I told you to keep it short.”

“Your lord said that all the villages you heard the proclamation belong to. But we have all served different masters, and I would like to ask how that is possible.”

All I inherited from Sudret was Olymus and its surrounding territories.

Pioneering villages within the territory recognized by the representative system originally had different owners.

It was an advantage for the village chief to ask.

“Didn’t you hear from Kistler? All non-human races have recognized the domination of your land. Most of your masters are not human, and if they are human, aren’t there other races above them?”

“That’s right, but…”

The village chief hesitated, unable to speak, and bowed deeper.

It is doubtful whether I have really been recognized as the possession of the territory by the different races.

It was a natural attitude because they were the ones who encountered the different races more closely than anyone else.

I let out a low laugh and woke the village chief.

“If you don’t believe me, go back and wait. Time will give the answer.”

The village chief blurted out, “But.”

“Soon it will be time to pay the rent. Who should we pay the rent to?”

“Don’t pay.”

“yes?”

“When the tax collector comes, tell him what Kistler said. Whatever they say, hold me accountable. I will not take any tax from you.”

The village chiefs raised their heads in surprise, then lowered their heads again.