Chapter 99: Power, Responsibility, and Ability

The rain came down in sheets, dense enough to blot out sky and earth, leaving the world a blur of white.

Victor stood calmly on the balcony, gazing into the hazy curtain of rain beyond, listening to the water strike the rubble below with a rushing hiss, feeling the cool dampness in the air. Yet his heart was a tangle.

His subjects would count this sudden downpour as a blessing from the heavens. They would remain indoors with family and friends, talking at length, eating candied pastries, and enjoying the rare sight of rain. Once this storm passed, the weather would surely turn much cooler. By now, all the houses in Victor’s villages and camps were built of brick and tile, and even the former temporary settlement for the freemen was no exception. The villages also had proper drainage, so there was no need to worry about flooding.

But what of the freemen gathered in the northeast of his domain? They did not even have enough shelters, and the flimsy ones they did have could not withstand such a torrential assault. More than two thousand of them were probably still shivering through this floodlike storm.

“Victor.”

Lilia came toward him with graceful steps. Her long, pale linen dress clung tightly to her delicate, well-shaped body, tracing its lovely curves. The wet wind lifted her chestnut hair, and her bright face was full of concern.

“Are you still worried about those displaced people?” she asked softly as she leaned into his arms.

Victor put his arm around her slender waist and nodded. “How could I not be? We’re all human, after all, not beasts.”

“Following your orders, my brother took fifty guards and delivered twenty covered wagons and seven hundred rain cloaks.” Lilia raised a hand and stroked the side of Victor’s face, already damp with mist.

“Once the rain stops, we should send them some meat, root herb, and coarse sugar as well. We can make them hot soup to warm them and keep them from falling ill.”

Victor smiled and patted her small hand. Her affectionate, tender gesture made him feel far less alone.

“Victor, why do we have to be so good to them? We’ve already given so much. I mean, do we really owe them this?” Lilia asked, still unwilling to let it go.

As more and more freemen poured into the camp, Lilia felt the pressure mounting. The domain was now providing food for them free of charge and even had to supply meat and medicinal herbs. This made the girl increasingly resentful of those uninvited freemen. In truth, that resentment had spread through all the people of the domain.

Victor sighed. “Whether we like it or not, we do owe them something, because we have the ability to help.”

Seeing her puzzled expression, he went on. “Ability creates responsibility, and responsibility in turn creates rights. The two support each other and drive each other forward. Take our soldiers, for example. A few months ago they were still farmers who didn’t even know how to use a sword. But they were strong, and Nelson believed they had the ability, so he chose them as guards. Then they acquired the responsibility of defending the domain. For that duty, they trained hard, and in just a few months they’ve become proper soldiers. Once they became soldiers, they no longer had to labor in the fields and were immediately granted ten acres of fief land, becoming vassals. That is their right.”

“Now look at your brother. He is the strongest fighter in the domain, so he became captain of the guard, responsible for the safety of the whole territory and in charge of all the soldiers. Isn’t it true that the greater the ability, the greater the responsibility, and the greater the responsibility, the greater the rights?”

Lilia nodded thoughtfully, then pouted. “You nearly confused me. The guards and my brother are our own people. What do those freemen have to do with us?”

Victor chuckled and shook his head. “Lilia, you now have more authority than your brother. You’re one of the people above others in this domain. How can you still look at things the way you used to?”

“As a leader, ability, responsibility, and rights must be viewed in reverse. As lord, I hold the highest authority in this land and control all affairs within it. Therefore, I bear the greatest responsibility for the domain. If I am to shoulder a lord’s burden, I must have the corresponding ability. That is why I’ve been striving all along to strengthen the domain, so I can truly govern it.”

“The freemen who have come into our territory are also subjects of the Kingdom of Gambis. As a lord of the kingdom, I must help them to the extent of my ability. If I refuse to bear that responsibility and choose to stand by coldly, then I’m afraid I would either be imprisoned by the church or impeached by the senate, and in the end I’d lose my rights as lord.”

“Victor, you understand so much,” Lilia said, looking at him with shining eyes full of admiration.

Being admired by his own woman made Victor rather pleased with himself.

He had learned the idea of ability, responsibility, and rights back in middle school. If you were poor, you should first perfect yourself; if you were prosperous, you should help the world. The wisdom in that saying was no joke at all. At the time he had not truly understood it. Only after he started working did he begin to grasp it in a hazy way. When he was employed at a small courier company, his boss would clap him on the shoulder and say, “Young Zhang, you’re pretty good. I’m going to give you more responsibility. The deliveries for those two other buildings will be yours too.” In moments like that, he felt only joy, while his coworkers felt nothing but envy and would take turns squeezing him for a meal. The principle behind it was recognition of ability, assumption of responsibility, and expansion of rights.

After crossing into this world and becoming a lord, Victor’s understanding of the matter deepened further. Put simply, if he wanted to keep his authority, he had to shoulder the responsibilities of a lord. That was why he had done everything possible to strengthen the domain. But his deepest insight had come during his journey to Blackfort Town to seek Sylvia’s help, when they had spoken at length.

Thinking of the prince’s faction glaring at him from the shadows, Victor’s eyes darkened. He said gravely to Lilia, “Lilia, you are already my lawful companion, one of the high-ranking people in this territory. You can’t keep judging things by the standards of the past. You have to think from the perspective of the whole domain. I need your help.”

The greatest weakness of the territory was the lack of advisers. Whenever Victor ran into a problem, there was no one to discuss it with. The middle layer of the domain was made up mostly of mercenaries or farmers, and Lilia was young, highly moldable, more worldly than a farmer, and exceptionally intelligent. The things Victor taught her, she picked up quickly, and she managed the domain with remarkable order. He had high hopes for her. He wanted her to broaden her horizons and become a proper assistant.

“Victor, I’ll work hard for you,” Lilia said firmly. Then she asked, “The holy knights are planning to take people back to Blackfort Town. Should we take over that camp? You said before that even the worst order is better than none at all.”

At the mention of the holy knights, Victor felt a surge of anger. By now he understood the whole affair. Barol had told him that Baron Vilpan had been manipulating everything from behind the scenes. They wanted to leave Victor unable to cope, then strip him of his position as lord. As for that holy knight, it had been nothing more than a personal act. The two priests in Blackfort Town had known nothing about it.

Yet it was this brainless holy knight who had brought Victor enormous trouble. The prince’s faction had indeed used vicious methods, but they had not expected vengeful wolves to roam Victor’s land. Once news of the wolves spread, the scattered freemen would never dare travel to Victor’s territory, and their scheme would fail. Now the holy knight had given those people hope. They were still expecting the lord and the holy knights to work together to eliminate the wolves, and as a result nearly three thousand of them were lingering in that camp.

For these people, so long as Victor sat in the lord’s seat, he had to deal with them whether he wanted to or not, or else the prince’s faction would certainly impeach him. The only other option would be to declare independence and then be crushed into dust by the kingdom’s Swift Dragon Knight Order.

Watching the freemen grow in number day by day, Victor, at his wits’ end, hurried to Blackfort Town. The first person he visited was Father Conley. After a long exchange of empty pleasantries, the priest finally made his position clear: once Victor’s territory had more than six thousand people, the church would immediately build a small chapel there to help Victor manage and assist them. Until then, however, the church would provide no aid to Victor’s domain.

The moment Victor heard that the church intended to enter his territory and proselytize, he grew anxious. He said he did not need the church to supply grain; all he wanted was for them to take the people away. Conley flatly refused and even insisted that Victor properly house the refugees and prevent any major casualties, or else the church’s tribunal would intervene.

At last Victor understood. For all this time, the lord was meant to do the dirty work, while the church did only good deeds. The lord wanted power, the church wanted faith, and an unspoken understanding had already formed between them. As for why the priests refused to provide grain, it was to prevent a population explosion, because they had no shepherds yet to harvest faith. Otherwise, Conley and Ivan would both be failing in their duties.

Victor said, “You don’t need to show up in person to provide relief. Give me the grain and I’ll handle the distribution. That way the population won’t gather so quickly.”

Conley: Dream on. If the church’s grain is used to aid the freemen, then the freemen must know it is a gift from the Radiant Lord. That is absolute law.

Victor: I am a frontier lord. I’m applying for aid.

Conley: We’ve already provided aid.

Victor: Where?

Conley: A fully organized squad of holy knights is helping you fight the wolf pack.

Victor: ...

Damn it all.

Victor then rushed to Rose Manor and held an intimate, in-depth exchange with Sylvia. He asked her to restrain the movement of the freemen. Sylvia told him that aside from those thirteen hundred people, no other freemen from Blackfort Town had migrated into his territory. She also told him that the turmoil caused by the work-point system was even greater than he had imagined; freemen from every other territory all wanted to try their luck in Victor’s land. If not for the wolf disaster there, his territory would probably already have been overwhelmed.

Victor pleaded with Sylvia for aid to help him through the crisis. Sylvia, tender as water, told him that simply not raising the price of grain was the greatest help she could give him.

Only then did Victor finally understand: even if he were impeached, Sylvia would suffer no loss, because his successor would certainly be of the Wimbledon bloodline, and the sanctified oath before the gods could not be overturned.

The frustrated Victor returned to his own territory, unaware that Sylvia had been doing much behind the scenes to ensure his safety. She now wanted only to enjoy watching her little lover’s performance. That was her pleasure, and it was also his training. Even if Victor failed, this strong-willed woman would still draw him into her grasp. As the head of a great family, gathering talented people was something she had to do, and her interest in Victor was only deepening.

Victor extended one arm into the endless rain, feeling the water wash over his skin, and said, “We can’t step forward and take over that camp. Taking it over would mean taking in the freemen, and we don’t yet have the capacity to accept more than two thousand people at once. Lilia, remember this: never take on responsibilities beyond your ability. It only hurts others and yourself.”

“Then what should we do? Just let them remain in chaos?” Lilia asked in confusion.

“We can borrow a method used by other lords to deal with waves of refugees,” Victor said.

“Freemen and subjects are actually separated by only a thin line. Most lords will convert freemen within the limits of their ability, though the process is slow. In a barony, with a population of around ten thousand, about three thousand are subjects, a few hundred are vassals, and the rest are freemen.”

“If a large influx of refugees suddenly arrives and exceeds the domain’s capacity, the lord will offer aid as far as he can while absorbing useful people from among them. He will also use some means to keep the refugees under control. But rather than sending soldiers to supervise the camp, lords often employ bandits. The bandits use brutal methods to lead the remaining population out of the territory. That is why so many domains have bandits.” Sylvia had told Victor many of the tricks used by lords, and now Victor was passing them on to Lilia in full.

“Lilia, why do you think lords rescue, absorb, and secretly control refugees?”

Lilia tilted her head and thought for a moment. “For order. Rescuing refugees prevents unrest. Absorbing useful people strengthens the domain. Secret control is for sending them away in an orderly fashion.”

Victor laughed heartily. “Lilia, you already understand the core of how a lord governs a domain. Exactly. Order. We establish order, we maintain order, and anyone who challenges our order is our enemy. So from now on, try to think about problems from that angle.”

Lilia’s beautiful eyes shone brightly, as though Victor had opened a new door for her.

“Then the holy knights withdrawing from the camp is actually a good thing. With them out of the way, we can secretly control that freemen camp,” Victor said.

“How are we supposed to control it secretly? We don’t have any bandits here,” Lilia asked, puzzled. She knew that some lords kept bandits in their employ, but their own domain had been founded too recently and they had no bandits under control at all.

“Who says we don’t? Not only do we have bandits, we can even bring in a batch of reinforcements,” Victor said with a cunning smile. He intended to drag the Chipman family into the pit with him.

You stole my mithril and my purple cane. It’s time for you to pay the price.