The next step

It was perhaps a miserable day. Clouds blanketed the sky, rain poured in endless droves, running in small streams in the road. A lot of progress had been made over the past few days, strangely Tryan seemed to know a surprising amount about how a settlement could be built. His advice was uncanny.

He knew and showed me how Dalance had implemented a system to limit how quickly one could expand, it was simple and complex, and had I not been informed I would never have known about it.

System notification! Congratulations to player Havoc for becoming the fifth grade 2 village on Almera, village of Haven's Morring; special reward of 600 merit points.

I winced, Tyran's information showed that gathering these merit points was almost essential to lords of villages trying to reclaim land from the Sundering. However in that regard at least I had a leg up over everyone else.

Tyran had founded a village some fifty leagues north of Hadran, we communicated rather quickly with through the messenger birds at our disposal. Tyran was of the rank Sir, the lowest of the low. however it had three tiers, third class Sir, second class Sir, and first-class Sir, most commonly they were lumped together as there was little difference between them and it was easy to move up in that bracket.

It was so easy in fact that Tyran had already with a few minor accomplishments become a third-class knight. The rank of a lord directly tied to how large they could raise their territory. However, the easiest way by far to earn merit points early on was simply to be among the first ten to upgrade a village.

I pulled my cowl tighter around me and braved the downpour. The platinum obelisk stood like a shining beacon in the dim light. I reached out to touch the obelisk, but waited for the signal.

System notification! Congratulations to player Tyran for becoming the Sixth grade 2 village on Almera, village of Einhov; special reward of 500 merit points.

Without a second's worth of hesitation, I touched the obelisk. There had been something I was made unaware of during the early construction of Hadran, I was among the few that started with anything in the way of supplies. Those building supplies in a way truly showed how the gods favored me.

System notification! requirements met for village upgrade, do you wish to upgrade? Y/N.

"Yes!"

System notification! Congratulations to Special Non-player character Elizabeth Almeria for becoming the Seventh grade 2 village on Almera, village of Hadran; special reward of 400 merit points.

However the glow around the obelisk did not fade, for therein lied the small... issue with villages, a well-deveopled hamlet like Hadran fulfilled all of the requirements.

System notification! requirements met for village upgrade, do you wish to upgrade? Y/N.

"yes." I said quietly, this was all that a month's worth of effort had amounted to.

System notification! Congratulations to Special Non-player character Elizabeth Almeria for becoming the first grade 3 village on Almera, village of Hadran; special reward of 1100 merit points.

It was quite something, to upgrade within a tier all one really needed to do was increase one's population past a certain threshold, the requirements tended to be already met by that point. So although I was supposed to build a village dining hall, an area similar to it essentially met the requirements.

With all that now done, I strode purposely back into the mansion. This, unfortunately, was where the difficult part of the road would begin. The immigration rate would increase, but so would the number of bandits that would begin infesting the fringes of my territory, hoping to glean enough to make a living. to deal with them, I needed a proper military.

With Kel still not willing to take up arms, I was forced to attempt to train them myself, which was cutting into my time that I needed to perform my administrative duties. of course, there were many things I was trying to do on the side as well. Things that may be of use in the future.

I had purchased a basic, yet comprehensive set of alchemist equipment for Shanri. That purchase alone had put me back several hundred denars. Another quite surprising expense that I hadn't accounted for was just how much food people ate. Currently, Hadran was scraping along by purchasing grain on the market and turning it into flour then baking bread.

It had taken a considerable amount out of my budget for the militias that needed to be armed, trained, and fed. Of course, only so much could go if I still was to have a militia, so I scraped the parts not absolutely needed to train a soldier. That basically meant they had spartan meals and a simple spear.

To say that the militia had better food was truthfully an empty saying at the moment, they just had more. But a brief look at the finance reports showed that another month or so and I would be strap out of denars.

Too much needed to be done, so schemes to raise some funds were in place. For instance, timber. We cut down more than we really needed, so after it was sent through the sawmill and turned into lumber about a third of it was sold through the market building. However, perhaps the largest form of income at the moment was the taxes I'd implemented, which was a joke as essentially it right back into paying the people's wages and then some, but it was the largest source of income at the moment.

So the hope was for the bandits near the fringes of the territory to have something on them that was valuable enough to sell or once they were dealt with, to liberate them of their denars. It was not something I was entirely happy with, but it was most likely necessary at the moment.