Re: Tales of the Rune-Tech Sage Chapter 848: Frontier Immigration

CH0848 Frontier Immigration

***

Marquis Brandford paced for almost an hour before finally coming to a decision.

He walked over to his desk and sat down to write a letter. When he was finished, he pulled on a cord beside his desk. A moment later, the butler entered.

"My lord."

The butler bowed.

"Call in Tierman," the Marquis ordered.

The butler bowed once more before leaving to summon Baron Tierman, the Marquis’ Knight Commander.

When the fully armoured Knight Commander entered the study, the Marquis handed him the letter he had just written.

"Have this letter delivered," the Marquis said. "Personally."

There was a sharp glint in the Marquis’ eyes.

"It shall be done." Baron Tierman nodded as he accepted the letter.

The Knight Commander and the butler both left the study.

Before walking away, the Knight Commander paused briefly outside the door.

Then he continued on his way.

A faint smile formed beneath the visor of his helm.

’Looks like the old iron-blooded Commander is still in there after all,’ he thought.

Back in the study, the Marquis turned towards the portraits once more.

’If this brat truly is like the Skywalkers of old... if he genuinely has the support of the Emperor... then I cannot allow him to grow!’ Marquis Brandford resolved.

—

Far away in the Frontier March, Alex and his domain officers were oblivious to the plot likely being set in motion by Marquis Brandford.

Even if they had known, they wouldn’t have cared. After all, some form of response from Marquis Brandford had always been expected following the events surrounding his covert vassal, Viscount Dunhill.

Besides, they were currently far too busy.

The massive influx of people from the Stronghold and Mirador City was a most welcome development for the domain. However, in the short term, the domain’s civil officers almost wanted to curse as they found themselves buried beneath an avalanche of work.

Although the census was still ongoing, a conservative estimate placed the number of new arrivals at no fewer than sixty thousand.

This meant the influx of people from Mirador City would swell the domain’s population to roughly one hundred thousand.

At present, the Mirador immigrants were camped at the entrance to the domain’s valley.

Fortunately, over the recent weeks and months of development, the fort at the valley entrance had grown from a makeshift outpost into a proper fortress, ready to guard the entrance to the domain.

As such, the imposing structure served as a passive deterrent to anyone looking to cause trouble within the temporary camps.

Rather than immediately allowing the immigrants into the Frontier March proper, Alex’s plan was to take advantage of the situation and begin constructing his planned valley city.

The domain officers had worried that the people would riot when they were informed of this. But that never happened.

Once again, Count Skywalker stepped forward to address the immigrants and somehow convinced them to willingly commit to building the valley city, presenting it as an opportunity for the immigrants to build ’ city.

He had somehow convinced them that whether they stayed in Mirador or chose to remain in the Frontier March, they would have to rebuild a city either way. However, constructing their own homes within the Frontier March would grant them opportunities they would never have had in Mirador.

Among those opportunities, aside from security, land was perhaps the greatest attraction that finally settled the people.

The planned valley city was to be at least three times larger than Mirador City, meaning the people could potentially own much larger homes by the end of its construction, becoming true homeowners.

With the immigrants settled and their complaints quietened, the real torture for the civil officers began, as they now had to record each and every one of the sixty thousand newcomers into the domain’s official records.

Anyone who had not yet been recorded had not yet been accepted into the domain and was therefore not yet a citizen. Consequently, they could not receive the benefits promised by House Skywalker, so everyone was eager to complete their registration.

This placed an enormous burden upon the civil officers, who worked themselves to the bone to register everyone as quickly as possible.

Alex understood the plight of his civil officers, but it couldn’t be helped.

This relatively slow registration process was actually far more than it appeared on the surface.

It also served as a verification process through which Alex rooted out shady individuals attempting to enter the domain.

With every completed registration, there was either a rise or a fall in the domain’s providence—something Alex could now sense far more clearly following his battle against the Tribulation Doppelganger.

Each citizen who held goodwill towards the domain increased its providence, while those harbouring nefarious intentions towards it diminished it.

While it was difficult for Alex to sense these fluctuations within such a large crowd, using the registration process made the task far more manageable.

There were one hundred civil servants simultaneously registering the immigrants, with each registration group forming a manageable batch.

Whenever Alex sensed a drop in the domain’s providence, he would send a message over the communications network, and everyone registered within that batch would be pulled aside for further investigation by the security forces—or, in more serious cases, by Udara’s Military Intelligence division—until the source was identified.

This method did not completely prevent all potential spies and other malicious elements from entering the domain, as fluctuations in providence were not, in themselves, a foolproof detection method. However, it did reduce their numbers, even if only slightly.

Fortunately, in the grand scheme of things, the number of times the domain’s providence declined was only a handful.

In hindsight, this made sense, since Alex’s decision to bring the citizens of Mirador into his domain had been unexpected and had given hostile forces little opportunity to prepare or infiltrate agents among the refugees.

However, Alex expected this to change in the future. Developing a long-term countermeasure was therefore something that needed to be prioritised.

In particular, Alex envisioned a method that would allow the civil officers responsible for registration to automatically deny entry based on an individual’s effect on the domain’s providence, without requiring his direct involvement.

Fortunately, those were all matters for the future.

For now, the domain continued to revel in its period of rapid development, allowing Alex, his wives, and his retainers to each focus on their own work.

Eleanore could now be found in Ashwell, where she used Ava’s assistance to further her alchemical and biotechnology projects.

Udara became increasingly secretive as her Military Intelligence outfit carried out more covert and clandestine operations both inside and outside the domain, hidden from the public eye—some of which even Alex himself was becoming increasingly less aware of.

Zora was, for the most part, left to run the domain while Alex worked alongside Sugud on a series of secret projects, one of which was, at long last, the construction of the Interplanar Gate... sort of.

***