Chapter 127: CH 121

The people who came to the so-called welcoming banquet were all wonderfully divided into different groups and it was really amusing to see them. There were 3 main groups. The, ‘No matter what, he is still the son of a Count, so let’s form a relationship with him’ group, ‘Just hurry and return to the capital!’ group, and ‘He’s still young and must be ignorant, so let’s use him to our heart content’ group.

Ah, there was another group… the group of people that wanted to make a ‘the Count’s son r̲a̲p̲e̲d our daughter!’ headline. The people of this group kept trying to offer me alcohol at the banquet, while their daughters were most likely trying to sneak into my bedroom. I expected this would happen, so I had already asked Sir Kesten to guard my room and catch all the people who tried to sneak in.

I also instructed Sir Kesten to throw all people he caught into the prison, even if they were young ladies. After all, they had committed the crime of trespassing into the governor’s mansion. The next day, their fathers came to me and asked me to release their daughters while apologizing for their daughters’ reckless behavior. I proceeded to ask them if they remembered the first order I’d given when I arrived in the town and their faces paled. After all, the first order I’d given was to execute the bandit leaders.

On that day, I told those fathers to return, using an excuse that a crime was still a crime no matter who did it. Then, after the bandits’ execution was finished, I sentenced the young ladies to a fine on the grounds that ‘even though they had trespassed into the governor’s mansion, there were no victims of this incident’.

I got quite a bit of money from these fines. I also heard that it would be hard for these noble ladies to find a marriage partner because they had a criminal record, but that wasn’t my problem.

By the way, I used the fines to buy alcohol and distributed it for free to the town’s citizens as a gift from the newly appointed governor.

I also got a report that one of the town’s influential figures violently assaulted a refugee woman. After confirming that the report was true, I went to that man’s residence with Neurath, Schunzel, Gekke-san, and the mercenaries and killed the man on the spot while his surviving cronies were all banished to Triot.

Several members of the Pledgers asked for leniency in the punishment. Apparently, one of the cronies was a Pledger’s brother, but I refused since that wasn’t a good enough reason for me to compromise on a criminal. After that incident, even the knights and soldiers that the kingdom had lent me became quiet. Good grief.

On the other hand, I dumped more than half of my administration work on Sir Behnke. I also told him to prioritize maintaining public order and gathering food supplies. It would be hard to buy any food supplies when we would be battling Gezarius, so I had to use this chance to slowly stock up.

In addition, I had also been working on the town’s sanitation. I gave daily wages to the refugees and had them work with the town’s security force to clean the street and ensure sanitation. It was often said that the town in the medieval period was not always the cleanest, but that was also the case for the provincial towns in this world.

One reason why the sanitation of the town was poor was livestocks. Many people in the town owned livestocks, but the livestocks here were only branded by the owner and then left free-range. As preservatives techniques were not highly developed and salt was expensive, the only way for the town’s citizens to eat fresh meat was to keep livestocks. Even if the livestocks ended up dirtying the town. Seriously, couldn’t the owners of the livestocks take better care of their livestocks?

It would be a huge problem if we had a disease outbreak because of livestock excrement while we were in the middle of a war. So, I had the whole town cleaned up and made a law to fine people who neglected to take care of their livestocks.

The importance of hygiene wasn’t common knowledge in this world, so it was pretty troublesome to spread the word.

By the way, I decided to hire only old people in the governor’s mansion, because it would be troublesome if some kind of scandal happened, especially against young women. It was possible that I would get accused of laying my hands on a young maid and forced to marry her. Plus, young people in the town most likely had their own work. In addition, half of the people I hired were refugees, while the other half were the town’s citizens.

After I recruited the workers for the governor’s mansion, for some reason, there was a rumor about me having a fiancee in the capital floating around. I didn’t know who spread that rumor, but since that rumor stopped the advances of strange ladies toward me, I was grateful.

By the way, the nobility of the medieval period often had an image of having a fiancee from a young age, but that wasn’t the case in this world. Nobles of this world usually found their fiances when they were students while engagements that happened from a young age were often engagements for the convenience of their families. Well, an engagement from a young age in the medieval period also happened because of the convenience of their families, but there was another more important reason for the difference in usual age for engagement here and in the medieval period.

That reason was the high mortality rate in the medieval period of the previous world. In order to ensure that their noble family always had an heir, the heads of noble families of that time thought that it would be best to leave as many grandchildren as possible, so they began to decide their children’s marriage partners from an early age. There were even cases where as soon as their children were able to sire grandchildren, the head of a family would force them, albeit with supervision, to ‘go to the bed’

Although I believed that doing that kind of thing would harm the children’s bodies, I guess the health field of that era wasn’t advanced enough to know that sort of thing.

Different from the medieval period on earth, this world had potions and magic. Frankly speaking, some random flu wouldn’t be able to kill anyone because of the existence of potions and magic. The infant mortality rate of nobles who could afford expensive potions was much lower.

Therefore, the idea that ‘we should let our children bear a child as soon as possible!’ didn’t exist here. As such, it was normal for engagement to be decided after their children became students unless there was some problem in the family itself. My late brother did have a fiance though, but that must be for the sake of convenience for the fiance’s family.

The love between children of noble families was even used as a bargaining chip. To put it bluntly, when the head of a certain family noticed that the son of another noble family fancied his daughter, he would be like, ‘your son seems to like my daughter and even has proposed for an engagement with my family. If I accept this engagement… what do I get in return?’ The world of nobles could be pretty dark.

As for me, I still didn’t have a fiance since there was no particular reason for me to hurry and get married. Rather than marriage, I was more concerned about whether I would be able to continue going to the academy in the future. I felt like that would be difficult. No, thinking about the academy wasn’t my attempt to escape the reality that I was still single, or anything like that!

Well, moving back to the subject of Anheim, I had done several things to prepare for the war with Gezarius in the past half a month. Ever since I had become the governor of Anheim, I had sent an emissary to the capital to ask for the money and supplies for the war. As for the matter of the roads, I had ordered Sir Holzdeppe to maintain the public order of the roads that would be used for communication with other territories.

The support troop had also gradually taken a shape and I had also managed to grasp the number of emergency supplies that were kept by the surrounding villages. With this, after matching the location of emergency supplies to the map of the Anheim region, I would be able to secure the supply lines for our army.

“Sir Kesten, how is the support troop?”

“They have gotten used to fighting in a group, but they have yet to reach the level of being able to fight in an actual war.”

“How about the guards?”

“There have been some small skirmishes among the guards, but I’ve taken care of them.”

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“Keep up the good work. For now, continue to focus on training the support troop on using crossbows and slings.”

“Understood.”

Currently, the people who had volunteered to become members of support troops were one who had either starved or lost their families because of demons. That means the current morale of the support troop was divided between people who were eager to fight for revenge and people who just joined the support troop for food. I still couldn’t let them do anything too difficult.

At the very least, when the war came, I hoped they would be able to shoot the crossbows from the top of the town walls without any fear.

“Sir Behnke, how were the documents?”

“I am glad that they have become easier to read.”

“Good.”

Just like in the capital, the officials here did whatever they wanted with the structure of the documents. A petition to the governor for example needed to have the petitioner’s name, the content of the petition, the witness’s name, and the guild leader’s signature and if the petitioner couldn’t write, you need to put the writer’s name,  but one guild put the petitioner’ name at the top, another guild put the guild leader’s signature at the top, and another one put the content on the top, it was all a mess.

That was why I instructed all guilds to follow a certain format in writing all documents, including the petition letter. The documents that didn’t follow the format would be returned to the respective guild. I got some complaints, but I ignored them. Once they get used to the format, the complaints should stop.

“How is the situation with the bandits?”

“Because we didn’t hesitate to execute their leaders, they seem to be gathering.”

“Good then. It would be more efficient for us to take care of them all in one fell swoop rather than chasing groups of 10 or 20 of them to all sorts of places.”

I nodded in response to Neurath’s report. In fact, I didn’t immediately hunt all the bandits after I arrived in the town on purpose, so the bandits could gather. I also told Viscount Grellman and Baron Zabel, the nobles who became the governor of the remaining two Marquis Knap’s former territory, that they could just chase out the bandits from their territory.

To be fair, I got the feeling that both the Viscount and the Baron had already taken care of the bandits in their territory. Either way, it didn’t matter as long as what they did restored public order.

As I put a piece on the map I had spread out, I noticed one troublesome thing. There was this hill in the middle of flat land. Frankly, this was the place where I would build the headquarters if I was setting up a camp. This hill was located in a troublesome spot.

“Is there any enemy movement on the border?”

“As far as I can see from this side of the river, our enemy hasn’t made any significant movement.”

Schunzel was in charge of inspecting the border. There was a river without any bridges on the border between Anheim and Triot. In the game, the players could see the river but couldn’t cross it. I guess this was for the convenience of the game’s scenario.

However, it would be different in reality. Even human refugees would be able to cross the river if they were desperate, let alone demons with their superior physical capability. I couldn’t choose the riverside as the site of the battle.

Hmm…. Since our opponents were demons I think the common tactic of ‘dam the river then destroy the dam when the enemies were crossing the river’ wouldn’t work… what should I do…

“Welner-sama, you have a visitor from the capital.”

“A visitor? For me (ore)?”

Because Frenssen suddenly told me that I got a visitor, I accidentally used me (ore). I didn’t hear that someone would come to visit me, though.

(T/N: Ever since he arrived in Anheim and become a governor, Welner used ‘Watashi’ a formal version of ‘I’ but here Welner switched to ‘ore’ the informal version of ‘I’ that he usually used before.)

“Yes. The Iron Hammer party from the capital said they wish to meet you.”

I was a little surprised to hear that name here. I guess since they were an adventurer party they could be anywhere, but once again, I heard that name in a quite unusual place.

Since I needed to receive the supplies, plus I wanted to take a break from my work for a bit, I decided to meet them. I also had something that I wanted to check with them anyway.

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