Blood Shaper

Book 3: Chapter 38

“And that is why we shouldn’t ask the Adventurer’s Guild for assistance in this!” One of the representatives shouted, “Their attempts to get our Lord to fight their Founder’s daughter in order to create a counter to him shows that they cannot be trusted!”

“I’m not saying we ask the actual Guild for help! I’m saying we post a job with the Guild to hire independent adventurers!” The representative who had the floor insisted back, “Just because the Guild wants to create some kind of countermeasure to Lord Kay doesn’t mean they’re going to start screwing us over when Avalon posts jobs!”

Amanda leaned over and whispered in Kay’s ear, “Honestly, trying to create a countermeasure to a new, unknown powerful person is just good statecraft. It’s not like it will immediately make us enemies.”

“We’re not all prodigies in the arts of politics and espionage,” Kay replied at the same quiet volume. “Some people need time to build to that level of experience.”

The representatives kept arguing, although the representative who had the floor had managed to turn the conversation back to the actual topic she’d introduced and away from the supposed Machiavellian plans the Adventurer’s Guild might have.

Slightly over two weeks after Kay had gotten his Noble Class advancement Quest and they were finally discussing it during a session of Parliament. Kay, along with three of his Ministers, Prime Minister Amanda Onika, Minister of Finance Cyrus Aventi, and the newly christened Minister of Education Eleniah Selthoran, were all sitting on top of a raised platform that looked over the rest of Parliament.

After a lot of arguments and fights, Kay had finally pinned a government job on Eleniah. Since there wasn’t an existing framework for government-run education on Torotia, and the society that currently existed didn’t really support one, Eleniah’s job was really just to run the academy she was building. Eventually, as part of Kay’s plans for future expansions, they would have academies in every major city in Avalon, or whatever they ended up calling the actual nation once they got to that point, and Eleniah would be the topmost government official in charge of those academies. She was still a little annoyed at him, which he knew since she’d been telling him that for days, but she’d finally accepted that she was both useful and needed in the position. And she’d also believed Kay when he’d told her he wouldn’t treat her like some kind of political tool the way her cousin had.

The building that they’d created for Parliament was situated right next to the still in construction palace, with passages making movement between the two easy. Like the palace, it was built into the cliff walls that loomed over the rest of Avalon, with a portion of the massive room literally hanging out over empty space, with its weight supported by magic. The semicircular shadow thrown by the part of the Parliament room that seemed to float over the town covered a good portion of Avalon during the heat of the day, and large swathes of the population had greeted the shade happily. Kay wasn’t sure how that was going to go during the winter, but at least it would keep some of the snow off the streets. If it snowed much; during the last two winters, there’d only been a light dusting.

The large circular room had a number of seats and tables spread out evenly from each other, giving workspaces for each representative, and the ‘back; of the circle, opposite the doors, had the platform for Kay and his Ministers. Kay sat in a large chair that was once more reminiscent of a throne, with the Ministers in smaller chairs with desks to each side of him. In the center of the circle was an empty space to serve as the floor for people to stand on when they presented ideas, laws, or topics. Right now, the room was fairly unfurnished since a majority of the work over the last two weeks had been focused on building the damn edifice in the first place, but Kay knew that it would end up looking more and more impressive as time went on.

“All in favor?” The current speaker, who had been randomly selected as speaker for Parliament for the month, asked after discussion finally died down. “There were a series of raised hands, and the speaker took his time counting each one and recording it. “All against?” He repeated his count for those against the motion. “Final vote is Twenty five for, seven against on the proposal to post a job hiring adventurers to aid in the subjugation of Darkport.” The speaker turned around to look up at Kay. “My Lord?”

“The Prime Minister will see to drafting the job and will conference with the Minister of Finance to see what prices we’ll be offering. Any problems or questions?”

A representative stood up and waited for Kay to acknowledge them. “What will we even be hiring these adventurers to do?” The same person had asked the same question earlier, but Kay had noticed that they hadn’t really received a real answer.

“They’ll be supplementing our own national adventurers as irregular troops. Our military forces will most likely be sufficient with dealing with normal pirates or other criminals that might live in Darkport, but there’s almost certainly going to be irregular and powerful opponents that will need to be dealt with by similarly irregular combatants.

“Won’t you be going, my Lord? Couldn’t you deal with those kinds of enemies?”

“Sure, but I can’t be everywhere. In my opinion, it’s better to spend some money to make sure that we end up with an overwhelming victory than to have a slog of a battle that we lose people in.”

There were no more questions or comments after that, so there was a short break before the next topic was brought up. Kay didn’t have anything specific to do, so he just watched the various representatives split into groups to discuss something or grab some food or drink from one of the outlying tables.

At that moment, there were thirty-two elected representatives of Parliament. Ten of those were regional representatives, representing the eight districts that had been decided on within the town of Avalon itself, and then one each for the northern and southern regions that were slowly developing into villages and outlying groups of people. The northern portion, somewhat safer within the walls of the valley, focused mainly on agriculture, while the southern region focused on resource extraction from the large forest to the south and somewhat less so from the mountain. Kay knew that as Avalon grew in population and just physically that those areas would be swallowed up by the city, Avalon would become, but there were plans for that both in terms of the logistics and construction of the eventual expansion and politically.

The eight districts of Avalon and the two outlying regions would eventually become a few larger regions once Avalon became a city, then one region that covered the city and its outlying lands as they eventually grew into a nation. Then there would be other towns and regions with representatives, and so on and so forth. Thankfully someone in the Constitutional Congress had seen the issue with not planning for eventual growth, and an actual plan for how Parliament would change had been created.

Included in that plan were the requirements for each species to qualify for a species representative. There were twenty-two of them in Parliament at that moment because the minimum number of citizens a species needed to have had been set at one one-hundredth of the overall population, and right now, twenty-two species had that number of people in Avalon. With a little over five thousand citizens, there only needed to be slightly less than sixty people to qualify for a representative, but there were actually a handful of species that didn’t have that many people, including Murunel since she was the only dragon. One member of the Constitutional Congress had foreseen that potentially being a problem, and they’d made it part of the constitution of Avalon that Kay would have regular meetings with members of those species that didn’t qualify for a representative to let them have some level of representation in government, directly through Kay himself.

There currently were representatives for humans, dwarves, elves, drow, nine different kinds of beastkin because while they are lumped together, each kind of beastkin is a separate species, half-elves, which are also considered their own species by the System, ogres, oni, gnomes, orcs, goblins, hzikar, a species of lizardmen, erethmai, a species that looks human with the exception of the small sensory tendrils that drape from the sides of their chins, and asura, a species of people very similar to Kay’s knowledge of the mythological beings from India, with each of them possessing multiple sets of arms, although they only had one face each. The last three species only had a small number each, with the hzikar having the exact number of people needed to qualify for a representative, but there were still a few people with even fewer members than that.

Of all of those species, the erethmai were the only ones that didn’t in some way connect to something Kay had learned about on Earth, whether from fiction or mythology. That made Kay start thinking about why there were so many similarities between two completely different worlds, but Kay had no way of getting answers.

There were four more topics brought up that day, with only one of them being related to Kay’s advancement Quest. When the session let out, Kay headed to meet Commander Mapsight and go over the strategy for taking Darkport. Commander Mapsight had quickly and effectively recruited a small military force of around five hundred people and trained them up to his standards. Half of those served as a reserve force that only trained once a week, but roughly two hundred of them were professional soldiers. They’d been very useful so far in dealing with certain monster problems that Avalon’s national adventurers hadn’t been suited to deal with, and all the reports Kay had read indicated that their training was coming along nicely.

“Hello, Commander.”

“My Lord! Good to see you.”

Kay held out his hand to shake Curcius’ hand and froze when a completely new tab on his menus lit up, right next to where his notifications were. A symbol he didn’t recognize shone with a metallic light.

“Sir?”

“Something System-related is happening.” Kay mentally opened the tab, then stiffened as he read the top of the page that popped up.

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Patch Notes Release (Patch 7.7.9.6.333.25.21.1.8.1.4)

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“Holy shit.” Kay started scrolling down the page. He saw line after line, with headers, sub-headers, bullet points, and massive lines of text, going on for a very long time, every bit of it redacted. He could only recognize what was going on because of the size and position of the redactions, giving away part of the organization. Mentally trying to access one of the sections, he received a prompt that told him he lacked proper access to see that information. Almost at the bottom of the page was an area of readable text, with one word as the header that marked it as a separate section from the rest.

“Torotia”.

Eyes wide, Kay scrolled back to the start and began counting. When he got to the bottom, he felt like he was having trouble breathing. Thirty-seven. If the formatting was the same across the entire document, and from what he could tell it did, there were thirty-seven different worlds under the System.

The implications of that were staggering enough that it took quite some time for Kay to recover and actually read the information in Torotia’s changelog. Most of that was also redacted, though he did see some random notes that weren’t very clear, explaining that changes had been made to certain Skills that related to mage Classes or that Alchemic reactions now had a one percent less chance to result in a total overload.

Then he found one section that was brightly highlighted. He read over the entire thing, then read it again. He slowly lifted his head to look at Lauren, who had been following slightly behind him as part of her duties. “Lauren, send someone to find Cindy and have her brought to my main meeting chamber immediately. Then send someone to find all of the Ministers and have them gather there as well.” He glanced over at Crucius, “Commander, you come to this will probably have an impact on your duties.”

As he jogged from the Army’s training grounds just outside the city’s walls towards his offices, Kay couldn’t help looking at the line of text that had started yet another set of circumstances that could cause huge problems and would give Kay more issues to deal with.

Firearms Update!

- Several errors that delayed the deployment of the Firearms Update have been resolved, and firearms have been properly implemented as weapons in the System! That means that firearms Skills and Classes will begin working properly as of the release of this patch! Happy shooting!

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