Ch.318Side Story: Steam and Colony (1)

Teralion. To describe this dimension located somewhere in the multiverse in a single phrase, it would probably be its remarkably strong steampunk atmosphere.

This dimension bears a striking resemblance to a certain blue planet elsewhere, but with magic power significantly weaker than other dimensions. In this world where only humans exist, development naturally progressed toward technology.

Teralion’s technological advancement began to surge forward madly when the “steam engine” was invented in Britannia, an island nation located on the Europa continent.

Particularly, since magic in Teralion was merely weak rather than nonexistent, people combined magic with steam engines. The resulting magical-steam engines had an influence that could be said, without exaggeration, to have reversed Europa’s fate.

The industrial revolution that occurred as steam-powered industry developed was just the beginning. Various devices created by adding magical technology to these magical-steam engines were sufficient to drive innovation.

From brilliant prosthetic technology to magical-steam powered walking war machines. Various steamships and trains, airships to automatons. From difference engines and analytical engines adapted into primitive computers.

These people, who could leap from absolute monarchy to the modern era in an instant, now possessed formidable technology. However, while technology advanced, people did not, so they decided to use this technology as they always had.

That is, for war.

But no matter how much social development lagged behind technological progress, the people of this era were by no means empty-headed fools.

Anyone with common sense could predict that if war broke out on the Europa continent where steam engines had become commonplace, an enormous number of casualties would naturally occur.

Therefore, they redirected their military power toward regions outside Europa where steam engines had not yet been introduced—

The powers outside Europa, unable to overcome this overwhelming technological gap, began to collapse one by one.

The indigenous nations of Aporacha fell helplessly before Europa’s thermo-mechanized infantry divisions, and in their place, the great powers of Europa extended their influence and cultivated colonies for exploitation.

The southern part of the New Continent, largely covered in jungle, suffered the same fate. Europa’s explorer-plunderers destroyed the human sacrifice and cannibalistic civilizations there and imposed even more brutal colonial rule than those they replaced.

They invaded the eastern continent of Osia, tore the Mogul Empire in the Hindia region to shreds to make it their colony, and extended their military might toward the Ming Empire, the traditional eastern superpower.

With a staggering population of nearly 200 million, military power considerably developed though not equal to those with steam engines, and the world’s highest level of magical technology on top of that.

This arrogant Ming Empire appeared with their pride and joy—an army of ceramic dolls (golems) armed with gunpowder weapons, the Terracotta Army—to fight against Europa’s steam-powered forces—

In exactly six years, the Ming Empire, having lost all its military power, surrendered to the United Kingdom of Britannia, which had been the spearhead of the invasion, and the entire world ultimately became Europa’s colony.

And Europa’s colonial rule was… so horrific that describing it as “atrocious” would be insufficient.

After the world fell into the hands of the European powers, they now had to consider wars with countries other than themselves, which naturally led to an arms race, resulting in a desperate level of resource consumption in Europa at that time.

The use of steam engine technology and military reinforcement required massive resources, but the amount they demanded far exceeded domestic resources, so they began extracting resources from their colonies.

Of course, this process was an evil history marked by countless atrocities and violence.

First, they used contracts written in their own language to threaten colonized people and force them to sign, and the contents of these contracts were not just malicious but beyond human decency.

Contents stating that they voluntarily transferred inheritance and succession rights to the colonial government, that they forever renounced all sovereignty and governance rights over their territory. Contents stating that they would support the colonial government’s operations and expeditionary projects with labor or other means whenever required, anywhere in the territory.

Additionally, they transferred toll collection rights for all roads and waterways crossing the colonies, and hunting, fishing, mining, and forest development rights to the colonial government, giving them absolute ownership—it was insane content.

After completing these preliminary preparations, the Europeans now began exploiting labor to fully drain the colonies’ resources.

A prime example was the plantation system—forming large-scale cultivation areas and using low-wage labor to save on labor costs while producing various cash crops.

The targets of plantations were diverse: mainly rubber trees, bananas, tobacco, opium, hemp, cotton, sugarcane, tea, cocoa, coffee, spices, dyes, and more. The colonized people were forced to work more than 10 hours a day while receiving only meager meals.

Various metal mines, coal mines, and precious metal mines also became targets of exploitation. People were forcibly dragged deep underground and exploited as consumables, with many dying from respiratory difficulties or lung disease.

Of course, wages were either non-existent or so minimal they might as well not have existed.

But even with these exploitative practices, after a few years, they still couldn’t obtain enough resources to meet their needs, and furthermore, frequent uprisings by locals and the enormous losses incurred during suppression occurred periodically.

A normal company in this situation would attempt structural innovation to somehow improve its constitution, but in this barbaric age where the class system still clearly remained, such lukewarm talk would never work.

Therefore, they used even more vicious methods to exploit these people several times more than before to solve this resource shortage problem.

Colonial government officials and colonial troops would raid local villages, capture all visible women, and imprison them. They would then inform the families and make them come to ask for their release—then negotiate.

The condition was: “Bring a certain amount of specific resources to release the women.” If a married woman’s husband refused to collect resources, she would be raped and killed on the spot. For unmarried women, the same was applied with family members as the target.

Moreover, even when men brought the specified amount of resources, the women weren’t simply released. They had to provide that enormous amount of resources two more times per woman before they could finally be released.

Of course, resource collection took considerable time, and during this period, the colonial governments committed the insane act of taking these imprisoned women and operating state-run brothels.

Even when families brought all the requested resources, there were many cases where the women never returned.

And the atrocities of the European powers didn’t stop there. The most representative was the hand-cutting punishment.

Without considering the livelihoods of colonial residents, they assigned individual production quotas and implemented the extremely cruel policy of cutting off the hands of those who failed to meet them.

Moreover, those who failed to meet their quota would have their hand cut off once and be allowed to live, but the second time, an entire arm would be cut off, and if they failed a third time, they would be beheaded.

It was literally murderous to meet the quota even with a healthy body, so someone missing a hand had no chance of meeting such a quota—essentially saying that failing to meet the quota meant death.

As a result of this policy being implemented, a local administrator in one colony reportedly received 1,308 severed hands in a single day, showing that their exploitation was absolutely unacceptable.

Even worse, these quotas didn’t end with the death of the individual but were transferred to family members or others around them.

When people who could barely meet their own quotas were burdened with others’ shares, they inevitably failed to meet the quotas and were executed… and the quotas of those executed were passed on to yet others.

Thus, the colonial powers of Europa crossed all boundaries with their colonial rule, making everyone weep. As anger against them accumulated and finally crossed “a certain” point—

There was one piece of news that struck not just Europa but the entire world.

It was that an independence war had broken out in a British colony in southwestern Aporacha, where they had repelled the colonial army and established their own autonomous region.

Consequently, the United Kingdom of Britannia sent their suppression forces to quell this rebellion (as they called the independence war)… until then, they didn’t know.

That this would be a historic event that would completely overturn the fate of Teralion.