Ch.91How to Prevent Unfair Treatment

When playing games, you often encounter situations known as “eokka.”

Short for “being forcibly screwed over,” this term means “a situation that becomes unreasonably difficult.”

Police Story was particularly notorious for such brutal difficulty, as most of the game’s numerous events were designed to torment players—the developers were truly dedicated to making players suffer.

Among these, the most infuriating was the “epidemic” event. In that world, there were no vaccines or cultivation facilities. The only thing players could do was combine existing medicines to create remedies that reduced fever or alleviated pain. While this might have been appropriate considering the poor medical environment of the medieval setting, from the players’ perspective, watching a city they had carefully nurtured get decimated in real-time was enough to give them fatal hypertension.

The reason I obsessively built water and sewage systems was precisely to prevent epidemics. Unfortunately, epidemics were just one of many events that made players want to smash their monitors with their bare hands.

Even the early-game Elysian event chain was maddening. If you chose “You bastard, you dare set fire to our sacred territory? Come fight us if you dare! We’ll crush you so thoroughly you won’t even have bones left to pick up!” you’d have to deal with massive, unplanned military expenditures. If you chose “Elysia is like a great mountain peak. Let us coexist peacefully,” your knights would revolt, throwing your political situation into even greater chaos.

Similarly with Fahrenheit, if you simply overlooked the diplomatic failure, you’d suffer a massive influence penalty for ten years with the “Humiliated!” trait, while your disgruntled military would try to break free from control. If you chose “Fahrenheit, you bastards!!! Let’s settle this in person!!” you’d have to do what I did—spend years pouring money into intense diplomatic campaigns and commit your entire knightly forces just to barely achieve victory by taking the Master’s head.

In short, if you yielded, they’d spring back and cause trouble; if you confronted them, they’d burn like firewood. Either way, players ended up with splitting headaches. In user communities, complaint posts about event chains topped the popular lists on every page, and in modding communities, mods that removed these infuriating event chains recorded over a million downloads—showing that everyone felt the same way.

What made it even more frustrating was that while these “eokka events” were brutally difficult, they weren’t designed to be impossible. With enough contortion, they could be overcome. The developers had poured their sadistic tendencies into creating events with up to ten difficulty levels, where the player’s response determined whether their nation would collapse or emerge stronger, like ground hardening after rain.

*

“So, you’re saying you want to build watchtowers at Pale Harbor?”

“Yes. Isn’t Pale Harbor a proper port city now? Even less significant ports get raided by pirates all the time, so we should prepare in advance.”

“Hmm. That’s logical. I can’t argue with that.”

Generally, pirates don’t target fishing ports like Pale Harbor.

While fishing ports aren’t completely safe, pirates primarily target trading ports flourishing with international commerce as their main source of income.

Of course, some pirates exploit this perception by specifically targeting seemingly vulnerable fishing ports.

As evident from the fact that preserved food is always calculated in Amurtat’s exports, food is a commodity that can be sold at fair prices anywhere—making it a valuable resource for pirates, both as provisions while at sea and as something to convert to money when on land.

Since pirates don’t form a unified government, measuring their threat was meaningless to begin with. But because of them, benevolent rulers like myself and our citizens had to live in fear of their unpredictable raids.

Just pirates, why be so afraid?

Well, of course we should be afraid.

In this world, humans weren’t the only beings with the intelligence to conceive and execute the idea of living by plundering others.

Just beyond the coastal waters lurked insane marine monsters like the Kraken. To navigate such oceans and conduct raids?

Humans would die before going mad, but servants of marine monsters or abyssal intelligences could easily ignore such conditions.

Although the Core’s barrier blocked most of these intelligences like coffee grounds caught in a filter, its flaw was that it couldn’t block human entry—which meant it also couldn’t block those who were “still” human.

Unlike skeletons or zombies completely controlled by necromancers, ghouls with “still” functioning metabolism and minimal remaining reason could cross the barrier.

“Damn it, so many things get through. It’s more like a filter than a barrier, seriously.”

“Your Majesty… if you put it that way, we’re living inside a filter…”

“Hmm… I guess so?”

Come to think of it, I’d rather be known as a ruler who creates barriers (with real fans) than one who makes enormous filters.

“Anyway, allocate additional budget for coastal defense.”

“…Understood.”

Having secured my aide’s cooperation, I spread out a map and circled all the points that could defend Pale Harbor.

As a result, the aide’s face grew more wrinkled watching the budget increase exponentially, but wrinkles can always be smoothed out with a blood injection.

*

“So basically, we have to build all of this?”

“That’s right.”

“Can I take a vacation?”

“Come on. Just work for a week first. Just one week.”

Naturally, the fortification of the eastern coast, which began before the new city’s construction was even complete, progressed very slowly.

In truth, Tiberius hadn’t declared “This must be finished immediately!” but rather “This needs to be built!” so no specific construction deadline had been set. Most construction workers had been dispatched to the Western Forest in the west, leaving behind workers who were either too old or too young.

But an imperial order was an imperial order, so hundreds of outposts and fortresses began to be constructed. The coastal outposts, which required less complicated planning, were built very quickly.

The reason was simple: even for projects that couldn’t be completed quickly, it was better to finish some parts rapidly to give the impression to higher-ups that “Ah, the buildings are being properly constructed” rather than showing only 20-30% progress across the entire project.

This kind of wisdom was especially prevalent among the lower classes, who could lose their heads at a single word from officials or knights.

Especially among those from Elysia.

“But we seem to have too few people. At this rate, we won’t even finish half the work in a year.”

However, the fundamental problem of severe understaffing was critical.

“Don’t worry about that. We’ll have more people soon.”

“?”

But the veterans and supervisors weren’t concerned, and the reason soon became clear.

“Here are the newcomers. They may not have skills, but they have strength, so put them to work.”

“See? More people.”

“…How?”

The young worker was bewildered by the sudden increase in personnel.

The explanation was quite simple: while Pale Harbor was a fishing port, it was also a multipurpose port capable of transporting various goods and people.

People lived in both the north and south of Amurtat, and people always tend to move in search of better jobs and homes.

And in April of the year 11 in the Amurtat calendar.

This time, when the weather was beginning to warm, was when the seasonal winds that had been blowing continuously temporarily calmed down, allowing immigrant workers from other countries to fill the vacancies.

Of course, many would leave after earning money, and not everyone arriving at Pale Harbor would stay there. But having additional hands to help with the work was always welcome.