The next day arrived silently. The morning sun slowly rose from the eastern horizon, casting its golden brilliance across the vast, cracked terrain.
However, there was no beauty to be found in this light. It only illuminated the harsh reality of the Althoff Barony, a thoroughly barren wasteland.
The Althoff Barony was located far to the east of the Solaria Kingdom, situated within the remote Zulor Region.
The Zulor Region was infamous as one of the various administrative zones of the Solaria Kingdom, but it was by far the smallest and the only completely barren territory in the entire realm.
The land here was dry, deeply fractured, and utterly unsuitable for growing crops. It possessed every single defining characteristic of a dead wasteland.
Because of its extreme hostility, the kingdom specifically utilized the Zulor Region as a destination to exile individuals who went against the Crown or the high nobility. Instead of branding it as an official, brutal banishment, the royal court wrapped the punishment in fancy packaging.
They framed it as giving these fallen figures a secondary way out by appointing them to local positions. In reality, the capital just wanted them to go and rot in isolation. Being named a Baron or a Count within the Zulor Region was basically a slow death sentence.
For instance, Raymond had been sent here under the fancy title of a Baron, but the reality was nothing more than a sentence of endless suffering and pain.
The entire region was designed to drain a man’s spirit.Yet, even within the Zulor Region, conditions varied. The region itself was geographically huge, and it contained multiple lords and baronies with scattered pockets of land that were at least suitable for basic human survival.
Unfortunately, the Althoff Barony was the absolute worst of them all. It was the barren center of the wasteland. Crops could not grow here even if high-tier holy or divine water was utilized for artificial irrigation; the soil simply rejected life.
As a direct result, the entire barony depended completely on imported food and vital resources brought in by traveling merchant caravans. These opportunistic traders deliberately raised their prices to a ridiculously high level, exploiting the isolation to completely rip off the local populace.
But the subjects had no choice. It was either pay the exorbitant fees or starve to death.To make matters worse, a few months ago, the Althoff Barony was handed over to a brand-new lord.
When the citizens discovered the background and history of the original Raymond, learning that he was a total, degenerate loser to the core, they were immediately appalled.
The despair was so heavy that some residents actually packed up their meager belongings and escaped the very same day this new lord took office.The original Raymond did not disappoint their worst expectations.
Upon his arrival, he did absolutely nothing meaningful to stabilize the economy. Instead, he systematically squandered away the little emergency money left in the castle vaults on cheap, low-grade wine, leaving the common people to slowly starve in the dirt.
If these desperate citizens weren’t deeply terrified of the brutal royal punishments traditionally given to commoners who lifted a hand against their noble masters, they would have dragged this good-for-nothing lord out of his bed and hanged him from the nearest wall long ago.
"Young Master... why don’t we just go back to the castle?" Lily muttered, swallowing hard. Her little face was completely pale, and her tiny hands tightly gripped the hem of Raymond’s clean silk clothes as she walked directly behind him, looking around the area with anxious eyes.
"Come on, Lily, there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of," Raymond replied smoothly. He puffed out his chest, raising his head high with unyielding pride as he walked down the center of the dusty streets. "They cannot do a single thing to this strong, handsome Young Master of yours."
The Althoff Barony’s main population hub was made up of only one single, giant town. As Raymond observed his surroundings, he realized the architecture was in an absolute state of decay.
The residential buildings were completely dilapidated, many of them leaning precariously on their structural supports, seemingly on their last legs. The streets were in a horrific condition, riddled with massive potholes that looked large enough to swallow an entire transport carriage whole.
The layout of the town was a total, chaotic mess. Garbage, rotting debris, and unmanaged waste were piled everywhere, creating an intense, putrid stench that filled the heavy morning air. Raymond found himself having a difficult time even breathing normally without gagging.Worse than the infrastructure were the people.
The narrow streets were lined with deeply malnourished citizens. They possessed pale yellow skin and dull, yellowed eyes due to the extreme effects of chronic starvation. Many of the children had gone completely bald from a lack of nutrients, their bodies incredibly skinny with oversized, tattered clothes hanging loosely off their bony frames.
The intense, blistering sunlight beat down on them relentlessly. To Raymond’s modern eyes, the people shuffling through the dirt looked exactly like mindless zombies, their expressions dead and devoid of any spark of life.
The town itself spanned a radius of roughly three square kilometers, packed tightly within broken stone outer walls. It was a massive, concentrated slum housing nearly one thousand two hundred souls, all of them slowly waiting for the impending winter to finish them off.
Currently, Raymond was making his way directly toward the primary entrance of the town, with Lily tagging fearfully behind his heels.The sole reason Lily possessed such a terrified expression was because Raymond’s decision to walk boldly down these public streets made him look like a live, moving target to the local population.
The moment his figure came into view, the dead, dispirited eyes of the surrounding townspeople suddenly surged with an intense, burning killing intent and raw resentment.
Raymond could literally feel a cold, pricking sensation dancing across his skin. There was nothing more these one thousan two hundred people wanted than to grab Raymond, tear him apart, and skin him alive for what he had done to their treasury.
However, the sight of the three giant armored knights walking silently behind Raymond made every single one of them think twice.
Although their hatred was absolute, and they wanted nothing more than to beat this idiot lord into a bloody pulp, they still possessed the basic survival instincts to think logically.
They knew they had to somehow survive the wrath of those three steel pillars first before they could ever lay a finger on Raymond.
Whether their frail, starving bodies could withstand even the passive, heavy breath of those Silver Rank knights was an entirely different story. The visible pressure radiating from Jonathan Vance and the other two guards kept the entire mob paralyzed in the dirt.