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The moment he laid eyes on the wrecked wine cellar, Field felt despair close in around him.
Fortunately, fate wasn’t done with him yet.
After searching just a few spots, he found a cluster of unopened barrels.
He tapped the side of the wood lightly.
THUMP.
THUMP.
A deep, muffled resonance answered from within.
Field’s heartbeat kicked up two notches, and a grin nearly broke across his face, but he’d been disappointed before.
He kept his expression neutral.
“Open this barrel.
I’m hoping for wine, not tentacles.”
The Grey Mist only corrupted living things.
Inanimate objects generally didn’t turn into monsters, provided the wine had been properly sealed.
The guard grunted and pried the barrel open.
A single POP, and rich, mellow fragrance rolled through the air.
In a winery reeking of rot and crawling with monsters, the smell of top-tier wine hit like finding shrimp in a sewer.
The contrast was deeply, deeply wrong, and yet Field had never loved anything more.
“This is it!” He couldn’t help himself.
His fist pumped the air.
“Black Pearl Wine.
Already extinct across the entire Empire.” He spun toward the guard beside him, who was clearly craving a drink, and snapped his fingers.
“Get my butler Kao.
I need him to tally every drinkable barrel in this place.”
Asina watched him celebrate and chose her words carefully.
“My lord, even fine wine should be consumed in moderation.”
More than a few lords had wrecked themselves through drink, spending their days haunting taverns and pleasure houses until there was nothing left.
“Don’t worry, Asina.
I’m not drinking it.”
Honestly, Field would take iced tea or a cold cola over wine any day of the week.
“These vintages have been off the market for ten years.
Every barrel is liquid gold.
Get them to the Imperial Capital, or honestly to any city nearby, and we’re looking at an enormous windfall.”
The exact number depended on how much wine was actually down here.
But Field had no doubt that nobles and officials would claw each other bloody for a taste of something this rare.
“Oh.” Asina pressed a slender finger to her lips, tilting her head.
“If Black Pearl Wine is that valuable, we could start brewing ourselves.
We do have the Starry Night Grand Winery now.”
“You’re not wrong.
He left Kao to sort out the wine cellar and finally had time to properly look at his territory.
Centered on the winery, spreading out roughly the size of an elementary school playground, that was what Field had claimed.
As long as the Grey Mist didn’t blanket it and people could move around on it, it counted as real land.
What was on that land right now didn’t matter much, since it was all corrupted plants and rotting creatures that needed to be burned out before anything else could happen.
“Now,” he said to no one in particular, “the real work starts.”
He walked the full outer edge of the territory.
The settlers had been busy, the corrupted creatures in the fields had thinned noticeably, and the place was starting to resemble somewhere humans could actually live.
The settlers were shoving the deformed Corrupted Creatures into piles.
The monsters had no real fight in them, but their existence alone was a kind of poison.
Scrap timber cleared from the Grand Winery made for decent kindling.
They tossed it onto the piles and put a torch to it.
Shrieks rang out, high, terrible, like cats yowling in the middle of the night.
The sound mixed with the wet hiss of burning flesh.
Thick grey smoke churned out of the creatures’ bodies and rolled skyward.
“Heavens, Valkyrie above — those awful things are finally gone.”
One of the maidservants pressed a hand to her chest and announced this to anyone within earshot, voice loud and theatrical.
The female slaves doing the actual work shot envious glances her way.
Access to the castle.
Scraps from the lord’s table.
Actual rest time.
For a slave, any one of those things was worth wanting.
“Scissors.” Field turned toward his maid.
“I need you to do something.”
“My lord, of course—”
Her grin disappeared the instant he addressed her directly, like a cricket that had suddenly gone still.
The loud voice cut out entirely.
Field had spent these past weeks playing the part of the weak, foolish young noble, but he was still a noble.
To a commoner, that gap was absolute.
He’d been too caught up in the expansion work to pay much attention to the people around him.
Now, standing here watching them, the sheer weight of this world’s class divide was impossible to ignore.
He found himself thinking about a story, something that had actually happened to his deadbeat father.
A rival noble had been planning to ambush the family’s trade caravan.
A peasant stumbled across the hidden position by accident, hurried to the castle, and told the Count everything.
The Count turned the information around on his enemy, lured them in, and slaughtered them.
By any reasonable logic, the peasant deserved a reward.
Instead, once the Count returned victorious, he had the peasant hanged in the public square.
The reason: the peasant’s filthy shoes, caked with mud and manure, had tracked foul prints across the Count’s carpet.
To the nobility, commoners were barely worth acknowledging.
Slaves weren’t even that.
Field wasn’t a saint, and he wasn’t pretending otherwise.
He had no interest in tearing down the whole system and certainly no interest in becoming the kind of monster he’d just thought about. Find the original chapter at g.com.
Give my people a decent life.
That’s the bar.
He paused.
The obedient ones, anyway.
“Scissors.
Round up everyone in my service.
I have a few things to say.”
“Yes, my lord.” She grabbed her apron and scurried off.
Kao arrived first.
He had the highest rank among the household, so naturally Scissors went to him before anyone else.
“My lord, the barrel count isn’t finished — we’ll need at least two more days.” Kao was slightly out of breath when he appeared.
He was a thin, almost frail-looking man, not much flesh on him anywhere, someone who had clearly known harder times.
Which was strange, because his salary was the highest in the entire territory.
Five silver coins and fifty copper a month.
Purchasing, accounting, financial oversight, all of it flowed through him.
A man with any head for numbers could squeeze that income several times over with minimal effort.
For context: one copper coin in the Empire bought a loaf of black bread, rye bran bread, often cut with wood shavings or tree bark.
Nothing like the bread Field remembered from home.
This stuff came out of the oven like a rock.
Bite into it dry and you’d crack a tooth.
The correct approach was to soak it soft in hot broth, then eat it with coarse salt still full of grit.
It had no wheat smell, no sweetness.
Just salt and a faint bitterness underneath.
And even for food that wretched, plenty of people couldn’t earn enough in a full day’s work to buy two loaves.
That was how people became slaves.
The maidservants, the manservant, and the cook each made fifteen copper a day.
Four silver and fifty copper a month.
Before long, they were all assembled: two maidservants, one manservant, one cook.
In Field’s old world, two or three personal servants would have been a flex.
Here, in the middle ages, it made him a broke nobody on the lower rungs of the nobility.
His older sister, the same woman who had sent cavalry to ride him down, had twenty manservants alone.
Some chopped vegetables.
Some butchered meat.
Some led horses.
At least one was dedicated entirely to trimming her nails.
Field let his gaze travel over each face in turn.
One by one, they dropped their eyes, staring at the ground.
Meeting a lord’s gaze was an insult.
They all knew it.
He looked at them and said nothing for a moment.
➤ Next: Territory First Established, Planning the Future