“My liege, are you sure that this is alright?”

The Baron nervously gulped and hesitantly asked.

“Oh, it’s fine. I can take it. Just keep going and don’t stop.”

The young prince casually answered.

Hesitantly nodding his head, the Baron lowered his head and started to move his mouth.

“Mhmmm. Wow!~ It’s so big! And it curves upwards too!” the prince blissfully intoned. “I’ve never seen one so big. How do you fit it in?”

“I lack the elegance of a gentleman, my liege. I just cram it in.” The Baron replied, embarrassed. He then continued to move his mouth while adding his fingers into the play.

“I see. I get it now! So that’s how you write the word ‘environment’. You start with ‘land’ and expand from there. Interesting. This language is very interesting!”

Atlas joyfully declared.

Currently, the young prince and the Baron were sitting around a table within the latter’s office. Multiple course parchments lay scattered on the table before them, with the two men holding onto quills dipped in ink.

The Baron had a leatherbound book in his left hand. He read it out aloud and wrote down the characters for new words on the sheet of paper before him. On the other side of the table, Atlas sat before a parchment of his own and wrote down the words which the Baron read from the book.

“Are you sure you can understand this, my liege? Usually, it takes one a full year of learning to reach basic proficiency in reading and writing,” The Baron worriedly said.

He still couldn’t quite grasp this ‘learning’ that the young prince was doing.

Traditionally, when learning a language, a person would start by learning the basic characters. After learning the shapes and the sounds of the various characters, they would move on to words. Words would then lead to combining multiple words, after which came grammar, sentence formation, tense, clause, etc.

All in all, learning a new language was not an easy task. This was common sense and the Baron, having gone through this process himself, knew fully well of how difficult it was.

However, the young prince seemed to have thrown tradition and standards out of the window. His method of speed learning, or so he called it, did not follow any rhyme or rhythm.

This is how Atlas did it; he asked the Baron to read the words from an ordinary fables book and to write down the new words that appeared each time. Atlas would then copy these characters once into his sheet of paper and…that was it.

While the Baron was dubious of this method, the young prince seemed extremely confident of his approach. The older man had tried to dissuade the young prince multiple times yet the latter never listened.

“Indeed. If I were to follow the traditional way, it normally would take me a full year to grasp all the characters, the way they are written, their sounds, etc. After that, it would take me another few years of learning before I reach any sort of proficiency in reading and writing. It is due to the enormous time involved that noble children are educated from a young age.”

Atlas agreed with the Baron’s perspective.

“Right. That’s why my liege, we must–” Thinking that he had finally gotten through to the young prince, the Baron started to passionately advise him. However, he was almost immediately interrupted by Atlas.

“But we don’t have a year do we, Baron Helm?” Atlas snidely asked. “No, we have only a week before the people out there begin starving.” He pointed out the window.

The Baron lowered his head.

After inspecting the ration storehouse, Atlas had ordered the Baron to send some servants into the building to separate the good from the bad. The result was…worrying, to say the least.

Almost 90% of the entire stock had gone bad from poor storage, extreme humidity, and the wet weather of the swamps. The surviving 10% would only last this colony of humans for a week.

In other words, the Baron had to secure a fresh source of rations if he did not want his people to starve.

Still, the bad news did not end there. People have begun to fall sick.

Due to the lack of readily available freshwater, the people had been neglecting their hygiene for the past month. This, combined with the daily tussling in the swamp’s mud, the poor insulation of their tents, the general coldness of the weather, and extreme humidity, sickness was a matter of course.

Honestly, Atlas was surprised that it had even taken so long. What with the children being taken into consideration.

Sickness was not something that could be taken lightly. Even something like the common cold was deadly enough to kill a person during this backward era.

If the Baron were not to immediately take steps to resolve this problem, more people will continue falling sick which would eventually lead to death.

It was a truly worrying state of affairs. Worst of all, the Baron was unsure how to handle this. This only served to pain the warm-hearted man all the more. The enormous weight of responsibility burdened him immensely and the Baron felt the world closing in on him.

Just as darkness seemed to surround him, filling him with despair and guilt for the future, a ray of light entered the stage.

Atlas Constantine; a thirteen-year-old boy with the mind of a sixty-year-old politician. Atlas was no fighter, but he was a damn good leader.

Even when presented with this hopeless scenario, the boy didn’t flinch. Instead, he greeted the challenge with enthusiasm.

“Don’t worry too much about it, Baron Helm. You did a…okay job in leading these people here. And it is quite obvious that anything more than this is beyond you. Thankfully, I’m here. I got this. So just rest easy, and follow my orders.”

Atlas confidently declared and the Baron listened.

It was the young prince who had opened his eyes to the problems growing within this town. It might be that he had solutions for them, right?

The Baron prayed that such was the case.

“As for my method of learning,” Atlas went back to the primary topic. “Is it odd? Yes. Unconventional? Very. Downright confusing? For you, maybe.”

He took a pause and started scratching something on the parchment before him. While he scratched away, he continued his speech.

“You see, Baron Helm, it would ‘traditionally’ take a ‘normal’ person a full year to learn the language. But I’m neither traditional nor normal. I’m a genius.”

Stopping his hands and removing the quill, Atlas turned the sheet of parchment to make it face the Baron. On it, written with perfect handwriting was the sentence.

‘Would you not agree?’

The Baron’s eyes widened to the size of eggs. His bald head turned pallid as his eyes scanned the words written perfectly using the native language with proper language.

It had to be known that the Baron had been teaching the young prince for less than five hours!

Atlas simply smiled in response.

“I told you. I got this. Just relax and obey my orders. I shall handle everything.” He then turned to face his parchment once again and said, “Let’s continue for some more time. I believe we can start with complex sentences, variant speech, and other difficult topics while we wait for your servant to arrive.”

The Baron stiffly nodded his head and complied. The two of them then continued to immerse themselves into the art of language while waiting for the Baron’s servant to arrive. Atlas had previously asked the Baron to send the man on duty.

---

“Two-hundred and forty-seven (247), is it?” Atlas asked, sitting behind a desk and holding a parchment in his hand.

“Indeed. Of which, there are a hundred and nine men (109), eighty women (80), and forty-five children (45),” the Baron faithfully replied. “There are also thirteen men (13) who claim to be educated. As per your wish, these men were recorded separately.”

The Baron handed another parchment to Atlas.

Holding in hands were two sets of parchments separately.

In one set, was the name, age, and specialty of every single resident within this small swamp town. While detailed on the other was the name, age, previous occupation, and basic history of the thirteen, supposedly educated men, living within the town.

The duty that Atlas had entrusted the Baron was to conduct a proper survey of the town.

He had originally thought that the Baron already had a list of names and was eager to get to work. However, the young prince underestimated the complacency and incompetence of the large man for he did not even have this.

When Atlas had questioned about the town’s population, the Baron had replied, ‘around three hundred, I think. Definitely not more than five hundred.’

“Two hundred and forty-seven (247)...” Atlas repeated. “In other words, we have to find rations to feed two hundred and forty-seven hungry mouths every day after a week.”

“...yes, my liege,” Baron Helm replied with guilt.

Shaking his head, Atlas asked, “Did you pass down my orders? The one where the ‘Feeding Shack’ is to be closed down?”

“Yes, my liege! It has already been done. It seems that the people have already noticed it, with a few coming up here to ask me about it,” the Baron explained. “Just as you told me, I had my servant send them away at the front door.”

“Good. Now for my next order…”

The young prince coldly declared.

“The Feeding Shack will only open once per day. Rations will be limited and the amount will be dependent on the number of members of the family. No more of ‘eat all you want, whenever you want’ business.”

“This will be effective, immediately.”