Chapter 87

I have taken care of my target, so now it’s time for some good old fashioned looting. Specifically what I want is the massive quantity of soul stones located somewhere in the keep, underground according to everyone that knows about it.

I blink down a couple floors and end up in the basement, where I can feel a large number of very weak souls coming from a room down the hall. I walk down the hall till I get to the point closest to them, and there is door, or if there is it is hidden very well.

Blinking into the room I see countless soul stones, tiny and incredibly low quality, but there are tons of them, so many that I couldn’t possibly carry them all in my inventory. This gets me thinking, can I refine soul stones into bigger soul stones? I had never considered it before mostly because I didn’t have a need to do so.

I attempt to do it the same way I would refine a normal soul into a soul stone. It works out pretty well until the stone gets to about the size of my fist, and then the process slows down significantly. Instead of trying to make the soul stone bigger I decide to refine more stones. The process is actually very fast, I can refine the tiny stones into one the size of my fist in roughly thirty seconds.

It doesn’t take long for me to fill up my inventory with the fist sized stones, and the pile of tiny ones is reduced by half. At this time I decide to get back to work, the armies should arrive in roughly twelve hours, the more commanders we can kill in that time the better.

A couple rapid blinks latter and I am outside the walls of the keep. I head towards the wealthy district of the city, most of the high ranking officials live in this area. Walking down the slightly crowded streets I rip the souls out of anyone that could be considered an authority figure for the military, not exactly subtle but at this point I don’t care, there are no soul mages other than myself in the city anymore, no one will know what happened to them or who did it till the city has fallen into my hands.

At one point I walk past a building when I feel many people die at the same time, when I observe it a little closer I realize uncle is in the building, seems he poisoned some necromancers successfully. I reach out to him with telepathy.

‘You ready to go?’ Jack

‘Oh, Jack, yeah, this was the last batch of them; all military necromancers in the city are dead’ Uncle

‘Let’s get the meet up location then’ Jack

A moment later uncle is leaving the building wearing a chef’s outfit. We walk towards the gate, a different one from where we entered. By the time we get to the gate people are starting to panic, no rioting yet but everyone is starting to realize that the leadership are dropping like flies. There is no one guarding the gate anymore so we easily slip out undetected.

It doesn’t take long for us to meet up with the couple people that have manage to complete their tasks, and over the course of the next three hours almost everyone makes it back, only one person doesn’t, one of the people that were chosen based on merit. He was captured and executed by one of his targets.

We watch from afar while the city falls into chaos, at one point the wealthy district bursts into flames. As expected the military is useless without their leaders, they try to help but with no organization they just make the problems worse.

At one point a young man runs from the city in our direction, carrying an arm load of valuables. I blink up behind him and slit his throat, offering the valuables to the other assassins.

We wait for several more hours before the two armies show up, from opposite direction. One led by Cath, the other by Johanna. When they see the armies many of the soldiers rush out and try to attack our armies, only to be annihilated. Seeing this most of them surrender, before dawn comes we have successfully taken hold of most of the city. The total casualties on our side were less than one hundred.

I enter the city from the nearest gate; the soldiers at the gate salute me and return to their duties. I head towards the keep, where Johanna and Cath are already present.

“Hey, you guys did pretty good work; it made our job a breeze.” Johanna

“My part was pretty easy too, the king was sick, made him really easy to kill.” Jack

“I figured that was your work.” Johanna

“We should have all resistance in this city cleared up within the hour” Cath

“Good work, have someone bring some booze out from the cellars, once the city officially falls into our hands let’s give them out as a reward to our soldiers” Jack

“Good idea, that will boost the moral even higher after this” Cath

Roughly an hour later a notification appears in my vision.

Congratulations! You have successfully captured the city of Itita, a flawless victory

Behind that there is another notification.

You are now level 37. +4.03 stat points

I pull up my status and put those points into spirit. I then pull up the control panel for the city and look it over, the settings are the same as they were before I conquered it. the tax system was needlessly complicated, why tax the person buying and the person selling? Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if the taxes are simple and easy to understand, like just having a ten percent tax on all money spent in the city? Which is exactly what I put it to; it actually lowers the taxes for most people. I then look over more of the management options, some of what it tells me I already know, the people in the city have always loved the arts, they have some excellent training programs for their soldiers, and it is currently in a state of discontent. The last one should be resolved pretty quickly now that we have taken the city.

The next thing I look at is spending, where the taxes are spent. The old king had twenty five percent of the taxes going to paying the leadership; I set it down to ten percent. The next part I look at is infrastructure; it was set to five percent, which is actually enough to maintain the current infrastructure due to the work of a previous ruler. I bring that up to twenty five percent, I want to not just maintain it but significantly improve it, as well as build roads between my cities. The military spending is set at twenty percent, I leave that alone. The part that previously had the biggest spending was on the arts, at thirty percent, I reduce it to twenty percent. Ten percent went towards research and development of all sorts, I set that to twenty percent. The last ten percent went towards miscellaneous things, anything that might come up that needs financial attention, I set that to five percent.

Next I have Cath order the soldiers to gather half of the wealth of the old leadership, leaving the other half for their families. Of the wealth gathered I divide a quarter of it amongst the soldiers based on merit. With the next quarter I divide it amongst the citizens, giving all of them approximately one thousand jaers, for the wealthy this won’t affect them much if at all, but it should be very effective for winning over the loyalty of the poor and the working class. It also has a side effect of calming down the populace. For the third quarter I put it straight into the cities treasury, while the last quarter goes towards a different treasury reserved for emergencies.

As for how this money is distributed is actually pretty simple. The system does it; apparently there is something similar to an inventory for a countries fund, apparently businesses have something similar. Basically this means that all citizens got a notification that they have been paid and then they can accept the money any time they want, it has already been removed from the treasury. Taxes are similarly automatically collected. A ruler can’t use this to store their own personal funds because of certain risks that come with it, namely it is likely to all be spent.

With some support from our highly organized military the city is back to functioning normally before noon. As I haven’t slept in a couple days I am starting to feel tired, I look for a bedroom to lie down and sleep in. finding one I curl up and drift off to sleep.

End chapter 87