Whilst Keswick and I are walking back to our dorms, she starts talking about something. "Hey, have you heard? They're doing another cleansing in the slums."

I don’t know what a cleansing is, so I reply, “What, really?”

“Yeah, apparently another gang took the previous gang's place too quickly. There wasn’t enough infighting within the commoners. *sigh Those poor commoners.”

“Oh, what’s the gang’s name?”

“I don’t really remember, although I do recall it starting with 'blood' or something.”, the idiot’s probably talking about the Bloody Iron gang, one of the top gangs in the slums. When I was leaving, I heard word that they were doing a full takeover of the territory left behind by the Gray Cobra.

As we split up and I head into my dorm, I do my routine. But instead of researching magic like usual, I try to find history and geography books.

It’s harder than expected to find any but, I suppose the idiots at the academy expected students to know all they need about history before joining.

In the end, my mentally gifted self finds a book called “History Of The Great Amber Empire by Amelda Lovett.”

It’s filled with heavy propaganda praising the nobles and the king. But reading between the lines, I gather that the Amber Empire originally split off from another kingdom called Evermyst.

The empire, originally a kingdom, was started by a group of nobles, probably idiots who were upset or something at the kingdom of Evermyst, although in the book, it says that the “great nobles were tasked with creating a whole empire by the great gods.” But I do find that a bit stupid.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Anyhow, out of the nobles, one was chosen to be king, but it seems like it’s mostly for show. In the end, the nobles are the ones running the whole place. They also founded the capital of the empire, Lomond, the city I am currently in.

After centuries of growth, the Amber Kingdom expanded into an empire. But although the lands the Amber Empire owned grew large, the people living there, the commoners, were worked to the bone, whilst the nobles did nothing but sit on their fattened rears.

The common people realized the unfairness of it all and staged a revolt. The revolt almost succeeded, but for some reason, it abruptly failed. The book only says that “The great gods struck down the unfortunate commoners, tricked by the demon lord's mind control, to stand against the great Amber empire!” and I don’t know what to make of that.

After the revolt, the nobles realized that they couldn’t just blindly take advantage of the commoners anymore. So the nobles realized something: if the commoners barely clung to their lives, working to serve the empire to barely make a livable wage, whilst also living in a crime and chaos-filled part of the city, they wouldn’t rise up, they wouldn’t revolt. Because, in the end, they couldn’t trust the very people they represented, their fellow commoners. And if they couldn’t trust each other from backstabbing and lying, how could they band together to rise up against the nobles.

So the nobles created a plan, they would pull all guards out of the outer layer of the city, creating more crime and chaos. Gangs and organizations would start to form, and the nobles would let them. Finally, when everything reached some sort of equilibrium, and there wasn’t an extremely high chance you would get shanked in a random street for petty money, the nobles would send in their soldiers, and they would annihilate one of the strongest organizations around.

This would leave a power gap, a power gap the other gangs would try to fill, thus causing more chaos. And the nobles pulled it off, they named the place they left behind the slums.

The gang I was in, the Gray Cobra, was one of the targets of the routine sweeping of the slums. Apparently, annihilating the gang didn’t cause enough of a stir, so they plan to do the same thing to the Bloody Iron gang.

I search the library for more interesting information, but the only thing I find is a very old book that is filled with maps.

Looking through the book, I find that it depicts the world as some sort of one landmass, like Pangea, although its form looks more rounded. A big chunk of the north is owned by the Amber Empire, the Amber Empire borders the kingdom of Evermyst, which is below the empire and is roughly half the size of the Amber Empire. On the east side, there seems to be a sea, very creatively named, the Great Sea. On the south, there are a bunch of small kingdoms and dynasties, scattered around, whose names I won’t bother to remember. Although there are some big ones, that border the kingdom of Evermyst, they are the Prodor Kingdom and the Yaittothen Dynasty.