"I had thought about just killing you," I said to the crew of the ship that I had captured. I had forced the ship to dock and everyone to disembark not long after the Ocean and Wind Spirits reclaimed their power and withdrew their attention from the area. I would question them eventually, but first I wanted to make sure the people that had gathered to help defend the town saw what my brand of justice would look like.

"But I have decided that a clean death is a waste of manpower the town can't afford right now. You and your ship were responsible for the damage done to the docks and warehouses, so it only seems fair that you repair that damage.

"I will be gathering a vial of your blood and recording your Qi signature in jade tokens as a method to track you. If you run, I can use the blood and Qi I will gather to find you," I warned them.

"This is the only warning I will ever give, if I have to track you down, your sentence will no longer be indentured labor, I will rip you to shreds and make an offering of your flesh and blood to the triad of Spirits that protected our land and defeated that Nascent Soul Realm cultivator."

I heard mutterings among the townspeople watching, most surprised that I would allow these men and women to live. Although a few were angry about that, most accepted it without rancor or recriminations. They might be angry that I allowed these people to live for now, but once their passions from the heat of battle had cooled, and they saw how hard I would work these prisoners, I thought it likely they would support my decision.

I was going to force them to work to build the city I envisioned Xiwang could be. In the end, the labor I got from them would more than offset the expense I incurred to repair the damage that had been done. Things might have been different if a number of my people had been slaughtered, but there had been no deaths.

I didn't know why, but the person in charge of bombarding the docks had launched those explosions with surgical precision, targeting warehouses and dock infrastructure instead of the more public and populous locations. That was a question that would be asked when I got around to interrogating each member of the ship.

Elves lived a very long time, and the amount of labor I could get out of these men and women in that amount of time would allow me to expand Xiwang and build a capital city worthy of the Myche Fief. A lifetime as an indentured servant might seem excessive, and I wasn't averse to addressing their circumstances again in the future, but I wanted to make a point. An attack against my territory or my people would result in real hardship.

Decades, even centuries of forced servitude. If they worked hard, stayed out of trouble, and became an asset to the Fief, I might commute their sentences, but those people captured or convicted of crimes would not be coddled. They would serve the community and land that they had attacked.

The town and the territory I ruled needed every able-bodied person working towards a goal. Xiwang was just one of the towns and villages I had under my control. From all reports it was the largest and best established in the entire territory, but it was still just one of many.

There was so much to be done, and if Xiwang was the best the territory had to offer, then the fate of those other towns and villages was worrisome. I needed to connect with each of them, find out where people lived, and develop a communication hub. A vehicle that would create a network of communities that could trade with each other.

I wouldn't be building roads and bridges between communities. They weren't sustainable on this world, and they weren't really needed. I would use ocean vessels. The construction of most towns and cities along the coast made that cost effective. With smart management, spatial devices, and flying animals, I would be able to create a Barony that was interconnected and self-supportive. A thriving area where my people could prosper, and the resources of the land could be harvested.

The ability to use flying beasts and spatial devices for trade was common. The use of ships and warehouses for smuggling had left me with a question about these people's methods. Why would the people running this smuggling operation use ships, warehouses, and normal people to move and protect their goods? A question I hoped those I had captured were unable to answer.

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There was no reason to ship even the large number of pods and cores that I discovered on the ship once it had docked. Even a weaker spatial device would have been able to hold everything that had been stored below decks. There had to be a reason for this inefficiency, something I wasn't understanding, something to explain their methods.

I knew the vast majority of the people couldn't afford spatial devices, and even if they could, they couldn't use them. It required someone who had reached the Body Refinement Realm to have enough Qi to use them. They required Qi to activate them and to place items inside or remove them.

They had used flying beasts when creating and connecting trade routes over a thousand years ago. It was the safest means to transport goods and people, but even this method of trade came with risk and needed protection against untamed flying beasts and monsters that would attack. Most of that was easily offset using stealth arrays, and well-traveled routes, areas flying creatures had learned to avoid.

The innovation of a ballista weapon, armed with Allocasuarina luehmannii, a type of ironwood gave even non-cultivators protection. The wood had been found to be the hardest of its kind, suitable to be harvested because of it's sustainability and perfect to make the ammunition bolts the ballista would fire. The bolts could, additionally, be fitted with beast cores, primed to explode on impact, similar to the weapon the ship had used to bombard the town.

The real advantage of this type of weapon was that anyone could be trained to use it. The Qi required to activate the cores was insignificant, so even those people unable to cultivate had enough to ignite the primer that would detonate the cores.

The ballista and bolts were a powerful deterrent against beast attacks both aerial and land based. Thinking about their suitability had me wondering why the town hadn't had any constructed and placed on the walls for protection. It was idiotic to rely only on the eight trigrams formation when even something that powerful could be overwhelmed with enough time and determination.

That was another thing to add to the list of issues that needed to be addressed. I was beginning to understand why most cultivators left the running and management of their Fief to others. This was going to be a time-consuming process, one that was going to take me decades to implement even the rudimentary changes I wanted made to each town.

Located where my Fief was, with people so scattered, and with no real exploration of the area having been done, I couldn't foist my responsibilities off on someone else. I didn't have the talent pool to draw on that could be found in the Empire. Or if I did, those people were well hidden and scattered. They would need to be found and recruited.

"Commander Faun, use one of the damaged warehouses to house the prisoners for now. Set a guard detail around the building. I don't want them running before I have their blood and Qi signature collected.

"Gwen, have some people begin interviewing them. I want to know their names, where they come from, what abilities and skills they might have. If any refuse to answer, have Commander Faun isolate them and I will deal with them," I said.

It was too early to trust Faun and Gwen completely, but I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt for now. I thought it prudent to give them a chance. They both seemed skilled at what they did, and I could ill afford to waste resources or people.

Maybe in the future, when I had a larger pool of people to draw on, I could afford to be more discriminating. But for now, they had done reasonably well to survive under Lord Chon's venal rulership. I would see how they performed when given the tools and support they should have had all along.

"Do you want suppression fetters placed on their necks?" Faun asked.

"You have suppression fetters?" I asked in disbelief. They were a barbaric innovation, used long ago by feudal lords to control their people. They were nothing more than slave collars that were enchanted to create a disconnect between a person and their Qi.

They were modified so that enough Qi was able to be cycled so that a person wouldn't die, but not much more. It left those shackled completely at the mercy of anyone with a control rod. Few people who wore those devices made any trouble, because the other feature of the collars was the ability to stimulate a person's pain receptors.

No one that wore one of those evil devices had ever freed themselves, it took an uprising that was nothing more than mass suicide to change people's perceptions about the evil things. A province of slaves with nothing to lose had rioted, forcing their slave masters to kill them. They had rioted knowing that it would kill them, but things had deteriorated so badly in that province that death was preferable. It was only after they had sacrificed their lives that the Empire had intervened.

The collars had been outlawed, except in the case of prisoners. And even then, the collars were used in only the most egregious cases. What made the slave collars more insidious was their inability to affect a cultivator of any realm past Qi Gathering. They were devices created by the powerful to enslave the weak, and it had created a class divide that existed even to this day.

Lord Chon must have ignored that proscription, and I ignored Commander Faun's question long enough to pen and send a missive to Elder Shadow and Patriarch Umbra. If the people on this island were being enslaved, then the Sect needed to know about it immediately.