The gates to my Palace opened and the black carriages rode out, piloted by my trusted guards, staffed by the maids. All of them returned without a problem, their distress signet rings never triggered. They each had a map of a piece of the slums, with the houses and alleys they should visit to rescue my unwilling future citizens.

This winter was particularly harsh and I knew a lot of people would die from a lack of heating. Some with the System could endure the cold but in all honesty, the difference of someone in the base Class, below level 20, to someone with no System was negligible. Unless they invested heavily in cold resistance, they would freeze to death without proper heating.

I used the [Assassin] ghosts to scout out people in vulnerable situations. Beggars, families in absolute poverty, slum dwellers, street urchins, orphans, and others. With winter came the steep increase in firewood and food prices and we don’t even need to mention the cost of enchanted heating items. The real estate speculators in the slums had even developed a method to tell which families wouldn’t survive, earmarking their houses for hostile repossession or relocation even before the family died. It created the hideous situation in which families who survived Winter by sheer luck or Herculean effort ended up being murdered just because these real estate predators couldn’t write one housing unit as a loss.

I could singlehandedly solve this problem. Wipe out the predators in the slums, give each family a slab of stone with a heating enchantment and an embedded Core sliver for self-sufficient MP generation. That would be catastrophic, the epitome of the adage, “no good deed shall go unpunished”. I wasn’t ready to have undue attention drawn to me, not to mention the situation with my father.

Myers’ ghost confirmed what he confessed in life. The one who ordered the strike on me was none other than the [Emperor]. Why would he do that? I had no idea. But he was up to something and he obviously didn’t trust me enough. Was it a test? Leodec said as much. What did he think would happen? Was he already aware I intended to…

I let out a forlorn sneer and titters at the thought. Of course, he was aware I intended to dethrone him. It was expected that all Princes coveted the throne. The real question was, did he suspect of anything else? Of which one of the world-shattering secrets I held did he suspect of? I could only play along and wait to find out.

Thus I couldn’t just renovate the slums. If they were no longer the slums, the poor families would be gentrified out of their houses and new slums would form elsewhere. Like a twisted Machiavellian engine, the Imperial Capital needed these undesirables dead.

The cycle went like this. Able people migrated to the Capital in search of better opportunities and to escape over-taxing by local lords. The so-called “rural exodus”. Reaching the city, they were quickly co-opted into working for coppers on the silver, without the means to guarantee their subsistence. They would slowly but surely be drained of all energy and stamina, growing weaker, thinner, and slowly dying of starvation.

Those with talent would be recruited by the many criminal guilds and enter lifelong contracts that were borderline slavery. Job turnover in the many thieves’ guild was a non-issue as fresh bodies kept arriving every single day. Very few would escape the tangled web of predatory social relations that ruled the slums.

Then the nobility sponsored these guilds, for a cut of the pie. It also gave them connections that were vital in the cutthroat world of backstabbing the nobles enjoyed so much. Many bandit groups out there were actually land corsairs, attacking rival trading companies in the most heinous anticompetitive activities.

With all that in mind, all I could do, either out in the open or covertly for these vulnerable families to save them from dying was to kidnap them. And kidnap them I did. The black carriages became feared and Percival’s name was used as a curse in the slums still in the first week of activities. People talked about how the wicked vehicles seemed endlessly hungry for the living as witnesses saw more people going in than what could logically fit in the passenger seats.

Occam’s razor failed the observers. The logical explanation with the least assumptions was that I was killing people and storing the bodies in storage items. A few stupid local enforcers and at one other time brave local militia tried to fight the wagons off but they soon learned that it was invulnerable. Their base damage could never surpass the hardness of Adamantite and the most powerful attacks managed to only scratch off the black paint. Whenever one of these carriages was attacked, the perpetrators were swiftly dispatched by Percival’s new knight order.

Sellswords, fencers, man-at-arms, reformed bandits, all kinds of commoner warriors flocked to the gates of my palace for a chance to enter knighthood. It was prestigious work with a lot of Perks, the most prominent of them the status of lesser nobility. Knights weren’t considered nobles but weren’t commoners either. After being knighted, their families would also enjoy the benefits of such status, including protection from common criminals, as knight orders were swift and brutal in their vengeance.

The best protection against thieves and muggers was to convince them the guy next to you was a better mark. The many knight orders made sure to pass the message along. They were not to be trifled with. Sometimes even other orders joined forces to punish one particularly stubborn criminal group and set a brutal example out of that thieves’ guild and whoever else was caught along if the memory of the last such incident had already faded from the minds of the general public.

So people learned that fleeing the carriages was the best way to avoid getting caught. Most of the time, my real targets had no choice. They were too weak or had feeble family members to protect and would put up a fight. Sometimes, I went disguised along with them and used telepathy and my social perks to convince them to surrender.

But once they set foot on the sunny extradimensional meadows and met the people already living there, they usually fell on their knees and prayed. Following Amina’s suggestion, I placed a church and a priest in each extradimensional village to guide, help, heal, and convert these people to my faith. The only thing that allowed me to rest at night (I didn’t sleep anymore) was that not a single one of them wished to go back to the slums, even after being offered gold to move out.

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Enchanting the carriages allowed me to deepen my knowledge of extradimensionality. They could be classified into two very distinct categories. You had the pocket dimensions, like my Tree Refuge where my own copy of the elven Home Tree grew, the Sanctuary Gates, or the enchantment on the wagons that emulated the latter. People could visit these, they were walkable and even livable if the conditions were right.

Then you had the storage items like my {Item Box} or the rings. These could store items by volume without worry about space, but couldn’t store living creatures. Most ordinary plants and microbes weren’t included in it, the problem wasn’t the chain chemical reaction we use to call life but the presence of a developed soul past a certain point. Ants couldn’t be stored so the bar was really low. Plant monsters or trees also weren’t included. Seeds of any kind were, though.

Pocket dimensions existed outside normal space while storage items distorted local space. One could open a gate to a pocket dimension inside another without problem as the gate was just a passage linking the two spatial bubbles. But an item holding a pocket dimension couldn’t be placed in the {Item Box} if anyone was inside the pocket dimension. I suspected it had to do with the inherent problems of stacking dimensions. Dimensional storage had couldn’t be put inside the item box. I thought of attempting to create dilated spaces where the insides were bigger than the outside but these caused problems with storage items.

That meant the wagons couldn’t be moved conveniently to the underground shelter I had for these people. Once a pocket village got full of people, I had to drive the wagon down a long winding tunnel to the shelter. That created a long delay in gathering more people.

I couldn’t also leave the tunnel open for too long. It was a liability as any opening deep and big enough into the underground brought the risk of developing into a branch of the world-encompassing Labyrinth. The shelter had the volume to become a Dungeon and eventually grow to connect to the Labyrinth. Artificial Labyrinth openings were illegal as it was a liability. Monsters could flood out of this unchecked opening. A detection spell could pick the sudden influx of magic from underground washing over the surface. I had to avoid being detected in such a way.

The solution was to link the wagons in a land train and move them through a bubble of air inside the underground. As I excavated the front of the tunnel and moved the convoy forward, I would seal the opening behind it, repeating the process as we descended. The people inside the pocket dimensions had air to breathe and I didn’t need to worry about that since I could use magic to renovate the air.

It took a week of my time to reach the shelters. The expansive cave had an illusionary roof that looked like the sky with artificial sun and moonlight. I seeded the ground with dirt and grass, then placed buildings I had in the item box. It was a small town for around thirteen to fifteen thousand people.

But finally, we were here. The first step in rebuilding Raswaria. I parked each wagon side-by-side in the central square, across from the cathedral to the Matriarch.

I opened the passage to the pocket dimensions as well as the back doors. My priests inside the pocket villages had already instructed the people on what to expect and they filed one by one out of the wagons, looking curiously at their new surroundings and at me with both awe and fear.

I was wearing the same clothes from the debutante ball. They had my coat of arms as well as the Imperial insignia denoting my station as a [Prince]. I waited until everyone was out of the pocket dimensions to speak. Once all the priests were at the wagons’ doors, I knew nobody was left inside the villages.

“Greetings and welcome to Waygate. We are underneath the Raswaria Highlands and here is where you’ll live from now on. I’m Percival, the thirty-seventh Prince of the Empire.”

At the mention of my name and station, the people all knelt. I could sense their mixed emotions. Some resented me for removing them from their houses but most were either aware and glad they had a new chance at life or were convinced by the priests to accept their new lot in life.

“As you could see by the insides, these dreadful carriages are a ruse. I needed to hide from the Empire that I took you alive. Most of you wouldn’t survive the thick of winter and see next Spring.”

I had to fight really hard to not apologize. I needed to play the part and it was ingrained in them that the Imperial family did no wrong.

“Here in Raswaria, you will be granted education, a trade, a plot of land to either cultivate crops or build a business or just a home for your family. Opportunities to join the guard or the matriarch’s priesthood. While we can’t go to the surface yet, you’ll live here. While you live here, you’ll learn a craft from the priests, and receive the tools and materials to work and practice it. I will buy the products you make at the System recommended price and while you are down here, you won’t be taxed. Food, double rations, freshwater, and basic living conditions will also be provided by me. Once you come to the surface, you’ll earn your keep. I expect all of you to be civil with your neighbors. Criminals will pay with their lives and I will personally bring them to justice.”

> > Charisma test successful. Reactions shifted by 67 steps.

The promise of work and tax-free earnings caught them. Even the ones still forcing from frowning or scowling at me were convinced.

“Now, follow me to the Matriarch’s cathedral. There you can see a model of this city. We will draw a lottery to let people choose their homes. Children without parents, follow the priests to the orphanage behind the cathedral.”

I turned and crossed the square, followed from a safe distance by the people. The nave was big but not enough to hold the five thousand people behind me. To counter this, we set a feast at the grounds to the side of the church.

“Greetings, children,” [Bishop] Amina said from the cathedral door. “I am Amina, a [Bishop] of the Matriarch. Our goddess works through [Prince] Percival’s hands. She commanded him to gather you here and also invites you to partake in her bounty. Please, follow the lanterns to your right, we have food and entertainment for you.”

I put my hand inside my jacket and called Pandora there. Her {Gifted Divinity} aspect started to work on easing the lingering worries of the people. We walked the side path along the inside of the cathedral wall to the feast area. The slum dwellers couldn’t believe their eyes as they took in the sight of the long tables teeming with food.

Whole peapura birds, roasted and gleaming a golden sheen under the faux sunlight. Fruits, bread baked by yours truly. Low alcohol wine, spring water, and juice. I didn’t bring a keg of dwarven ale since I didn’t want anyone drunk. The children and orphans were already eating in their corner.

I stood to the side and ushered them inside. “This is our gift to you. The Matriarch and I bid you welcome to Waygate. Enjoy.”

> > Charisma test successful. Reactions shifted by 30 steps.

I would bring another two batches of people before winter was over. The first step to retake Raswaria was done. I could complete the quest with fifteen thousand people.