The Abduction Incident

Years ago, during the campaign against the Four Central Duchies, Lorist had led the Four Northern Families Alliance's forces in a surprise attack on the Duchy of Sabaj. They had plundered its three provinces of Limade, Meishan, and Qikesai. With the territorial nobles' allied army and the Fissabrun Family forces joining in to seize what they could, the three provinces had become a living hell. More than eight hundred thousand residents were taken as spoils of war and forcibly relocated to the victors' territories. Had the Second Prince not arrived, Qikesai Province might have been stripped bare like Meishan and Limade.

Nearly ten years had passed since that war, yet Meishan and Limade still had not recovered their vitality. Both remained sparsely populated. The severe bandit problem in the central region was closely tied to the lack of effective oversight in those provinces. Bent on rebuilding his army, the Second Prince had introduced no meaningful policies to improve people's livelihoods. Instead, he had raised taxes and squeezed the farmers to fund his troops. Bandits sprang up across the eleven central provinces, joined by many nobles dissatisfied with him, making the unrest even harder to quell.

The situation worsened after the Second Prince trained an army of three hundred thousand in the eleven central provinces and sent it straight to the front against the Commercial Alliance. Without that army holding them in check, mountain bandits and mounted raiders, backed by certain interested parties, grew powerful. Robberies and attacks on royal administrative offices became commonplace, and the eleven central provinces became the kingdom's most lawless region. The Second Prince had once sent a corps to join the local nobles' forces in suppressing them. But whenever the bandits could not withstand the troops, they vanished into the forests of Meishan and Limade. Faced