Dragon-Worshiping Cult: Am I Taking the Blame This Time? (33)

Ian thought of Baron Layan.

Before his exposure, this noble had been quite beloved by the people of his territory. Setting aside the matter of him going mad and capturing people for experiments, his reputation locally had been exceptionally high.

That was because the baron used the money he earned from Rosy Radiance Grass and other sublimation and spiritual-energy plants to subsidize the local residents, allowing them to grow ordinary crops, purchase grain from elsewhere for storage, stabilize food prices, and ensure that everyone could settle in his territory without worry.

Why? Because even if he handed out subsidies to the entire territory for a hundred years, the profit would not compare to a cartload of Rosy Radiance Grass burned by his fire dragon.

The ecosystems of nobles and sublimators had already become disconnected from those of ordinary people. The resources the former required were things the latter could never obtain even through exploitation. Ordinary people could not possibly hunt wild beasts and Magic Beasts regularly, while even if the former piled up the grain from more than a dozen granaries, they could not use it to sublimate themselves.

Yet this instead stirred a trace of concern in Ian's heart.

For a civilization whose system still leaned toward the primitive, this kind of "decoupling" was fundamentally a fracture between levels of life... This was not even a matter of class solidification.

Their ecosystems had completely diverged.

"A Fifth Energy Level sublimator... can't even fight on a planet. A single dragon skimming across the surface at twenty times the speed of sound would be enough to destroy ten cities."

As he watched the scenes of Twin Tree Town's residents laughing and rejoicing before him, Ian felt an extraordinarily complicated emotion welling within him. "The only value ordinary people have to higher-level