Repairing the City Wall

"Dig the foundations deeper. They need to be packed down more firmly."

The Dwarves directed the slaves at work. The city wall was progressing at a decent pace and should be finished before winter arrived.

Lynn took a rare break, sitting on the Second Floor of his house and watching the wall rise. In just one morning, the basic foundations had already been dug.

When Lynn was not thinking like a Paradox Game War Criminal, he actually found himself rather repulsive. He should have governed benevolently, abolished slavery immediately, and launched a revolution at the same time.

But whenever that war criminal mindset returned, reason told him, No, you won't get anything done that way. You have to deceive them. You have to scheme.

Whenever this happened, Lynn remembered something he had once heard while watching videos: "A great monarch must be both a vicious dragon and a cunning fox, a worshipped god. Only founding monarchs possess such qualities; hereditary monarchs are merely flowers raised in greenhouses."

He had felt that deeply when playing games before.

When playing Victoria 3, what did those troublesome commoners know?

Make them suffer a little, raise taxes, complete industrialization, and improve the treatment of entrepreneurs. The harder the Capitalists exploited them, the sooner the red revolution would arrive.

After completing the Industrial Revolution, he would complete capitalization. Only then could he increase the political weight of the trade unions.

Only then could the living standards of the lower classes improve.

When playing Crusader Kings, marrying his daughter's daughter was a great move if it expanded territory and built a powerful nation.

The Book of Lord Shang, The Prince, and Records of the Grand Historian all said that a ruler's morality could not be the same as an ordinary person's morality.

These days, Lilim was still dissatisfied about the Demi-human slaves. She had also learned what kind of lives the Demi-human tribes were living.

Lilim had suggested that Lynn reduce the slaves' working hours from fourteen to twelve. How could Lynn possibly agree?

If Lilim were the ruler of the Demi-humans, her nation would be destroyed in no time.

This was a city wall. Lynn wished he could impose a sixteen-hour workday and get it finished faster.

Those Dwarves, Dania, and the child slaves from her dozens of villages had all suffered because of Orc raids. Lynn himself had been attacked by Minotaurs when he first arrived, and the baron of the nearby town had been beaten so badly last year that he abandoned his castle and went to the fortress for the winter.

According to Lynn's war criminal instincts, he was one hundred percent certain that they would fight the Orcs again this year.

The wall had to be completed faster, even if the slaves had to do fourteen hours of heavy labor a day.

Compared to the sixteen-hour hard labor imposed by other Slave owners, Lynn was still very merciful.

Lynn's transformation from wanting to be a Two-dimensional Male Lead into a war criminal had begun when he was disheartened in that carriage, then exiled for privately telling Lilim that the emperor, the Saintess, and the Church were all piles of garbage.

He pursued his ambitions only to prove that he was greater than those vermin.

Though he only ruled as a lord and had not yet governed other lands, he was still someone in a leadership position. Now that he had truly reached this position, Lynn realized that he really was greater than them.

All he had to do was make sure they were full, give them meat to eat, and keep them warm, and these slaves adored him. They smiled whenever they saw him.

The people Lynn used to curse not only deceived others, but deceived themselves as well. They convinced themselves that they were great benevolent rulers, that they were Saintesses or popes, and that they had bestowed debts of gratitude the people could never repay.

Lynn could not deceive himself. He knew exactly how disgusting what he did was: manipulation, brainwashing, one face in public and another in private.

The meat he claimed they could eat was Minotaur meat. The full meals he promised came from old stockpiled grain he had bought because it was cost-effective.

Keeping them warm was only because he did not want to lose laborers. Building houses was the same.

In the future, for war, industrialization, and social progress, he would have to deceive even more people with his lies, perhaps even send them to their deaths.

Just like those first few dozen militiamen, whom he had roused into standing against Minotaurs they could not defeat in order to buy time for the Knights.

When Lynn went to war in the future, he would surely have to fool many people into filling the battle lines as well.

But then Lynn changed his perspective. After industrialization, life would certainly be better than it was now, and everything he did would be praised.

Intelligent life really was pathetic.

Lynn felt helpless about his situation. Whenever he sincerely tried to make friends, clear his name, and interact with people without schemes, they often came to dislike him.

Now that he had become a war criminal and done so many disgusting things, everyone's attitude had instead improved. Lilim, that Female Imp, was far more obedient than before. Eckley used to look at him as if he were the foolish second son of some landlord's family, but now he looked at him as if he were an enlightened monarch.

Lynn could feel every one of these changes.

A major reason Lynn had become disillusioned was that he did not want to conform to human nature and join the filth around him. In other words, he had pursued that kind of pure love from Two-dimensional stories.