Rus Wang didn't interfere much with the Elves' various alliances or village mergers. From the start, his plan had been to let the villages slowly develop into city-states.
So, just as he had when he first arrived on this continent, Rus Wang patrolled the entire north of the Zheer Continent. He beat up the Soul Beasts that had fled there and were killing Elves as if they were humans, then checked whether they were intelligent. If they were, he explained the difference between Elves and humans, then gave them a suitable patch of the Nanshan Rainforest to live on. As long as they caused no trouble afterward, he left them alone. If they weren't intelligent, he didn't waste words—he killed them and took them back to feed his wife and children.
Then he settled the new Elves he had taken in around the Levant Region, where elders from nearby village alliances sent people to teach them farming, smithing, literacy, and how to speak Elf (Chinese). When he came back again, he assessed how well they had been taught and rewarded the village alliance with some good things for helping him educate the newcomers.
As the days passed, more and more Elves gathered in the Levant Region. With plenty of food, the villages developed rapidly, and several of them even grew to a population of ten thousand.
But a large-scale bloodshed that erupted in the eleventh year made Rus Wang realize that letting the Elves develop on their own was simply recreating humanity's old path from the era of tribes with communal ownership to the age of slavery.
If he had enough time, Rus Wang would have let these things happen. The problem was, he didn't have time, nor did he want the Elves to enter an age of slavery. In more than nineteen hundred years, the protective mechanism surrounding this continent would disappear, and human colonial exploration ships would finally be able to reach it.
Rus Wang wasn't the Silver Dragon King. His past life as a human was just that—a past life. Now, he was a Seer Elf with the words "Soul Beast" hanging over his head. He couldn't stake his life on trusting humanity.
So, over the next nineteen hundred years or so, Rus Wang had to unite the custom-made race of Elves, become their national leader, and develop technology and civilization powerful enough to stand against humanity. He had to protect himself and his descendants while playing the role of a chess player in a game of conquest—not end up labeled a Class A war criminal and dissected by the humans of Douluo Planet.
The bloodshed unfolded roughly like this: a large village alliance sought revenge on a smaller one. The smaller alliance had a Rock Salt mine within its territory. By mining it, they made a fortune through barter, which naturally aroused the envy of other tribes.
For eleven years, Rus Wang had planned the boundaries of every village established in the Levant Region. One village in the smaller alliance had land that couldn't grow any crops, so everyone there relied on the mining skills Rus Wang had taught them. They dug Rock Salt from their territory and traded it for grain produced by other villages.
Most Elven elders from other villages had chosen to accept that this village used Rock Salt to obtain a great deal of their grain. After all, the villagers really did depend entirely on that resource to survive.
But once the Rock Salt village joined the smaller village alliance, everything changed. At the eleventh year's Corn Harvest Festival, the elders' council of the large village alliance discussed the matter and realized something was wrong. This was a complete loss for them. They worked hard to farm their fields, while the Rock Salt village sold a jar of salt for two bags of Corn to other villages in its own alliance—but charged four bags of Corn within their alliance. What the hell did they think they were doing?
Now that Rus Wang rarely got involved, the tacit barter arrangement they'd had between them had changed. After joining another village alliance, the Rock Salt village was treating them differently? Did they think that after eleven years of working the fields, their hands could no longer lift a Copper Spear?
At first, the elders of the large village alliance had no intention of resorting to violence. They sent several envoys and guards to argue with the smaller alliance's elders, hoping to bring the price of Rock Salt back down to what it had been. But the strange thing was, after those envoys and guards entered the smaller alliance's territory, they died.
When the large alliance's elders saw the bodies sent back by the smaller alliance's envoys, along with compensation of just a few jars of salt, they were dumbfounded. Their people had died on the other alliance's land, where they should have been under their host's protection—and the only apology they got was a few jars of Rock Salt?
So the elders of the large village alliance discussed the matter and decided to send another batch of envoys. The first team, accompanied by more guards, would continue to demand an explanation from the smaller alliance and try to peacefully force the Rock Salt price back to the rate used for trade within the smaller alliance. The second team would brave the Nanshan Rainforest and ask Rus Wang to handle the matter personally. After all, as the god-king of the Elves in the Levant Region, he was sure to be the most reasonable one.
But before the second team of envoys and guards could be brought back to the Levant Region by Rus Wang, the first team from the second batch disappeared on the smaller alliance's land, just like the first group.
That was a full eighty people! They were all wearing leather armor, unlike the first group, which had numbered barely ten. Even if some village in the smaller alliance had killed them on its own, surely a few survivors could have escaped and made it back? There was no way a single village could have wiped them out without help from the whole alliance. The large alliance's elders didn't believe it.
With more than ninety people gone in one stroke, the Elves of the large village alliance were furious. Before the second team of envoys could even find Rus Wang, they demanded that the elders' council immediately send troops against the smaller alliance and make them pay in blood.
Some female Elves who had lost their husbands or sons said nothing at all. They simply took stone knives and went to assassinate the smaller alliance's elders themselves.
That was what finally sent the tense situation spiraling out of control, like throwing a stone into a pot of boiling copper.
The large village alliance had nearly twenty thousand Elves. The mysterious deaths and disappearances of two groups of envoys and guards had enraged the entire alliance. The elders had been thinking of asking each village to contribute a total of six hundred people, but the Elves below them were far too eager. More than four thousand set out at once and attacked the smaller alliance, which had a little over two thousand people.
By the time Rus Wang arrived with the envoys and guards from the large village alliance, the villages of the smaller alliance were, quite literally, engulfed in flames. The surviving Elves of the smaller alliance were thrown into the salt mine by the furious Elves of the large alliance and forced to dig salt for them on a pitiful amount of food.
Rus Wang saw that it was impossible to reconstruct everything that had happened, and the bloodshed had grown too extensive for him to keep letting the Elves govern themselves. After putting out the fire himself, he legalized the large alliance's de facto occupation of the Rock Salt mine. Then he provided supplies so the survivors of the smaller alliance could regain their freedom. He designated an area on the smaller alliance's former land for a new village, and arranged for the large alliance to supply it until the wheat harvest at the end of the year. The village would be managed by an elder chosen by the large alliance for twenty years, during which time the villagers were forbidden to elect their own elder. If the village dared to defy Rus Wang's ruling simply for the sake of defying it, he would personally bring down divine punishment.
After calming the large village alliance, Rus Wang discussed matters with its elders and learned about the chaotic trade and relations between village alliances in the Levant Region. He decided to summon the elders of every village alliance in the region for a meeting. They would make sure no bloodshed like this ever happened again and establish explicit rules that every village alliance had to follow, instead of relying on unspoken understandings.
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