"I'll leave things here to you. Fold those Merfolk who just surrendered into that little kingdom you established. Only a more advanced, systematic civilization can provide us with greater resources."
As Taylor watched Krite leave alongside Butler, his teacher's parting words still faintly echoed in his ears.
After leaving the wizards half a year to gather resources on their own, they had agreed to meet at Wizard Tucker's Floating City for further academic exchanges, the distribution of benefits, and the division of the territories each wizard would actually control.
While the wizards gathered to exchange knowledge and divide the benefits, the apprentices they had brought along could finally play their part.
Their task was to sort out the Merfolk in the regions the wizards had already conquered and arrange for them to rapidly cultivate and extract resources.
As long as those Merfolk were properly raised and trained, even if the final assigned territory was not the land they had conquered, they could still quickly relocate the Merfolk and establish themselves there.
This was also an unspoken agreement among the wizards. The Merfolk race of this plane had become a labor resource that the wizards competed over.
As for how much labor they could gather, how much they could tame, and how effectively they could make that labor show its true value, that depended on the methods of the apprentices the wizards had left behind. It was also a test for the wizards' own apprentices.
It was also a reflection of knowledge and capability.
That said, Taylor still felt that the wizards were simply being lazy and dumping their own work onto their apprentices.
Still, Krite had not exploited his apprentice too harshly. As a reward for Kano bringing in a large number of Merfolk laborers, Krite gave Taylor a high-capacity