The carriage traveled smoothly and swiftly along the stone-paved road to the Royal Capital.
Inside, Cui Ciyou leaned against the soft seat back.
His gaze seemed to rest on the enormous, unfolded map of the Asla Kingdom.
His thoughts, however, were on his audience with the king.
Meeting the king and persuading him would be no easy task.
Of the three great Humanfolk powers, the Asla Kingdom possessed the largest territory and the greatest national strength.
Its power structure was also far more complicated than outsiders imagined.
The king was nominally the supreme ruler.
Yet he was constrained by multiple factions.
Persuading him, along with the tangled web of power behind him,
to launch a project of such immense scale and staggering expense,
a "Great Migration" unprecedented in human history-the difficulty was easy enough to imagine.
The political systems of the Humanfolk nations in this world aren't like the highly developed, centralized systems of late feudalism in the history of my previous life.
They're more like... an early system of enfeoffed lords.
Cui Ciyou slowly traced his fingers across the four vast domains marked on the map with different colors and crests.
The Greyrat Four Great Nobles are like the four most powerful feudal lords in the Asla Kingdom.
Within their own domains, they enjoy considerable, nearly independent autonomy. They even have private armies.
The lesser nobles beneath them are likewise enfeoffed in successive tiers, each with their own lands and authority.
Besides them, there's also a faction of "new nobles" led by the powerful court minister Darius, who rivals them in the Royal Capital.
You could even say that, in certain respects, Darius already stands on equal footing with the king as the kingdom's "second most powerful figure."
*Every royal decree can only be implemented through bargaining and compromise