It sounded cruel, but the plague ravaging the North was good for Free City.
The Rikaner Kingdom was too busy dealing with disasters erupting across its territory to continue its campaign against the Blade of Freedom.
It wasn't that they cared much about civilian casualties. With the plague spreading everywhere, they had to stay alive before they could think about winning glory.
The plague was spreading along the border, but the New Royal Capital remained peaceful—and still found time to attack Free City.
The civilian edition of the Rikaner Daily called Free City a "poor, backward, savage foreign land." Free City was a real place to Middle Earth, but to the Rikaner Kingdom, it was more like a shapeless concept: a target they could attack whenever they pleased.
Depending on what the Kingdom needed, they could call its people "vile, shameless scoundrels bent on overthrowing the Kingdom" or "cowards hiding in the sewers like rats, easy to bully."
Of course, sometimes it was also "Champion Sorcerer Annan's mysterious Floating City" or "the birthplace of the Magic Film everyone loves."
So they blamed Free City for all sorts of dirty deeds they themselves had committed and imposed trade sanctions, all while accusing Free City of launching an invasion.
The funny thing was that Free City bought nothing from the Rikaner Kingdom. The especially funny thing was that Free City's wheelchairs, eyeglasses, corsets, and Faster Cloth—the common people's Love's favorite—were all wildly popular there.
Their sanctions achieved nothing except making their own people furious.
Deepwinter was coming. People couldn't afford firewood, and now they had lost access to cheap, durable Faster Cloth. All they could do was huddle and shiver in drafty shacks.
"I'm so cold... Why won't they let us buy clothes?" a young boy asked his father.
"Because we have