The ramshackle carriage creaked along roads that grew ever wider and smoother, carrying the troubled Priest Crawford toward the heart of the Kingdom of Bagnia... Votradnoi.
During the days of the Bagnia Republic, the city might have been the capital, but it had resembled a bloated giant. Its permanent population had reached its limit at fewer than three hundred thousand. Within the walls, everything was unbearably crowded; outside them, disorderly slums and farmland lay scattered about. The streets were narrow and muddy, and the air mingled with all manner of indescribable odors.
After Chris took over, he had launched a sweeping overhaul of the city, ruthlessly purging and killing its thugs before forcibly demolishing its illegal buildings.
People back home in later generations could refuse to leave their homes to obstruct redevelopment, and the thugs and unscrupulous tycoons of Bagnia could certainly do the same. Unfortunately for them, Chris, who had been far away at Anvil Fortress fighting a war, had no intention of indulging them.
He had not resorted to anything particularly drastic. He had merely sent the Tax Bureau to pay them a visit.
Those who received a "home visit" either cried and pleaded before backing down, taking their compensation and moving out, or were arrested by the Police and had their property confiscated as fines by tax officials, ending in utter ruin, their families shattered.
Thanks to those thunderous measures, Votradnoi's redevelopment had proceeded smoothly, changing by the day. Crawford had been away for less than half a year, yet the city already felt profoundly unfamiliar.
The first thing that assaulted Crawford's senses was its staggering scale. The city's boundaries had expanded wildly outward like an inflating balloon.
The old stone walls that had once surrounded the central district still stood, but they had long since been