Southern Continent, East Balam, Valterik City.
"What?! Another tax increase?!"
That afternoon, a crowd of dark-skinned locals dressed in coarse linen had packed tightly around the enormous wooden noticeboard in front of the city hall square.
The crowd was like a pot of water on the verge of boiling, seething with anxiety, despair, and anger.
With so many people gathered, a cordon had already been established around the square to maintain so-called "order" and prevent an uncontrollable riot. Dozens of local policemen in khaki uniforms, armed with batons, stood sweating profusely around the crowd, warily watching their outraged compatriots.
To save money, the colonial government had recruited these policemen from among the locals specifically to manage the lower classes... in other words, the men commonly known as "collaborators" or "lapdogs."
Although most of the laborers and plantation serfs gathered there were illiterate and could not understand the Loenese writing on the noticeboard, they still learned the terrible news from the trembling, fragmentary explanations of the few literate compatriots at the front.
The Loen government was raising taxes again!
For most locals struggling to keep themselves fed and clothed, this was a bolt from the blue!
The taxes the Loenese collected here were already outrageous. They toiled like livestock for an entire year in rubber plantations and cotton fields beneath the blazing sun, only for those lofty Loenese plantation owners to take more than half the wealth they produced straight away.
The small portion left over still had to cover the colonial government's endless assortment of exorbitant taxes: a "poll tax" charged per person, a "daylight tax" that had to be paid whenever a house had windows, and even an absurd "water fee" for fetching water from the river!
After all these layers of exploitation, they had nothing left despite working