Boundless Family Upgrades For The Deadbeat Lord

Harlan spotted Raymond approaching and immediately started walking toward him with a stack of papers. Raymond changed direction.

”My Lord!”

”I suddenly remembered I have somewhere else to be.”

Harlan stared after him. ”But the spring planting allocations...”

”Send them to Lily.”

”Lady Lily told me to bring them to you.”

Raymond stopped walking and slowly turned his head. That little traitor had anticipated him.

Harlan eventually caught up, grinning despite himself as he handed over the papers. He looked nothing like the half-starved old man Raymond had first met in the basin months ago.

Proper meals had restored weight to his face, his shoulders no longer curved from weakness, and although hardship still showed in his features, he looked much closer to his actual age.

”We can begin preparing the expanded fields as soon as the frost clears properly,” he explained. ”There are more farmers among the new families than we expected. Reth alone gave us nearly seventy people with field experience, and the northern town brought another hundred if we include seasonal laborers. If the new land is as fertile as...”

Harlan paused, carefully selecting the terminology everyone had apparently agreed to use around Raymond’s unexplained miracles. ”...as blessed as the first basin, we can plant considerably more than we originally planned.”

Raymond glanced over the allocations and nodded. ”Plan for growth beyond the current population. I don’t want us planting enough for five thousand people and discovering six months from now that we have seven thousand.”

Harlan blinked at the number before slowly smiling. ”Seven thousand.”

Raymond immediately pointed the papers at him. ”Don’t look at me like that. Four months ago, twelve hundred people hated my guts. Now five thousand people are somehow my responsibility. At this rate I’ll need permission from the System to panic.”

Harlan understood almost none of that last sentence, but experience had apparently taught him when not to ask questions. He simply bowed and promised to revise the estimates.

Raymond continued toward the training grounds after escaping with only half the paperwork Harlan originally intended to give him. The military transformation was just as obvious.

Boris’s thirty-two original guards had once represented nearly the entirety of Althoff’s conventional defense.

Now the training ground contained former village guards, hunters, caravan escorts, able-bodied refugees undergoing basic instruction, and summoned Bronze Knights helping supervise exercises.

They weren’t an elite army, and Raymond refused to pretend otherwise, but they were no longer terrified civilians holding weapons for the first time. The winter had given many of them real combat experience. They knew how to respond to horns, form defensive lines, evacuate streets, fight alongside the Knights, and operate the kill corridors incorporated into Althoff’s defenses.

Hunting parties traveled beyond the walls regularly, and smaller Magic Beast attacks that once would have caused panic were handled as military problems rather than disasters.

Boris stood near the edge of the grounds yelling at a group of recruits when Raymond approached. ”If you swing like that against a Frostfang Wolf, you’re not going to hit the wolf! You’re going to generously donate your arm to its breakfast!”

He demonstrated the correct movement with a wooden practice weapon before noticing Raymond and walking over. ”You’re outside early.”

Raymond frowned. ”Why does everyone keep saying that like I’m some kind of nocturnal animal?”

Boris gave him a look. ”Because three months ago Lily had to threaten to remove your blankets to get you out of bed before noon.”

Raymond lowered his voice. ”That information was supposed to remain inside the castle.”

Boris ignored him and looked toward the training field. ”Another twenty-three volunteers entered basic training yesterday. Six used to serve as town guards, so they’ll move faster. Edran also wants permission to expand the northern hunting routes now that the migration is thinning.”

”Approve it, but keep them away from the deeper approaches to Blackridge,” Raymond replied. ”I don’t care how quiet things look. Nobody gets adventurous because the snow started melting.”

Boris nodded immediately, and Raymond glanced toward several hunters practicing alongside Bronze Knights. ”Any major sightings this week?”

The captain shook his head. ”Nothing above Silver. Mostly isolated predators and smaller herds heading back north or east. Whatever happened during the worst of winter seems to be over.”

Raymond nodded, but something about the answer stayed with him even after he left.

He spent the rest of the morning walking through Althoff without any particular destination. Marianne’s medical operation had expanded into several rooms inside a converted building rather than the improvised treatment stations used during the Beast Tide.

The deep-well pump continued providing clean water reliably, and additional distribution points prevented the long queues that had once formed whenever refugees arrived.

The granaries remained well supplied despite four months of feeding a population that had grown far beyond initial projections, partly because the original harvest had been supplemented by purchased supplies and enormous quantitiesof Magic Beast meat.

Storage buildings held preserved hides, bones, horns, claws, and Mana Cores that represented wealth Althoff had barely begun converting into money.

Craftsmen worked. Farmers planned. Guards trained. Merchants traded. Children ran through streets that had once belonged mostly to hungry adults too exhausted to waste energy talking.

Raymond stopped when a small group of children raced past him chasing a wooden hoop.

One nearly collided with his leg before another grabbed the back of the boy’s coat and dragged him aside.

They recognized Raymond a moment later and froze with identical expressions of horror, clearly expecting punishment. Raymond looked at them, then at the wooden hoop rolling away down the street. ”You know, if you’re going to commit attempted assassination against your lord, you should probably have an escape plan.”

The oldest child immediately started apologizing until Raymond waved him off. ”Go. Before I assign all of you to Lily.”

That threat apparently carried more weight than prison, because they disappeared almost instantly. Raymond watched them run away laughing and found himself thinking about how few children he had seen playing when he first arrived.

Four months.

It was difficult to reconcile the territory in front of him with the one he had inherited.

He remembered arriving as the disgraced head of a fallen noble house, dumped into a frozen corner of Zulor that everyone expected to finish destroying him. Twelve hundred citizens had been starving. The land barely produced food. Buildings were collapsing. There was no meaningful economy, almost no military force, no reliable clean-water infrastructure, and barely enough hope left for people to bother hiding how much they despised their lord.

Raymond himself had been poisoned, physically weak, and dependent on a System he barely understood.

Even the guards had been close to mutiny.

Now more than five thousand people lived under House Althoff.

The granaries contained food.Livestock filled the enclosures.

Farmers were planning spring cultivation on a scale the old Althoff could never have attempted.

Carpenters and masons were building instead of merely repairing collapse. Blacksmiths had work. Leatherworkers had more material than they could process.

Hunters traveled beyond the walls deliberately searching for resources. Soldiers trained every morning.

Clean water flowed through the territory. A market had appeared without Raymond ordering one into existence. Magic Beast materials sat inside warehouses waiting to become products or trade goods, while Mana Cores accumulated inside secured storage.

Refugees no longer came only because they had nowhere else to go; some came because they had specifically chosen Althoff over other territories.

Most surprising of all, Raymond von Althoff’s name no longer meant what it had four months earlier.

The Deadbeat Lord had not disappeared completely.

Raymond doubted reputations built over years vanished because of one successful winter, and there were probably still nobles elsewhere in Solaria who would laugh if someone suggested he had become competent.

But throughout northern Zulor, another version of his name was spreading. Lord Althoff. The lord who opened his gates. The lord whose people had food. The lord whose territory survived the Beast Tide. The supposed Divine Emissary who apparently commanded heavenly warriors if one believed particularly imaginative travelers.

Raymond still wanted to strangle whoever started that last story.

His wandering eventually carried him toward the northern wall.

Repairs were still underway where the Beast Tide had broken through, but the defenses were stronger than they had been before the attack.

Raymond climbed the stone steps and walked along the upper section until the town stretchedbehind him and the northern wilderness opened ahead.

Much of the snow remained beyond Althoff, especially farther north, but dark stretches of ground were beginning to appear beneath it. Roads that had vanished during the worst storms were becoming visible again.

In the distance, beyond miles of lowlands and forests, the Blackridge Mountains cut across the horizon.

Raymond stopped.

For several minutes, he simply looked at them.

Boris’s words from earlier returned to him.

Whatever happened during the worst of winter seems to be over.

That should have been reassuring. Instead, Raymond found himself remembering the reports that had arrived before the Beast Tide.

The migration had begun too early.

Routes used by Magic Beasts for years had collapsed.

Species that normally avoided one another had moved together.

Predators had abandoned established hunting territories instead of remaining behind to follow prey gradually south.

Refugees described entire stretches of wilderness emptying almost simultaneously.

Hunters familiar with the mountains had repeatedly insisted they had never seen anything like it.

Even the Gold Rank Blackstone Ursar bothered him. A creature powerful enough that eighteen Silver Knights had been needed to bring it down had traveled far beyond the deeper valleys where Boris said its kind normally remained.

At the time, Raymond had been too busy trying not to get everyone killed to think much about why.

Now he had time. The Beast Tide had looked like an invasion because thousands of Magic Beasts were moving toward Althoff, but that wasn’t what had actually happened. There had been no command structure. No coordinated target. No attempt to conquer territory.

Herbivores had run beside predators that normally hunted them. Creatures had trampled one another trying to move south. When the Blackstone Ursar appeared, even other Magic Beasts had panicked and scattered away from it.

They hadn’t come south because Althoff was here.

Althoff had simply been in their way. Raymond’s expression slowly lost the relaxed amusement it had carried throughout the morning.

For the most part, the Beast Tide hadn’t been attacking anything.

It had been running.

He looked toward the distant Blackridge Mountains again and felt the same question settle uncomfortably into his thoughts.

Running from what?

A familiar sound suddenly rang inside his head.

[ Ding! ]

Raymond’s attention snapped toward the translucent blue interface appearing before his eyes.

[ Mandatory Territory Mission Complete! ]

[ Mission: Survive the Blackridge Winter Migration ]

Raymond stared at the notification as another panel unfolded beneath it.

[ Evaluating Host Performance... ]

[ Calculating Civilian Survival Rate... ]

[ Calculating Refugees Rescued... ]

[ Calculating Territory Expansion... ]

[ Calculating Population Growth... ]

[ Calculating Military Performance... ]

[ Calculating Economic Gains... ]

[ Calculating Hidden Achievements... ]

The lines disappeared one after another as the evaluation completed, replaced by a final notification.

[ Calculating Final Mission Evaluation...]