Linley, seated above him, nodded slightly upon hearing this.
“Enough, Nemi. You can retire now.” Barker glanced at him.
“Yes, Lord City Governor.” Nemi immediately left respectfully.
Right now, the people seated in the room were Linley and the other core members of the team. According to the decision which Zassler and Linley had originally made, to outsiders, they said that Lord Barker was the city governor. ‘Barker’ was a very ordinary name. Nobody else knew which ‘Barker’ this was.
“Lord, you really gave us a good scare when you casually brought out a magicrystal card with a hundred million gold in it.” Barker chortled.
Linley laughed. “Don’t worry about the financial side of things!” In the past, Linley had essentially stripped away thousands of years of accumulated wealth from the Kingdom of Fenlai.
Zassler said, “Linley, the reason we are being so generous to the citizens of Blackdirt City is because we want Blackdirt City to become our strongest, most resilient base, and to make sure that the people here are absolutely loyal to us! It is enough that we exempt this city from paying taxes. In the future, at most, we can just lower the tax rate in our cities. In addition, in order to function well, a nation needs to be able to be self-sufficient. It can’t always rely on outside money. It has to be self-sustaining!”
Linley nodded.
“I don’t know much about managing a country. I’ll let Zassler and Jenne handle these matters.” Linley laughed as he glanced at Jenne. Zassler had controlled a Duchy before in the Anarchic Lands, while Jenne had helped her little brother administrate the affairs of the prefectural city of Cerre for multiple years. Both of them knew much more about city management than Linley did.
Jenne nodded and laughed. “Big brother Linley, the most important part of being a leader is knowing who to use. Just let me handle it.”
Zassler concurred. “Jenne is right. Linley…you are our standard-bearer. In the Anarchic Lands, an ultimate expert has a great deal of influence. Look at the War God. The War God always stays on War God Mountain and never gets personally involved in anything, but everyone understands that so long as the War God is alive, then the O’Brien Empire will never collapse.”
“Lord, in the future, your relationship to our nation will be the same as the War God’s relationship to the O’Brien Empire.” Barker agreed.
Linley nodded slightly. “I understand your reasoning. Oh, right. Yesterday, I took a stroll around Blackdirt City. I saw that a few dozen kilometers northeast of Blackdirt City, there is a small mountain known as Mt. Blackraven. I plan to train there.”
Linley could sense the vastness of both the Laws of the Earth and the Laws of the Wind. Linley wished to spend a large amount of time subsuming himself in them, and spend some time attuning to them and understanding them.
…..
In the central-southern part of the Anarchic Lands, there was a prefectural city with hundreds of thousands of citizens. Within a room on the fifth floor of a five story tall hotel, an old man with white-streaked hair opened a letter, carefully reading its contents.
“What I feared the most has come to pass!” The old man began to frown. “The Emperor ordered us not to act against Linley and just observe him. A while ago, we learned that Linley’s group had entered the Anarchic Lands. At that time, we though he was just engaging in tourism. Who would’ve thought that they’d take over a city? What exactly are they planning?”
The old man had a bad feeling.
Linley was a major foe of the Radiant Church. A foe which they didn’t want to have to fight.
But now…
“I hope Linley is just messing around and having fun in the Anarchic Lands.” The old man was frowning. What he feared the most was…that Linley had come to the Anarchic Lands expressly to deal with the Radiant Church. “We don’t want to stir up trouble with him, but if he insists on stirring up trouble with us, we’ll have to act.”
The old man was a high level manager for the Radiant Church in the Anarchic Lands. He knew exactly how powerful Linley’s side was.
“As for now…let’s just watch. Let’s see what Linley plans to do.”
……
Outside of Blackdirt City, in a small mountain roughly a thousand meters tall which was located in the direction of the Forest of Darkness, Linley was seated in the meditative position on the top of a large tree. The treetop swayed along with the blowing wind, and Linley swayed along with it, as gently and as agilely as a leaf.
He was carrying a 3600 pounds adamantine heavy sword, and yet he was seated on the crown of a tree. Linley had indeed reached a very high level in his ability to control the wind.
“Slow. Fast. It isn’t that simple…” Linley was constantly pondering his ‘Tempos of the Wind’ technique. The Tempos of the Wind was actually utilizing two contradictory aspects of the wind in perfect harmony, with the clash between these two aspects creating a terrifyingly sharp blade of air.
But Linley was discovering that as he continued to study the individual aspects of ‘Slow’ and ‘Fast’, these aspects had additional astonishing secrets that had yet to be revealed to him.
“The limits to the Profound Truths of Slowness…the limits to the Analytics of Hyperspeed…” Linley was totally absorbed in his meditations on the Elemental Laws. This sort of meditation relied entirely on a single sudden spark of insight. Perhaps Linley would suddenly gain an insight onto the Laws of the Earth, at which point Linley would begin to analyze the Laws of the Earth. If he suddenly gained insight into the Laws of the Wind, he would go study that instead.
Those days he spent in training on Mt. Blackraven passed very quickly