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Chapter 551: Scheme

Translator: imperfectluck Editor: Kurisu

An individual’s scheme would never match up to the heavens’ schemes. A scheme’s success or failure depended more upon the heavens than the individual. Such cliché phrases had likely been said countless times already. But, in most typical stories, those who said death flag sentences would always die quickly.

No matter how wondrous the plan or scheme was, it would be quite easy for everything to fail for one simple reason: bad luck. For instance, if you met with a youth who just left his village... What, you’re saying that an inexperienced youth who left his village for the first time wouldn’t be scary at all? Ha, just watch the gears of fate turn. Perhaps that youth who had just worked as a tavern server recently would soon become the next main character of a legend.

After many years of experience, I came up with three maxims about why schemes would fail. First, if the schemer killed the main character’s parents, teacher, or some other respected elder. Second, if the schemer kidnapped or stole the main character’s girlfriend or love interest. Third, if the schemer tried to renege on a marriage agreement. What these three maxims had in common was one thing: you antagonized the main character.

...Cough, cough, it seemed that no matter what world I was in, the stories would always be quite cliché.

Yep, I was referring to schemes in stories only.

Although sometimes reality would be even more fantastical than stories, most of the time, stories were only stories, and reality was reality.

The success rate of schemes in real life was always much higher. That was because the schemer and his subordinates wouldn’t be such idiots like in the stories. Someone capable of planning a grand overarching scheme and being in the midst of carrying it out probably also had a more than ninety percent success rate guarantee to be willing to start it in the first place.

A certain earl’s family waited patiently for a hundred years for the ruling royalty to have a generation with no descendants. Then, that earl’s family assassinated four royal relatives that might succeed the throne, thus ensuring that the earl’s family succeeded the throne in the end... Yep, I was actually referring to the current San Antonio. The history behind how the current ruling family obtained their crown wasn’t glorious at all.

Did the major nobles in San Antonio not know about how this crown was obtained? Was the previous royalty not on guard at all? In fact, the royalty had long since known that Earl Misset had grand ambitions. The royalty even knew exactly why those distantly related princes had died. However, Earl Misset from that generation had the most powerful army, and the loyalty of one-third of all the major nobles. So, the San Antonio royalty from back then could only watch on aggrievedly as they were destroyed.

I had often heard stories about inexperienced youths saving the princess in distress and finally reviving a kingdom and becoming the ruler of an entire country. However, I had never seen such things happen in reality. Instead, the ugly and old “villains” from the story would always win in the end, along with marrying the princess, having several children, and usurping the throne. This was actually quite commonplace.

The reasons were quite simple. The schemers were typically quite powerful. Their ambitions stemmed from having a sufficient amount of factional support and actual power. If a noble family was even stronger than the royalty, it was only natural that this noble family would have ambitions to replace the royalty. Only an incredible few would adhere to their ancient contracts to the royalty and remain loyal. The end result was that the schemes were basically almost open for everyone to see, and that today’s traitor would be the glorious king of tomorrow.

The internal war in the Sala Dukedom was just one such example, but there were plenty others ongoing in the world right now. In this current generation, there were so many betrayals, uprisings, assassinations, and civil wars that such news no longer made the headlines. Even though the human mega empires were still able to keep such chaos suppressed, the smaller countries were now in a state of utter chaos.

It would be too naïve to think of all this chaos as only natural during the Holy War. Judging from the information I received from the fairies and the Mist Alliance, much of this chaos actually had to do with the involvement of other species or outside factions.

Perhaps a certain noble would mysteriously receive powerful God Equipment. Perhaps a certain domain lord would suddenly have a few non-human archmages join his cause. Perhaps a certain dukedom would find several beastman tribes offering their support. Perhaps a genius strategist would suddenly appear, greatly strengthening a certain faction’s military strength... This type of abnormal news was actually considered normal in this day and age. What happened next was even more common. Either the domain lord who felt like it was his “destiny” to be the ruler would start plotting to overthrow his current ruler, or the ruler would feel threatened and begin to preemptively clean house.

The “Vultures of War” catastrophe from the game’s history had now appeared in front of us in a different form—civil wars and internal unrest from nobles.

For most countries, seeing your neighbor having a civil war would be the most annoying thing possible. If you didn’t intervene, the civil war would end up affecting you as well. But if you intervened, you would immediately be accused of interfering in another country’s internal affairs or invasion.

Of course, some ambitious kings and archdukes actually treated this as a great chance to expand their territories. And so, the fires of war kept burning even greater as the civil wars were upgraded into international world wars.

To my knowledge, many mega empires, including Bardi, Xiluo, and San Antonio, had secretly gained much from the current chaotic civil wars raging in the world. Not to mention, since this was all about other countries’ internal affairs, it was impossible for outsiders to intervene.

This was destructive for any small country, but was it only a small issue for the mega empires? No, this was a tremendous issue for everyone.

The mega empires only won and never lost whenever they conquered other smaller countries. Expanding their territories not only solidified the royalty’s position, but it also benefited the country’s markets, the major nobles, and military. That made the mega empires’ citizens desire even more wars, so their citizens’ wishes forced the king and the nobles to start even more wars... That was the biggest trouble of all.

If all of this was due to the Chaos Faction’s scheme, then I must say that it was wonderfully done.

A few random powerful individuals joining up, or a few nonhuman outsiders offering their support, or a few dark cultists, or a single powerful weapon, or some new technology, or a few sacks of gold coins. As long as they were used well, such tiny pieces in the grand scheme of things could cause an entire country to sink into utter chaos. This would decrease the entire overall strength of humanity.

The Sala Dukedom was an obvious example of this. The civil war here was between the ruling archduke’s family and the domain lords. This was no social class revolution. And, in the end, no matter who won or lost, the Sala Dukedom’s power as a country would definitely be greatly diminished, with a large reduction in population. There would be no true victor in the end. Looking at the overall situation and the long-term future, everyone would be a loser.

Limit the scale of the wars? It wouldn’t be so easy after the wars began.

Something like stopping wars before they started was especially hard to do. Those with ambition were plentiful everywhere. It just depended on if the ambitious had actual power backing them up or not. Were we supposed to investigate every single one of each domain lord’s subordinates? Were we supposed to ban the nobles and domain lords from trying to improve their own power? Considering how this world currently had a feudal society where domain lords ruled like kings in their own domains, even their countries’ royalty would be unable to stop the domain lords.

This scheme didn’t seem like it came from the demons, as demons were simple-minded and would directly declare war against you. This seemed far more like a vicious scheme from the devils that loved to torment humans. While such a scheme wouldn’t see results anytime soon, a sufficient amount of time passing would mean the significant weakening of all of humanity.

Perhaps it was because several of the Devil Lords betrayed the Chaos Faction and joined the Hell Faction. Perhaps it was because Cynthia, the will of the Chaos Abyss, had disappeared. The remaining Devil Lords were no longer remaining neutral as they typically would in previous Holy Wars. The other Devil Lords were showing off their abilities and support for the Chaos Faction.

To be honest, this was actually another of the main reasons why I had been staying in the Sala Dukedom. I had originally intended to see who exactly was behind the traitorous noble that rebelled to see if I could find anyone behind the scenes. Although the hope for successfully catching the true mastermind would be quite slim, I could at least give it a try. I wanted to at least find out which bastards from the lower planes were meddling in human affairs.

“Tsk, in the end, all my plans were interrupted. We actually met with so many things here. Am I really the legendary elementary schooler God of Death like Conan Edogawa? I meet with incidents everywhere that I go? Why am I so unfortunate?”

“Shouldn’t the Sky Tower Spirit be the one shouting about how unfortunate he is? He almost managed to achieve his goals. If it weren’t for meeting you, his scheme which took him hundreds of years likely would have succeeded.”

Judging from this standpoint, the Sky Tower Spirit was also quite the incredible schemer. He had started his plan several centuries ago and patiently waited for the Holy War to begin again before putting it into action. He then purposefully let the adventurer Old Barton into the ruins, having him take away the critical Katarina. The Sky Tower Spirit then started an Undead Calamity to indirectly kill the true master of the tower so that he could become truly independent.

But, due to a single unexpected occurrence, Undead Emperor Conservation and the Sky Tower Spirit’s schemes were destined to fail.

“Their only mistake was that they antagonized the main character! That’s right, me!”

“...Are you sure that you took care of all this with your main character plot armor rather than your calamitous aura of misfortune? All those ‘reinforcements’ of yours came here more to hunt you down.”

I was actually rendered speechless by this. Indeed, this potentially devastating Undead Calamity had been halted mostly because of Amelia and her wood spirits arriving on time, and the adventuring team in the ruins had mostly been saved because of Reyne.

“Silly cat, would you die if you stopped commenting on everything about me?”

“I would!”

But while the silly cat and I glared at each other, others were finally unable to take this anymore.

“Be a little more serious, we’re in the middle of a battle!”

Even though I also kept reminding myself that this was a battlefield, it was so hard to actually take things seriously.

The stairs going down had been opened up again, with more demons coming up. However, Reyne blocked the stairway by herself. All I saw was her swinging around her silver sword and spear in circles, and then... there was nothing else except for blood and flesh flying off of Reyne’s shining weapons. I had yet to see a single complete demon down here.

“Reyne’s in such a combat fervor. She’s showing off her own progress. Right, did you teach her those sword techniques?”

“Tsk, I would never teach her sword techniques like this. They fit only a gorilla.”

I wasn’t blind. Of course I could tell whose style these sword techniques were. I had indeed previously taught Reyne fighting skills and techniques. But, her current sword techniques were very honest and simple horizontal or vertical slices. They were gorilla-like brute force techniques that used instinct and senses far more than any logic or reason. Only someone as simple and direct as Karwenz would use such sword techniques.

Although I was rather surprised by Reyne’s huge increase in power level, I highly doubted that any ordinary demons would even pose a threat to Reyne. This meant that I could secretly slack off and plan for the future.

Indeed, plan for the future. Plan for the future of these ruins, and the future for the huge inheritance within these ruins.

From what I could tell, since Amelia and her wood spirits had arrived, and we had already eliminated the most troublesome and powerful individual, Conservation, it would be impossible for us to lose control of these ruins unless something like two Main Gods suddenly appeared.

There were no treasure chests or gold coins here for adventurers to go crazy about. But, all those silly-looking robots we’d met on the way here were actually hundreds of times more valuable than treasure chests filled with gold.

Perhaps I wasn’t exactly a high-level engineer myself, but I could at least slightly extrapolate the advancement of a culture from its creations and tools.

Completely automatic robots and artificial souls, together with designs and constructs for all sorts of never-before-seen machines. This Sky Tower even managed to produce half-machine and half-undead creations, and there were also spiritual creatures here that could imitate a real person’s soul wavelength. All of this knowledge was a treasure trove of information that far surpassed any known archaeological dig on the Haletdam generation. This was a super mega harvest.

Just the fact that this place also had a highly unique structure that made it easier to communicate with other dimensions here would probably make this location tremendously valuable to the Chaos Faction. And of course, this naturally had worth to us as well.

If news about the true nature of this place was leaked, it would quite obviously cause the Sala Dukedom’s civil war to rage even harder. Perhaps some major countries would also find excuses to invade. I would need to think of methods to contain everything first before the news leaked.

“Perhaps keeping this portal and having this ruin constantly maintain itself in a state of ‘active warfare against intruders’ will be safer.”

But as many thoughts and schemes which I hesitated about roamed around in my head, the true master of this tower, Katerina, walked in front of me, seeming like she had something to say.