Chapter 400 — The War Is Not Yet Over

Amber had just said that he was now thoroughly at odds with the Daystar Church. That might well be true, but Gao Yang had his own understanding of those words, and his own plans.

Heidi took the order and left, leaving only Amber and Gao Yang in the room for the time being. Amber mulled it over alone for quite a while, then suddenly seized on a detail from the task Gao Yang had assigned Heidi. "Ah! You just said to have the army distribute the thing across the entire Southern Frontier... Does that mean the war isn't over yet?"

Gao Yang glanced at Amber. "When did I ever say the war was over?"

"But we've won on every battlefield," Amber said, scratching his hair. "Count Horsman in the north is dead, and his army has scattered. Count Peppo in the west is dead too, and I hear even fewer of his men escaped. Now even the Daystar Church's bishop is dead... I heard they've taken a lot of prisoners on the northern and western fronts, and many of them are Southern Frontier nobles. Normally, doesn't that mean the war is as good as finished? And then you'd negotiate with the families of those noble prisoners, demand money, grain, land..."

Watching the half-smile on Gao Yang's face, Amber's voice grew quieter and quieter, until at last he slowly trailed off, an expression of horror spreading over his face. "My God, you're not planning to stop at all, are you?"

"I said long ago that this is a war to reunify the Southern Frontier, and what I want is not the old kind of unity—nobles carved into fiefs, held together by fragile oaths of allegiance and vassal ties. So from the very beginning I never intended to take any 'ransom,' still less to negotiate," Gao Yang said, his expression stern. "Count Horsman's coalition has indeed broken apart, but remember: they have only scattered, not vanished, not surrendered—they ran from the battlefield. They have become neither population for Cecil nor nourishment for the soil of the Southern Frontier. And those captured nobles... the families behind them, their castles, their manors, their still-independent domains—all of it remains. As long as those routed armies return to those places, those places will remain the fiefs of nobles carved up among themselves, not the land of Cecil."

Here Gao Yang emphasized, word by word, "The Southern Frontier has one Cecil domain, and only one."

"You're not planning to..." Amber looked at Gao Yang's eyes in disbelief. "Kill every noble family in the Southern Frontier..."

"Of course I won't kill them all—at least not directly, not all of them, because that would collapse the social order. And whether I like to admit it or not, the nobles and their retainers—the 'upper class'—are currently the main source of intellectuals. I must make use of this group; I must use their strength," Gao Yang said. "But I will still 'destroy' them—destroy their system and its foundations... After that, everyone will be a glorious and law-abiding Cecil citizen."

At this he sighed softly. "I very much hope that every Southern Frontier noble and their retainers can accept this arrangement. But if they cannot... I hope at least that the incinerators will suffice."

An expression of bewilderment gradually surfaced on Amber's face, and in the end he gave a sudden start.

Seeing this, Gao Yang could not help laughing. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I'm not listening!" Amber clapped his hands over his ears. "Everything you say is either impossibly hard or scares people to death!"

Gao Yang smiled and reached out to ruffle Amber's hair. The little dumpling's height was just so perfectly suited that his hand landed exactly right.

Then he turned and looked out the window at the sun already sinking in the west.

Philip the Knight had likely already set out with his orders. The cleansing of the Southern Frontier had begun.