After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World - Chapter 1695

Chapter 1695: Taking Over A Region (Part 1)
Nearly two months passed by in a flash, and for most of the world, it had been mostly the same. In a certain region, though, it was different.

While there were still Terran slaves that were being spread and sold off here and there, especially through previously established routes, the increase of the number had slowed down significantly. In certain directions, it had wholly come to a halt.

A couple of territories even directly returned some of them.

In that time, Alterra received dozens more allies and subsidiaries—some through wars, and some through peaceful means.

Decent territories generally had no reason not to join in. Even if many were guarded at first, it was not difficult to prove that Alterra meant no harm.

Some would also realize they were already ‘surrounded’ by unallied territories and might have no choice but to succumb to it.

The few ‘decent’ Terran villages that refused for a while eventually gave up, too, when tradespeople from several adjacent villages came and started convincing people from the ground up.

The recruiters would even mention times when an aborigine village attacked one of the allied villages, and the enemies would be shocked at the reinforcements, crushed without much of a fight.

This actually happened quite often in the past few months, and soon it spread out that a solid network was forming, even among villages with no Post Offices, which was already indicative of the scale at which it was happening.

As for the oppressive territories within the region, aborigine or not, they were dealt with by the alliance that formed. It wasn’t anything too brutal like massacring a village, of course.

All territories had restaurants and wells, so they were fairly self-sufficient, so economic pressure would take too long, especially when they didn’t know Alterra for long and hadn’t experienced its products yet.

So, when the territory was hurting Terrans and was stubborn, then they were probably going to be dealt with by war.

There would just be an allied or subsidiary village who’d start a war, get another ally or two to help out, and they’d get the territory to surrender with—as per Alterra’s request—as few deaths as possible.

In those cases, Alterra didn’t have to do anything except sell some resources and weapons for a good price, giving limited-time-only increased purchase limits in all resources to whoever decided to go to war.

This was a win-win for whoever ended up attacking. Not only would they win a war and gain half of the loser’s assets, but they would also increase purchase limits, which was not a small matter at all.

If they strategized well enough (Alterra wouldn’t help anymore), they could even get a token.

Sometimes, the Lord would keep it, but more often they’d sell it instead. The latter had to invest in a Token Guard, however, fortunately allied territories could buy it with terms of payment (i.e. half a year to pay or something like that).

Anyway, at some point, a sort of Token auction started in the region, now called Alterra Region.

However, for the villages within the region, only Terrans were allowed to participate.

These Lords would bring these tokens to Alterra, and because there were no official auctions yet, they started little auctions where the Lords would invite rich people, merchants, and rich mercenary teams to one of Alterra’s premier restaurants to bid for the token.

They’d usually do this with one or two other Lords (with the alliance system, it was easy to exchange word between Lords) to lessen the initial investment and also to add more things to sell in a single auction.

In all cases, the Lords did not just recoup the costs of the war and the Token Guard, but also made huge profits.

It also alerted the Elders to create an auction house, even if it was just a manual one. Buying the system auction house was a waste of slots, but it should be easy enough to manually build one!

In this time frame, Alterra had become associated with more than half of the territories in the Terran region, most of the remaining ‘untouched’ ones were those up North.

It couldn’t be helped. The terrain was a bit difficult, and it was simply more practical to take over everything before it. It was in this direction that many Terran slaves were still being produced, exchanged, and exported.

The other area receiving a little recoil was the Western side. After all, Voumi was there, and they had been actively trying to take over elementalist territories.

Voumi itself seemed to be busy, but they were desperate for more elementalists, so they kept sending their subsidiary villages in, not realizing how quickly their overall strength was dwindling because of it.

Some would start wars with Terran territories they had already taken over. However, because Terrans had allies all over, it was not difficult to send reinforcements, and it was definitely not difficult to ambush people, especially with the intelligence network that they had.

Basically, what the Intelligence team did was to give messenger birds to certain ‘hubs’ in the region. These hubs allied with the other territories as well, so they could easily pass information through their respective Lords. Through this, they were able to detect suspicious activity even before it happened.

In one case, a few mercenary teams were sent out a few days before a declaration in order to camp around the target territory. They were planning on weakening the enemies and cutting their supplies before the war, which was a common tactic.

Unfortunately for them, they landed in an affiliated village (with a lower level and was therefore not targeted) to rest. Because they were so damned arrogant and noisy, it wasn’t even a challenge for the locals to get information about who they were targeting.

In the end, when they found out that these people were targeting an ally, they put a lot of poisonous things (many people could develop their own poisons by this time) in these people’s meals, causing them to weaken.

In cases where the rules were strict (and it was rarely this specific), they would find a way to incorporate the poisons in their food or items they’d take outside, so that the poison would activate belatedly and outside the territory.

In another place Southeast, a subsidiary village near Basset Town headed to the region, wanting to see what had taken down Basset.

They saw some interesting things on the trip—even small villages had some of Alterra’s products by now—and got greedy. They would start buying out the items, and when the villagers—who were generally several levels lower on average—refused, then they would show darker colors.

The Lord immediately noticed hostility and made a report to the hub which, in turn, sent it to Alterra. Using the aborigine’s arrogance with fake pandering, they also confirmed they were hostile.

Suffice it to say, they wouldn’t even be able to reach the next village. If they were too strong for a village, then they’d be mysteriously dealt with by stronger people midway.

Anyway, as long as it was an allied territory and an enemy was attacking, it was practically a ticket for being hunted down. While this wasn’t common knowledge just yet, as more and more aborigine territories were defeated, word about it slowly spread.

Do not attack any territory from that region, they would say, either that…or risk death.