The next day, Wang Ergou woke up feeling refreshed. Looking at the little sprite curled up in the corner of the bed, covered in bruises and with vacant eyes, he felt an unprecedented sense of satisfaction.
He opened the window and saw dozens of elven slaves diligently clearing the garden. Although their movements were filled with sorrow, they were highly efficient.
He knew that a golden age for him was about to begin.
He didn't have to do anything; all he had to do each day was supervise the slaves cultivating the land and planting the cabbages and potatoes he knew best. In the evenings, he would return to the castle and subject the once unapproachable elven gardener to all sorts of brutal acts that were enough to destroy all his dignity.
He enjoyed seeing her pained, humiliated, yet fearless expression. It made him feel no longer like Wang Ergou, the man who toiled in the fields, but a true, unyielding king.
He burned all the artwork in the treehouse as firewood because he thought the bottles and jars were taking up space. He turned Ella's study into a pigsty because he thought pigs were more useful than books.
He transformed a thousand-year-old elven manor into a highly productive farm filled with vulgarity and violence in just a few months.
And he thoroughly enjoyed this kind of life.
The "happy" life like Wang Ergou's has become the new norm in Silvermoon City. Those "new citizens" who have just struggled out of the bottom rungs of society have degenerated into slave owners who are more brutal and greedy than their former masters at an astonishing speed.
Chen Qiaoniang was awarded the "First-Class Imperial Warrior" medal for capturing the Elf Queen Liandra and was appointed as the commander of the newly established "Silvermoon City Women's Garrison".
The "property" she was allocated was in the most central area of Silvermoon City—the former Royal Library.
This library houses all the knowledge and wisdom of Avila accumulated over thousands of years. Along with the library, her "private property" consisted of all the librarians and scholars within—a group of frail, elderly or young elven intellectuals.
At first, Chen Qiaoniang had mixed feelings about these spirits. She felt that she was "liberating" them.
So, she opened a special "history class" here.
The first thing she did was order the elven scholars to gather all the books in the library about elven history, magic, and art in the square and burn them to ashes.
"Your history is a false, cowardly, and ignorant history!" she declared from the high platform in her shrill voice. "From this day forward, the only thing you need to learn, the only thing worth memorizing, is the Imperial Codex of our great emperor!"
The elven scholars let out desperate cries, and an old curator with white hair knelt on the ground, pleading that these were treasures of civilization.
Chen Qiaoniang kicked the old curator to the ground, her eyes icy cold: "Old man, now, the Empire is civilization! His Majesty's words are truth!"
After burning the books, she began to "reform the thinking" of these scholars.
Her teaching method is simple yet effective.
She would randomly select an elven scholar and have him recite the "Imperial Bloodline Purity Protection Law." If he mispronounced a single word, she would have other scholars whip him with salt-soaked whips.
One blow after another, until his skin was torn open and blood was everywhere.
"Look, this is what happens when you don't remember His Majesty's teachings!" She would point to the scholar lying in a pool of blood and lecture the others, "Your race, your civilization, has come to this end because you refused to accept the Empire's 'redemption'! You are guilty! Your souls are filled with filth that needs to be purified!"
What she enjoys most is destroying their faith and dignity.
She would have those young and beautiful female scholars strip naked in front of everyone, smear their bodies with ink, and then use their bodies to imprint the four characters "Long Live Your Majesty" on a huge white cloth.
She reveled in their humiliating tears and in their bodies trembling violently with shame.
She believed she was undertaking a great cause. She was "purifying" these filthy souls, cultivating a new generation of "qualified" and grateful slaves for the empire.
That girl who once cheered and ran because of her liberated feet is now using the most vicious methods to put heavier and more desperate shackles on other souls.
The ordinary soldiers, on the other hand, enjoyed the fruits of their victory in a more direct and brutal way.
Zhang Tieniu, the young man saved by the Empire's medical technology, was assigned a lair belonging to the former Wind Knights of the Kingdom of Arasso—a huge manor built on a cliff and adorned with dozens of giant eagles.
His "personal property" consisted of the wind knight's widow and his two daughters.
Zhang Tieniu grew up in the countryside and was honest and simple-minded, but honesty and simplicity are not the same as kindness. When absolute power was handed to him, the darkest and ugliest side of human nature, like wild beasts released from their cages, quickly took over his heart.
He treated the noble Lady Wind Knight and her daughters like livestock.
During the day, he ordered them to serve him like servants, cleaning his huge, dung-smelling nest.
At night, he would chain them up and enjoy the perverse pleasure of conquering the "flying female knights".
He also particularly liked to invite his neighbors, who were also farmers, to his home as "guests".
At the banquet, he would force the two underage daughters of the Wind Knights to wear revealing dance dresses and perform in front of everyone. Then, like showing off spoils of war, he would say to his fellow countrymen, "Brothers, which one do you fancy? Pick whichever you like! Tonight, you can have some fun with them! Don't be shy, it's all thanks to His Majesty's kindness!"
Human nature, in this land devoid of all legal and moral constraints, was magnified infinitely. The purest gratitude of the past has now transformed into the ugliest acts of violence. They vented all the repression and discontent they had suffered upon these poor, foreign slaves.
They want to completely pull these fairies, who were once as beautiful and noble as "fairies" in their eyes, down from their pedestals and trample them into the dirtiest swamp.
They wanted to use this method to prove their "nobility," to demonstrate their superiority as first-class citizens of the empire, and to "repay" the great emperor who had bestowed all of this upon them.
The conquest did not end there.
According to the Empire's Colonial Sustainable Development Act, in order to prevent colonists from becoming addicted to pleasure and losing their fighting spirit, and in order to make more efficient use of the conquered resources, a portion of the "spoils of war" would be transported to the Empire's homeland.
Part of it was given as top-tier luxury goods to the true elite class of the empire.
Another portion was distributed as a special "welfare" to settlements of "new citizens" like the Third Frontier Zone, in order to "improve" the quality of life of the local new citizens and inspire them to desire the next war.
The Elf Queen Liandra, the peerless beauty with precognitive abilities, was sent directly to the imperial capital, Chengtian City, in a cryogenic hibernation pod as a top-tier A++ grade trophy. Her fate will be decided by Lin Feng himself.
Meanwhile, approximately 100,000 selected young and beautiful elven women were loaded onto massive colonial transport ships, much like those used for transporting livestock, and sent to the Third Frontier—the homeland of the Dragonfang Legion soldiers.
When the transport ship arrived at that former territory of the Qing Dynasty, the entire pioneering area once again erupted in celebration.
The port was packed with people. The families of the soldiers who had remained behind were anxiously waiting. They had heard the good news from the front lines and knew that their sons, husbands, and fathers had become "people of high status." And now, His Majesty the Emperor had even bestowed upon them the legendary "fairy maiden" as a gift!
Wang Ergou's parents, Liu Laoshi and Li Cuihua (using the character names from the previous text as a typical example), squeezed to the front of the crowd. Their faces were filled with an indescribable complex expression, a mixture of pride, greed, and smugness.
"See that! My son is a hero!" Li Cuihua boasted loudly to the villagers around her, "He's made something of himself! He's earned a manor for our Wang family! And now, His Majesty has sent us a fairy!"
When the transport ship's hatch opened, the crowd erupted in thunderous cheers as the elven girls, wearing collars, with vacant eyes and looking like walking corpses, were roughly shoved down the gangway by Imperial soldiers.
"A fairy! She really is a fairy!"
"It's even more beautiful than in the painting!"
"Haha! Now we can command these pointy ears too!"
The allocation process was simple and brutal. Each family that had distinguished itself in battle could receive one to five elven female slaves, depending on the merit level of the soldiers on the front lines.
Li Cuihua received three elven girls. This was because Wang Ergou had made outstanding contributions and was specially allocated to them.
She was like an old farmer picking through livestock at the market, pinching this one's arm, looking at that one's teeth, and constantly making disgusted "tsk tsk" sounds.
"They're too skinny! They all look like they haven't eaten enough. How can they work?"
"Her hips are small too, she doesn't look like she'll have a hard time giving birth!"
She eventually became quite smug, tied the three "fairies" together with a rope, and led them home like three sheep.
The two elderly people, using their small-farmer-style survival rules gleaned from their impoverished lives, began to "manage" these "gifts" from another world.
They were more stingy and harsher than their sons on the front lines.
They believed that these "fairies" were simply better-looking livestock. Feeding the livestock was merely a way to make them work better.
They were reluctant to use the electric shock function on those slave collars because it would consume "energy." They preferred to use fire pokers or simply their fists and feet.
In their eyes, these three elven girls were no longer beings with independent personalities, but three free tools that could be used to do work, to show off, or even to "produce offspring".
Li Cuihua even started planning that after a few years, when the heat died down, she would sell the least attractive one of them to the black market.
“That blond one doesn’t look very clever. If we raise him and sell him, we can get several hundred dragon coins! That’s perfect for my grandson to save up!” That’s what she said to Liu Laoshi.
The arrival of the two elderly people, and these "gifts," brought about a drastic and distorted change in the social atmosphere of the Third Development Zone.
The former repression and simplicity have completely disappeared. In their place has a nouveau riche atmosphere, full of comparison and ostentation, which is ugly.
Every household took pride in owning an elf slave. Neighbors no longer compared whose crops grew best, but whose elf slave was more beautiful and more capable.
A nationwide corruption brought about by conquest, like a plague, was spreading wildly across this newly "liberated" land. They were transforming at an alarming rate into the very kind of "superior people" they once despised—those who could arbitrarily control the fate of others. And they thoroughly enjoyed this process. They believed it was all a gift from the emperor, something they were entitled to.
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