But Petrió wouldn’t be able to study the monster, not if he couldn’t defeat it and in his current state it wasn’t even close. He kept escaping as he suddenly heard a roar in the direction from the town he was escaping from. He was quite a bit of way away from there, so it must’ve been really loud. The monster had found out that he had been tricked and it was probably furious, so there were even more reasons to keep the speed he had and get away from the place.

He also realized that his own strength, while above average, wasn’t enough to fight harsh opponents. He could try two different options to defeat them, either get stronger or get strong allies that would fight for or with him.

But he didn’t think that he could get much stronger by reading publicly available books so he had to either search for a teacher that taught him fighting skills, enter an academy or something of the sorts where he could access more information or steal this information.

On the other hand, if he searched for these organizations or people, it might be easier to get them to fight for him than to convince to cooperate with him by making him stronger. In fact, he could hit to birds with a single stone by capturing a city and forcing these people to cooperate with him, which would make him quite similar to the religions, but at least the people would have the freedom to leave the city… eventually.

If he gave it immediately, he’d lose too many people and then, with the little people left, he wouldn’t be able to defend a city. At the same time, he also wanted people tending crops and doing other jobs in order to keep people alive and creating new technologies to improve said lives, but people were needed for those jobs.

Thinking was one thing, but doing was another, so instead of overthinking about this topic he’d get on with it and learn on the way, what was the worst that could happen, after all it was only a single city and he’d go for a small one, so there were less things that could wrong as well.

He was also going for one of the cities he had already visited and expected not to be governed by the people of the war god, yet. It was quite far from any of their cities and the city itself wasn’t really unique or relevant in any way, so it wasn’t in the priority list of the followers of the god of war.

The target was a town of the god of tranquility, which had managed to influence at least four cities, but all of them were in places where one could find calmness. This one was beside a beautiful blue lake with a mountain on the other side so that the reflection of it would be seen on the lake.

When he was there the people weren’t really dissatisfied by being forced to work, the contrary was actually true, they were resting too much, and their homes weren’t being built. The twenty or so followers of the god of tranquility simply calmed the crowds and continued relaxing themselves.

Petrió wouldn’t really need to fight them and expected to take the city with relative ease. And so it was, by promising the cultists rest in exchange for the city they thought for a moment, then got tired of it and simply agreed. And he’d keep his word, they wouldn’t need to work, but if they wanted a home or improve their lives, they would need to do so, there wouldn’t be anyone who profited without working in his city.

The townspeople took the change of pace rather positively, because they were starting to feel the consequences of constantly sleeping out in the open, most of them had some level of back-aches and mosquito-bites all over their bodies. While they wouldn’t be totally protected inside a home, the chances of suffering the same was decreased by a lot.

So now, with Petrió in command, they started planned building of their homes, while also leaving some spaces in between for other buildings he wanted to have in his city as well. The houses were quite simple, they only had bedrooms and a living room with a large table and a cozy fireplace.

The bathrooms weren’t built inside the homes, but rather a group of houses shared a large bathing building with multiple showers, toilets and some tubs as well. This was made because he thought that the people would grow closer this way, but also because it made the planning of pipes much easier. One of the reasons was more important than the other, clearly.

The building was going very well, the people had barely used any energy before and with Petrió actively helping, they managed to build around six houses every day once they picked up the pace. This way, it only took them a bit over a month to rebuild and then he immediately started working on a simple wall which would work as a simple defense for the moment.

Then a pair of smithies were built, together with large storage rooms. Now not everyone was working with the buildings, and some were farming, while others were crafting tools for the city. Everything was going surprisingly well, but it only lasted until the city got a message requesting help from one of the other cities that followed the same god.

This caused that the quite calm followers of the god started moving and talking, requesting Petrió to help them, but he knew that it wouldn’t be worthwhile, and he’d simply be wasting resources. At the same time, it was likely that the city had already fallen, taking into consideration that the messenger had traveled for five days and their army, which hadn’t been trained and had just received weapons, would take even more time to get there to defend a town that had probably already been captured.

He managed to resolve the situation by giving these leeches a home for each pair of them and promising them that they wouldn’t need to build anything in the future, which kind of hurt him, as he’d have some people constantly draining resources off of him, but at the same time he prevented a large loss of people, weapons and food by preventing this useless expedition.

Once winter had come, the city was completely different than before Petrió had taken over. Not only was the section of the city behind the first wall completely build, a second layer of defense, further outside, was being built as more and more buildings were needed and constructed outside of the first wall.

In this city the winters were less harsh than where Petrió had been living, but still a few centimeters of snow fell from the sky and covered the city and its surroundings in a white sheet. The lake, due to the low temperatures, had gotten slightly frozen and had a sheet of ice covering it.

Meanwhile, the city was still hard at work, Petrió had already partially taken the hands off the rails and let other people handle the little things, while he planned for the far future. Some people did indeed try to take benefits from their new positions, but as soon as they were caught, they were harshly punished and, in order to prevent such situations from happening again, the persons family also suffered some consequences. At the same time, no one could leave the city, so you either worked or had nothing, there was no option in between.

This was the first time that my tendencies of having everything under my control resurfaced after the control over my sister, almost as if it was in my nature. Or perhaps because of my lack of parent figures that I ended up this way. Who can tell, really. And this isn’t a book about those things either.

I simply wanted everything to go my way, and felt that it was the right way, at least at the beginning and when I started realizing that everything wouldn’t be perfect, it was too late to turn back, as it’d only create more damage. But this only happened years after I had begun my rule over many cities and the management turned out to be too much for me.

In the present, I was pretty successful with the people, with only a few people that didn’t like the forced rules and therefore tried escaping, but they’d leak the information about no religion being on top… But it might have been time for that as well, because he couldn’t hide it forever and with no supports going towards the city that had been attacked, suspicions had probably risen on the attackers and defenders of this city.

For the first time, he let someone go do something against his book of rules, which now more and more people managed to understand, and be left unpunished. Some of his advisors, which were mostly people of higher class and as such with better education, told him that it was a mistake to let their situation be known so early, but he believed that they’d try to stay away from cities for a while to prevent getting caught in a similar situation as the one they had been in for over a year.

He also believed that they had progressed a lot within the last year, now having a permanent guard of twenty people which were both able-bodied and good with weapons and had actually helped with some of the detentions of criminals. The main flaw that this group had, was that they were too simple-minded and as such needed someone else to give them orders and guide them so that they would be useful.