- Deliver Us from Evil

To become a ‘beloved ally’ after the evil spirit incident, I focused even more on diplomacy.

Although it reduced our profits a little, I signed a spice contract with Lord Jeras for the sake of our relationship with the princess and our neighboring domains, and I sent a considerable tribute of spices, salt, and other goods to the prince who had sent Azel as a gesture of gratitude.

Yet there was one family whose relationship with us never improved: House Ryan.

I could not understand what these bastards were dissatisfied with, but they returned the compensation money we had sent to Dreihart and took an even more thoroughly hostile stance toward us than before.

If they had merely taken a hostile stance toward us, I could at least have understood.

House Ryan brutally hunted down not only the slaves fleeing to our domain but even the free citizens, and unless we dispatched the Kron Knights to the domain's border to protect them, the fields would have been littered with corpses.

In fact, I already knew through the merchant informants Noah had planted that the Ryan domain was gradually going insane.

But I never expected them to go so far as to publicly kill even a steward, the free citizen who stood closest to the nobility, in an old-fashioned trial called ‘God's judgment’ rather than ‘the judgment of the law.’

A few days after that incident, a letter arrived.

It had been sent by ‘Vara,’ Hadem's son, whom I had met exactly once in the past...