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Since we reached the abandoned and desolate Demon Kingdom, a whole week has passed.
We had spent our days leisurely working on many things. We had to leave the investigation about what happened to the people for later, as we had many people we needed to take care of first.
The cold temperatures were not good for everyone, and we had to quickly find shelter for all the group of people and give them the things necessary for survival as well.
Ultimately, we also want them to be able to survive by themselves, but as they were mostly all slaves, their mentalities were not in the best of places, and their bodies were atrophied due to all the bad treatment they received.
It was going to be hard, but we had to quickly rehabilitate all the people, both in health and spirit.
Well, the spirit wasn’t so hard, since the moment we arrived here, they got happier as if this place was filled with some sort of dark energy that resonated with something that made them comfortable.
Some said it reminded them of me for some reason, and the more we stayed in here as the days passed, the stronger this energy became as it resonated with me.
Essentially it wasn’t because of the energy itself but also because of me. Yes, it was because of me. They had been acting like this because they see me as their savior, and thanks to my Title Skills, it only becomes worse as they make me seem like a Queen, a Ghost Queen, or something.
And they seem to adore me, which only becomes more awkward… I wish I wasn’t this awkward with people I don’t know well, but I cannot really take them praising me and kneeling before me, so I always ask them to act casually and not mind my presence. However, that only makes them think of me as highly, as someone benevolent or something.
You guys, I am not really as amazing as you think. Please stop this!
*Sigh*… But there isn’t much I can do for now, and I consider myself someone benevolent at the end, so I accepted their praises at the very least, but anything that would lower them, such as kneeling, was prohibited.
Aside from these small issues, the entire rebuilding project had been advancing at a snail’s pace. We haven’t done anything at all other than relocating the people and mildly repairing some of the houses that remained in the best states. However, we still didn’t want to separate the people too far away from the castle, so most of them were located within the houses all around the castle.
We repaired these houses with the wood we went to cut from the forest surrounding the fallen Kingdom. There was plenty of wood there, and by swinging my giant ax, I was able to easily chop down like ten trees at once… so it was fairly easy to get wood!
Catarina used her monstrous strength with Lucifer’s help to move away from dangerous boulders that were around and anything else that seemed dangerous. The ice pillars and spikes left with the people inside remained the same. We can’t move them, they’re stuck on the floor, and this special ice cannot be melted easily.
Some of the people began to leave candles around these spikes with people inside and offered their prayers to the goddess of death and the goddess of ice and snow for their salvation.
Aside from this, we have been relocating the people, as there is a lot of lone people without families, so we have to pair them up with others so they can live in the tight places. We have responsibility for them. After all, most of the houses are ruined and filled with snow, the ones that were mildly okay are a few, and the rest of the houses were actually constructed with fresh wood we went to chop off out of the forests outside.
We were also planning on repurposing these ruined houses’ wood. Still, the wood is frozen and rotten at the same time, so it is not really that good for anything other than making bonfires, which we are using to warm up the people. Everyone has a chimney inside their house, and there are also large bonfires around the town too. Hence, there is always a place to warm up.
The chilly temperatures seem to be enhanced by the large ice pillars and ice spikes around, so the chilly temperatures are even chillier than if they were not there. These pillars of ice are literal freezers right at our side.
Another bad thing is that we cannot really grow any crops in these frozen lands, no plants would ever grow in here other than pines, and those take years after years to grow. So we have to rely on our plan to capture and raise cattle animals or monsters, while we mostly survive through the rations I had gotten from the Duchy of Affnaria and from fishing in the river and the lake nearby or hunting any monster we come across.
But these areas are a new level of desolation, so it is hard to even produce actual food here… But it’s not like we got anywhere else to go. The coast is a few dozens of kilometers from here, where I thought we could get a larger quantity of fish, but the waters there are thunderous and dangerous, and it is very cold as well, so we’ll save up that project of building a small fishing town there for later.
As of now, we are still reconstructing the demon king castle while making more houses out of fresh wood for the people. Some of them are staying in the comfier rooms inside the castle, although they’re all covered in dust to the brim. We had already found several monsters inside that had made this place their home, mostly Giant Rats, Horned Rabbits, Black Spiders, and an assortment of smaller critters, which we had been using for food…
It has been a rough week.
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