Has Isha given up on rebelling? Not at all.
Even during her current class, Isha continues to instill the thoughts of liberation theology into the children in the classroom.
However, under Lind’s request, Isha has removed those theological ideas, effectively secularizing them.
No one finds this strange, because the beliefs in the Cape Kingdom are quite varied, with the Goddess being the dominant faith among the official beliefs, but in the Northern Border, there are actually many followers of the Winter God and the War God.
In such a complex environment of beliefs, Lind’s request to remove some theological content is actually quite reasonable.
Of course, Lind hasn’t completely prohibited it. After all, this world genuinely has divine magic existing, and Lind himself can use the divine magic inherited from the female protagonist’s save file, hence denying the divine would actually reinforce idealism.
Moreover, after removing the theological content, most of the ideas Isha expresses revolve around equality and resistance to injustice, urging those priests and nobles to work pragmatically for the people, which carries a hint of reformist meaning.
In extreme cases, Isha teaches these children to learn to resist authority, meaning to oppose the nobles.
Overall, it is a more radical form of reformism.
But even so, this is still content deemed rebellious within any noble territory, yet Isha boldly spoke about it in the Graythorn Territory.
Not only does Lind allow this, but he even helps revise the teaching materials, as all the students listening to Isha’s lectures are promising candidates for political commissars.
However, Lind also knows that this so-called reformism is merely a compromise Isha makes with herself. If Lind were to employ more cruel means of exploitation, he suspects that Isha would undoubtedly instigate a rebellion without hesitation.
Upon hearing Caroline’s response, Isha did not hurriedly refute but treated Caroline as her own student, sharing the experiences she witnessed after leaving the Cathedral of the Blessed Mother of Relief.
Caroline, who had initially been in an excited and anxious state, gradually fell into silence.
As Caudic mentioned, the Northern Border can be described as chaotic right now, but is it truly the fault of the Lars Family? The Lars Family has not only entrenched most of their army at the borders to resist foreign invasions; they have also genuinely provided relief supplies, making them seem more noble compared to scum like Jagger.
In contrast, Isha’s viewpoint is more radical; rather than saying the Lars Family is rotten, it would be more accurate to say the entire noble class is rotten.
As Lind once taught Isha: “There are no traitorous classes, only traitorous individuals within a class.”
This statement holds true in reverse as well: only individuals can betray a class; there are no classes that betray themselves.
And now, Isha is conveying her viewpoint to Caroline.
“No, it’s all the problem of the Lars Family; it must be so. As long as the Lars Family surrenders to the Demon Clan, everything will be fine.”
Although Caroline is still stubborn, she is evidently shaken. From Isha’s observations along the way, if she were to admit that the Lars Family is rotten, then the noble class, at least the nobles in the Northern Border, could be said to be utterly corrupted.
The Lars Family, at least for the sake of their own position and authority, still has to maintain the overall stability of the Northern Border; however, those smaller nobles are exploiting the common folks, colluding with foreign enemies to commit heinous acts, and many high-ranking individuals are even in league with merchants to sell supplies to the Demon Clan.
“Especially that noble named Lena; I heard she has been making life unbearable for the people in the Northern Border.”
Caroline was somewhat hysterical, uncertain of whom to believe, one being her idolized senior and the other being the prime minister who had cultivated her to become the student council president.
Isha did not directly refute, but instead asked: “Caroline, do you know what it feels like to be hungry? Not the kind of hunger suffered during a fasting day to honor the goddess, but the true feeling of having no food.”
“At first, you will feel dizzy, weak, and devoid of strength. Then your body will urge you to eat; at that point, you might even bite into moldy black bread that has been stored for weeks.”
“Eventually, the black bread is gone, and each day you can only continuously search for edible weeds and tree bark. Then a type of soil is discovered; this soil is not only edible but fills you up, yet it is difficult to digest. Many who eat it can only suffer from a bizarre swollen belly until they die by the roadside, but this has become no longer important, for your body tells you that if you don’t eat, you will starve to death soon. By eating, at least you can sustain yourself a little longer.”
“At this point, ethics and morals mean nothing; the gospel of the goddess cannot reach these people’s ears, and serving the family pets on the dinner table is no longer a rare occurrence. But this is not the end; what do you think will happen next?”
Although Caroline had already mentally prepared herself halfway through Isha’s words, when Isha finally articulated it, Caroline couldn’t help but cover her mouth and gag, as Isha’s later descriptions resonated so deeply that it felt as if she had witnessed it herself, even recalling the cooked meat’s color in vivid detail.
It was then that Caroline realized that both she and the royal capital nobles were utterly ignorant of the situation in the Northern Border.
There is no such thing as a compromise; the current state of the Northern Border is filled with deformities and disabilities, without even needing the nobles’ interference to create a hellscape.
Let alone the topic of “compromise,” in the Northern Border, even the professional beggars are hardly seen anymore. If the Graythorn Territory is functioning well due to Lind’s enforced control and the Lars Family’s significant support, allowing everyone to be well-fed enough to avoid beggars, then in other parts of the Northern Border, the truth is that it is too impoverished to the extent that even beggars are invisible.
Seeing that Caroline has barely stopped her retching, Isha doesn’t continue but takes out an application form intended for applying for a position in the territory. As long as she passes the assessment, she can start her appointment immediately.
“I once heard the lord of the Graythorn Territory say a phrase: ‘No investigation, no right to speak.’ When the territory was just beginning its development, he personally spent a day setting up tents to establish standards. How about you? Aren’t you considering staying in the Northern Border to investigate?”
Caroline, in a daze, takes the application form, her mind filled with class and noble issues, while the horrific scene of human roasting that Isha described continues to spiral through her mind, along with Caudic’s seemingly self-righteous speech, and the true tragic conditions in the Northern Border are conflicting in her thoughts.
Finally, with Isha’s concerned gaze following her, Caroline left the school with the application form, her eyes vacantly staring ahead.
However, just as Caroline left the school, a number of children by the roadside seemed to have been waiting for a long time.
“That’s her! She spoke ill of the Lord and the Lady!”
No sooner had she spoken than several eggshells were thrown at Caroline.
Having undergone knight training, Caroline instinctively caught those eggshells with her hands, but immediately stones and mud were hurled at her.
One child, while throwing, shouted: “The Lady just wants to take my toy! You nobles were trying to take my mother away too! Get out of Graywhite Territory!”
“Get out of here! Get out!” The other children joined in, evidently influenced by Isha’s education; these kids held no respect for the nobles, showing no fear of Caroline’s splendid noble attire.
They even seemed to harbor hatred towards nobles other than Lind and Lena.
Feeling insulted, Caroline wanted to cast a spell to retaliate against these lowly people, but seeing the children’s hateful expressions, she couldn’t bring herself to muster the magical power, despite her ability to accurately construct spell models in general.
Didn’t she come to the Northern Border to save these suffering people? How did it seem that now she had become the villain ruining their lives?
Caught in her thoughts, Caroline stared at the eggshell in her hand, as if beginning to understand what Isha meant by “no investigation, no right to speak.”
These children studying in Graywhite Territory can genuinely eat eggs.
As Caroline awkwardly fled, she glanced at the eggshell and the application form in her hands, seemingly having made a determination.
In her subsequent wandering, Caroline no longer approached people to ask if it was true that, as Caudic claimed, the Northern Border had become a hell on earth. Instead, she earnestly inquired about what they did each day, how much they earned, and their family situations.
Even the earlier urgency to prove her point had disappeared; Caroline became a bystander, listening carefully as the territory’s workers shared their stories.
Listening to one worker recount how Lind had led them from the territory occupied by the Demon Clan to here, even selling all their belongings along the way to provide food for the territory’s people, Caroline suddenly believed that this obscure viscount had indeed managed to develop the territory to such an extent in a short time.
Listening to one who had escaped here with Isha from the Cathedral of the Blessed Mother of Relief, Caroline gained a deeper understanding of the situation in the Northern Border, especially when hearing these people describe the Demon Clan. Caroline realized that the Demon Clan was not a benevolent race at all.
They waged wars, plundered human women and property, and trampled over fields. They not only ravaged and captured infants, allowing them to cry out loudly only to attack those drawn by the cries, but in war, would even use human captives as shields in front of them, slaughtering children in front of the defending troops to lure them out.
Many rumors said that the Demon Clan is conducting cruel human experiments.
This is completely different from what Caroline had been taught about nobility emphasizing dignity and courtesy from a young age. In noble wars, losing merely required paying a ransom.
These demons also claimed to be a superior race, just like elves, because they could inherently wield magic, and thus justified their killings of the lowly human race.
The prime minister, Caudic, had mentioned such a view before, but had never said anything about the demons committing massacres at the borders, only stating that they, like elves, could naturally use magic and, like elves, cherished and revered civilization and that it was the evil Northern Border that invaded the land of the demons, provoking them into retaliation.
After hearing everything, Caroline felt a wave of chill; what exactly had the Northern Border been fighting against all this time? How could these demons present themselves in the royal capital as victims while actually doing the most heinous things?
Once she stepped outside the perspective of the royal capital nobles, Caroline finally recognized how ludicrous her previous views had been. In the population of the Northern Border, these demons had originally lived in the permanent frostlands of the Far North, unable to survive, and had requested the Cape Kingdom to allocate a piece of land for them during the kingdom’s blood mist turmoil to stabilize the frontier; thus, the kingdom genuinely allocated a small piece of land for the demons to survive.
Yet now, these demons continuously encroach on the originally delineated borders, claiming the Northern Border always belonged to them, that their god had bestowed it upon them a thousand years ago, and they aimed to expel the lowly humans from their land.
However, in the royal capital, a completely different version circulated—that the demons began to retaliate only after the Northern Border invaded their land, stripping away any claims of divinity and the notion of their land being originally the Northern Border’s, instead emphasizing the Northern Border’s attacks as invasions, while they were merely defending.
After listening to the workers’ accounts, Caroline increasingly felt ridiculous for past overestimations of herself. Her imagination of the poorest people’s plight only included selling children to nobles or the wealthy, and she had even thought that the demons represented the righteous side, with some in the royal capital believing that the demons were there to save the Northern Border from the oppression of evil nobles.
But if, under noble rule, people in other territories lived lives akin to hell.
Then what about those who continuously fled to “hell,” merely to escape the Demon Clan’s rule?
After inquiring among the local inhabitants, Caroline finally arrived at the office to submit the application form. What struck people as strange was that the staff in the office were almost all maids and stewards, or people dressed in maid and steward outfits.
Yet those coming to register their jobs showed deep respect towards those serving, completely devoid of any contempt due to the outfits.
People not only referred to those in servant clothing as “comrades,” but many even brought eggs, bread, or wild fruits to these secretaries, to the extent that one maid had to put up a sign reading “Feeding Prohibited.”
Although it didn’t matter much, as most still could not read, they would still happily present various items to these secretaries.
Upon inquiry, Caroline learned that “comrade” means one who shares the same will or path, a term coined by Isha, not only applicable to peers but also between superiors and subordinates.
It was said that when the lord of the Graywhite Territory heard this term, his expression was quite complex, but in the end, he said nothing, even encouraging people to refer to each other this way; although no one referred to the lord as such, it was just some maids occasionally hearing the lord say, “I don’t deserve to be called a comrade,” suggesting that this term carried tremendous weight for that lord.
“Comrade, comrade…”
Caroline repeatedly savored the flavor of this term; what so-called shared will exists among the people of this territory? What path could they possibly share?
“Excuse me, comrade, are you here to submit an application form?”
The maid’s sweet yet somewhat fatigued voice pulled Caroline back to reality. Following the voice, she noticed the words carved onto the wall behind the maid, and suddenly, Caroline understood everything and found a goal to dedicate her life to.
On the wall behind the maid, bold words were engraved: Serve the People.
