It took a full month to sell the rest in between royal audiences, interrogations masked as invitations, dinners, outings, balls, soirées and even a sword tournament in which Ioha lost in the third round. He had his own small town-house paid by the crown with an equally small staff, also paid for by the crown. Small in this case still meant a dozen rooms, and Ioha made a mental note to rent it out to whomever Isjase decided to send here as head of their future branch office. In another life, he would have jumped at the opportunity to take on that role himself.

  He received three marriage proposals, which he had Meneki turn down. Of more interest were seven business partners he could hand over to his business associates, and an equal number of acquaintances he’d keep for himself. Harvali helped him set up contracts to split out revenues that were to be sent to the southern fort, revenues with Meneki’s unit as benefactor, royal spoils which was the same as the crown’s monopoly on legal theft, or in other words tax. Ioha always felt like a good Swedish citizen and paid the taxes without grumbling before he even noticed that not everyone was happy about it. At the other hand, he personally expected to get something back for paying taxes, but both here and in Wergaist they were more likely to end up as finery shown in a ballroom or a noble’s courtyard.

  The royal church, or that was at least how Ioha translated the concept, kept making problems but, well, Heimdall’s vulgar show of force had already been blown out of proportion. Not that it needed. Out of proportion was, if Ioha was honest, where it started, and he owned a large part of the guilt himself. Some of the rumours were easy to debunk. The grand temple still stood in its place, and there was no huge crater glowing in the dark. Still, the clergy demanded he be brought in line, but when Ioha suggested they take that discussion with Heimdall in person, they quickly decided he wasn’t part of the Remerrin pantheon after all.

  After that, they sent an assassin his way, who didn’t survive activating one of his traps outside his bedroom two stories above stone paving where Meneki’s men patrolled. This was not Earth, and the Remerrin justice system didn’t extend to fair trials for someone caught red-handed with weapons and poison outside a home. Meneki’s men pinned him to the ground with his own weapons and forced the poison down his throat. Harvali in turn taught the clergy how a successful assassination was supposed to be carried out, and when the church complained, Meneki told them they had to handle the diplomatic fallout with the federation themselves. There were two more attempts, this time on Harvali, and a dozen more clerics turned into corpses. The crown eventually intervened, Harvali apologised, and another two clerics were publicly beheaded.

  During all of this, Ioha had entirely different problems. What he disliked the most was the unsurprisingly erratic behaviour of his status display. Nothing wrong with it per se, but spending over a month behaving like a civilised person doing business didn’t yield any increased numbers in abilities he wanted to improve. Instead, he received a smattering of new abilities or rather higher numbers in abilities he never bothered to check before. They reflected the kind of competences you’d normally prefer a person to have before sending them an invitation to your home. He did gain one new ability of his own choosing, though, and now Ioha sported a laughable capacity to miss his target with a bow without hurting himself and people standing behind him. Archery turned out to be far more difficult than he believed, and for a short moment Ioha even considered one of the insanely expensive magic guns that at least delivered ammunition in the general direction of what he tried to hit. In the end, he decided that general direction wasn’t good enough to spend a day's salary on for every shot and stuck to training with bow and arrow and improving at a snails pace. Who knew, in a decade or two he might even be able to hit the walls of a house -- if he stood inside it.

  Today, worth a general celebration, was the day when he left the capital. He’d be accompanied by closer to thirty men and women in a wagon train, half of which were two parties led by Meneki and Harvali each. It looked like an armed escort, but Remerrin was just as safe as Wergaist or Isekai and one E-rank party would have been more than enough for the journey to Isekai. Why an armed escort at all? Because the wagons carried goods valuable enough to keep an average noble house afloat for a full year.

  Ioha sat upon his latest acquisition. A riding horse to replace the one he left with Nanami. His new packhorse he left latched to one of the wagons, just like everyone else did. He didn’t need it for this trip, but horses were cheaper in Remerrin than in Isekai, and that held true for any items associated with them as well. There was a future business here.

  “Harvali, ready?”

  “We’re waiting for your command, o exalted Sir Ioha Questingtank, Protector Saint of Heimdall.”

  A sneer was the proper reaction. “I love the sound of that, Sir Harvali Terendala.”

  “You two, stop that idiocy now, or I’ll slug you both before we leave through the gates,” Meneki offered as advice. Good advice.

  “What the hell are you going on about?” a plump middle-aged woman with greying hair said.

  Ioha bowed from his saddle and grinned. “Your keys,” he said, and dropped them into her outstretched hands.

  They were at the gates to what served as a caravanserai here, and until the new buildings outside the city walls were finished, this was Isjase’s temporary branch office, with Ioha’s town house doubling as suites for business guests staying overnight. Hence, the keys. He added a list of contacts and his notes on promising business opportunities in the coming months. If she were any competent, she’d expand those notes in ways he didn’t even know were possible.

  “This is a nice place. I have a friend from here, and I’d prefer win-win solutions,” Ioha added. It had been. The capital felt lived in without any of the absurdities that sprung up in Isekai every month. “If possible, do get involved with the two trading posts on both sides of the eastern pass. You should be able to make an earning out of shorter supply lines to the border zone camps. Halfpoint is simply too far away.”

  “Good business?”

  He shrugged. “Not very, but not a loss, and it should keep your staff from dying of boredom at the southern trading post.” He scratched his cheek. “You could make a decent profit from trading monster materials, I guess. Just check how much you piss off the people in Halfpoint first.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  She gave him a very evil grin. “They’ll be pissed off, don’t worry.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ll notice.”

  Ioha sent her a querying look, but it was clear she wouldn’t offer him anything more. He straightened in his saddle and led the train out of the enclosure, along a short street and into the plaza just inside the city-gates. There were people there waiting for their departure, and Ioha heard a few cheers. He waved back before they left through the gates. They turned south at the crossroads, a few hundred metres into the surrounding farmlands. Wheels creaked, horses snorted, and the men and women around him chatted about everything and nothing in the cool winter sun. There was barely a breeze.

  The journey south quickly settled into boring routine. Just as in Wergaist this was farmland with forests creating borders between noble domains. Here they were proper fiefs in an early modern setting, rather than the patchwork of independent states that pretended to obey a central federation government. The days ended in barns, which were a thing in Remerrin, just like south of the mountains, but since they had yet to reach the borderlands, they had to pay a small fee for each night. In return, the barns were clean and usually in good condition. Whenever they passed through a small town or a village, part of the population came out on the main street to watch the spectacle and made some money from selling food, drinks and replacements for small things that inevitably broke during a journey like this.

  This was, Ioha mused one day, exactly the kind of adventure you could sell to tourists for a day or maybe two. Now when he itched with boredom, the mountain-range to the south was a welcome sight. It marked the end of Remerrin, but more importantly it marked a change.

  They spent the night in a barn, and after breakfast, half of Meneki’s men left to oversee the construction of a trading post this side of the mountains. Lunch saw them climbing the foothills, and late afternoon they made camp where the real mountain-pass began.

  It took the better part of three days to pass the mountains, despite decent winter weather. Permanent shelters, if not barns, would have to be built along the pass to allow for any decent volume of trade. As a route, it was dismal compared to the western route, but there were no monsters to worry about here.

  When they were about to exit the pass on the southern side, Ioha was surprised by the presence of half a dozen men building a barn where they had felled a swath of trees. Half a day later they reached the finished trading post controlling the crossroads. Meneki and his remaining men left on the road to Nanami’s camp, with promises to tell her and everyone else that Ioha was fine. If possible, he would have preferred to make them company. Instead, they followed the road east until it turned south again. Another half a day later, they reached a crossroad that hadn’t been there before.

  “What’s this?” Ioha asked an old man running the equally new roadhouse.

  “Roadhouse,” he answered unhelpfully.

  “I can see that, but why?”

  “Because of the crossroads. Best place to sell meals and drinks.”

  Ioha shook his head. Wrong questions. “If we take the road directly south,” he said and pointed at the road that shouldn’t be there, “where does it lead?”

  “She goes all the way down to Isekai.”

  Ioha made some mental calculations. Five days then. If the road was properly constructed, it shaved over a day. “Barns along the road?”

  “Oh yes! Roadhouses as well.”

  Yeah, I can see why they’ll get pissed off in Halfpoint. “Lemme guess, a few new villages as well?”

  “Yes! How did you know?”

  Yep. Sounded exactly like something Isjase would come up with. In their own way, they were absolutely ruthless. Ioha had helped them with the plan to sell farming-in-a-new-world dreams. There wouldn’t be a lot of takers, but even a few hundred made a huge difference. I thought they’d expand south first, though. Maybe not. That meant a direct conflict with Wergaist. Instead, they solidified Isekai’s hold all the way to the border zone. Invasion by migration. That had always been the Isekai way.

  They watered horses, a few of them had an unexpected meal, and then they were on their way down south. The road was good enough. Still a dirt road, but Ioha could see it getting properly paved piecewise to make life easier for the local communities that were bound to grow up here. A day or two southwards, the mountains separating inland from sea offered a gentle pass. Give it a year, maybe less, and a fishing village would grow up on the eastern side. There were always more mouths to feed in Isekai.

  For the next five days, Ioha was constantly and rudely reminded of what it meant when a modern power got serious about building a new land. He always expected Sweden or Japan to one day ham-handedly build a better fantasy, but in the end, Isjase showed up pretty much from nowhere. Their plans hadn’t, though. He knew that. He heard one of his parents’ acquaintances talk about Isekai during a dinner before the Swedish gate even opened. He’d just met a cute girl from Japan by then and fallen helplessly in love. Shortly after, the Gothenburg gate opened and everything changed.

  The midday sun tried but failed to offer any warmth to the wagon train when Ioha finally saw signs they were nearing Isekai proper. Or rather he had seen them since the day before with new farms waiting to have their equally new fields ploughed during the coming spring, but now there were more of them, and he saw signs of infrastructure coming into place in a way Isekai had never bothered with before. As the sun sank lower on its path to night, brand-new villages straddled the road, and soon thereafter they reached outskirts that hadn’t been there late summer. By now the road had once again merged with the old one, and Ioha noted how his ryokan an hour outside the town was now his ryokan half an hour outside the town.

  “Harvali, could you book hotel rooms near the caravanserai?”

  “Caravanserai?”

  “Eh, the marketplace for long-distance merchants.” It wasn’t entirely correct, but it had to do.

  Harvali nodded and sent two of his men ahead. They were men. Women were uncommon, even if in no way unheard of among the knights. “And after this?” he asked when the riders vanished between buildings ahead of them.

  “I don’t know,” Ioha said. Harvali’s simple question grew in his mind. After what, exactly? After an end meant some kind of future. What kind of future? Ioha couldn’t answer any of the questions simmering in his head. “Let’s get the caravan home first.”

  “Caravan?”

  Ioha looked at the wagon train behind them. “Yeah, it’s a caravan. No camels though.”

  “Camels?”

  “I’ll pay for dinner,” Ioha said, “I’ll explain then.”