The Runic Alchemist

Chapter 771: The Three Border Towns

At last the majority of the registration process was complete and the list of Sanctuary’s residents was made and stored digitally. Still, the small registration offices they had opened in each major city would continuously get new people who had missed out, so it would be a list that would never be complete. Damian had his assistants on the audio channel explaining to people why the registration for the Sanctum ID was so necessary from now on. Damian had given them talking points like the ID being a must for waygate travel, the ID being the proof that they belonged to Sanctuary. It would be used as legal proof of the name and everything.

The reason for doing this was the common people’s concern that had reached his ears through the newly selected House of Lords. People had no idea why the registration process was happening, so Damian had this arranged. Everything was ready. Today Damian just needed to check the border towns where the waygates from three countries would open and build some necessary places there. Controlling the flow of the public was a must. Then he could open his waygates for business.

The idea in his mind was: no foreigners would be allowed to leave the border towns. They could stay in the town as long as they wanted, they could buy and sell things to his Sanctum merchants, but they could not leave the town just yet. It was like a trial period. In time, Damian would allow people to enter the Sanctuary once he had unique IDs of the registered foreigners.

The multi-nation trade and cultural exchange was a long-time plan. Launched in stages, first Damian would just allow them to access his borders, subtly forcing the foreign merchants to sell their products only to them for a while and do trade in the Sanctuary through local traders and merchants. Then slowly he would allow the three countries’ people to gather on his special island where all parties—buyers and sellers—would give him tax, since everything would happen on Sanctuary land.

And the last stage, after he had built major infrastructure in his Sanctuary, was to allow others to enter the Sanctuary, travel through it very fast, safely, and have them invest large amounts in this up-and-coming nation that was a trading heaven with instant access to people from all around the mainland. Once the first stage of this waygate plan was complete, Damian had planned to launch his open dungeon plan. The waygates and easy travel and trade news needed time to reach all around the mainland. Till then Damian just needed to prepare for the wave of people that would come for the dungeon.

Giving everyone access to dungeons right at the border town, or maybe building a special place where he could place all hundreds of dungeon waygates and send people there with a waygate, would be better. There should be many uninhabited big islands in the vast ocean—no one would even know where they were, making it a secure, unreachable place. There was a potential of making it a popular big island city kind of place. Guess he could reuse one of those island dungeon places.

Damian stepped into the waygate to the southern border where he had made the statue after winning the war against the Faerunians. Einar and Souldealer were with him too. For the first couple of weeks the three of them had decided to stay in these three border towns where the foreigners would come, just to see everything working as they had planned in real time. They didn’t need to stay all day here, just the majority of the hours in the day.

The town at Sanctuary’s south border Damian had chosen was called Highland Reach. It was used by the army when the Faerunians attacked and they had even lost the land for a while. The population of the small town had exploded recently, people from the inner land coming here through waygates or traveling on their own.

The reason was Damian’s receivers. He had spread information about the foreign trade opening in two days at all three major border towns. The merchants and opportunists had long since figured out what Damian’s intentions were and had been fully prepared. Finally having a confirmation that foreigners wouldn’t enter the inner Sanctuary had made their mouths water.

Cheap things from the Empire, Faerunia, and Eldoris could be bought in these towns or by going through the waygate, but that would have complications, so people preferred if foreigners came to them instead of them going. They could buy Sanctuary items cheap from all over the Sanctuary land, made even easier with the waygates—and sell them at profit to these foreigners coming to their land.

It was a pretty sweet opportunity—Damian’s information spreading had even hyped the thing a bit too much for the common people, and everyone was waiting for it with bated breath.

The town of Highland Reach was a simple and small thing. The first thing Damian did here was build a protective wall all around it. Creating a wooden wall and coating it with a thick layer of Blazur alloy was easy enough for him after all the construction work he had done in recent days. Highland Reach would have people from the Empire. Souldealer was going to manage this town for the opening weeks.

With her advice, Damian kept the area where the dungeon opened separated from the main market. The town had two large gates, both had second-ranker knights guarding them—no one without a Sanctuary ID was allowed to leave. The waygate opening zone was turned into a small closed camp that stopped people coming through the waygate from wandering off.

They had to first go through a large immigration building Damian had built, where the foreigners would be registered with a unique Sanctuary ID, and then they could enter the town and do whatever they wanted to do. The list of rules was etched in the immigration hall; whoever broke them would be thrown back in the waygate, going straight back to their country.

For this immigration job Evrin, Souldealer, and Damian had chosen many people who had taken part in the House of Lords exam and put them to work. They had been trained to use the Sanctuary ID list, and a few experienced people who had done the registration were also among them guiding the whole process.

The second town at the eastern border where people from Eldoris would come was not a town at all—it was called Layinie City, the border city ruled by the pugilist transcendent duke. At first Damian had chosen his own small town on the eastern border, but the pugilist duke insisted that he give his city this honor. The guy was smart enough to realize what the amazing opportunity’s true worth was.

The Layinie City was actually Eldoris territory, so the queen didn’t have any issues either with making that a trading city for their two countries. The pugilist duke would rake in a lot of money from just tax and hundreds of people visiting the city, both from inland Eldoris and Sanctuary, but the guy had done a lot for Einar and Sanctuary in their hard times, so Damian let him have this opportunity.

Here too Damian reinforced the walls of the city. The duke already knew about the plan, still Souldealer would be there to manage it all. Eldoris had not put the restriction of entering their country, but unlike Sanctuary the waygate only connected to Eldoris’ capital and from there to the border regions. No convenient major towns and city waygate travel was available like Sanctuary, so it might be hard to travel the forest and large empty land filled with monsters and bandits for the wagons and horse riders.

Damian had still put a restriction on Eldoris people entering the Sanctuary. The town near the Layinie City that was the start of Sanctuary’s border—Damian had built walls around it too and placed his second-ranker knights there to protect the waygate entry. No foreigner was allowed in yet. He could sense the Eldoris people not liking that much, but it was a necessary thing to do.

Without an enormous wall protecting the Sanctuary border he could not stop the foreigners from entering Sanctuary land, but he could stop them from accessing his waygate network without the Sanctum ID. They would have to travel on foot to come to the inland Sanctuary. Not very convenient; selling to Sanctuary merchants in the Layinie City would be a better option. If they hired people from Sanctuary to do their business, Damian would also count that as a good enough employment opportunity for his people.

The third border town where Faerunians would come was called Kovalrine. Damian built a wall around that too and built all the facilities same as Highland Reach. He was going to oversee this one himself. There was another reason for him choosing this place—the second biggest island of theirs was right ahead of the town, some 50–60 kilometers from the shoreline. While watching over the initial trading system Damian could work on that island and make it an international trading zone.

The island was 60 kilometers long and around equal in width. Only 10% of it was inhabited. The rest Damian could use to build an enormous closed city that would be a trading heaven.