Chapter 91: Chapter 90: Fodder Mixed with Goblins

Heating, forging, quenching, grinding, then wrapping the axe handle with leather to prevent slipping—the Feder Blacksmiths were experienced, working methodically to craft the weapons.

Hefting the handcrafted Double-Bladed War Axe, Levi felt that aside from being a bit less refined, its weight and feel were nearly identical to the system-generated ones.

Zat also gave a fair assessment: there wasn’t much difference between the two.

However, Zat was a Heroic Unit, and the system didn’t assign him standard template equipment, so his impression wasn’t enough to prove the theory.

Levi handed the War Axe to the Beastman Warriors of the Burning Corps, letting them take turns experiencing the difference between the system-issued standard template equipment and the handcrafted version.

The group of burly, rough-hewn men gave a surprisingly unanimous evaluation.

Every one of them adored the system-issued template equipment, finding its feel to be superb. It was as if the weapon became a part of them, an extension of their own arm. Of course, this wasn’t to say the handcrafted one was bad, but it always felt like something was missing, like it was just a foreign object.

To put it simply, with the largely identical Double-Bladed War Axes, the Beastmen could use the system-issued ones to strike a wooden post five times and leave five cuts of the exact same depth and size.

But once they switched to the one made by the Feder Blacksmiths, this terrifying level of control vanished without a trace. The marks left by their cuts were completely inconsistent.

This disparity couldn’t be explained by feel or condition; it was entirely due to the system’s influence.

Levi surmised that when his soldiers advanced in tier, the system didn’t just grant them boosts in Power and Martial Arts. Even their template weapons carried the system’s power, and when the two fused, it created an effect where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

This discovery left Levi both thrilled and frustrated. The overall power ceiling for his system soldiers was higher, but upgrading their equipment had now become a problem.

After all, every time a system soldier leveled up, their equipment had to be upgraded as well.

Even a mountain of gold and silver couldn’t withstand that kind of spending.

The system-issued template equipment was far more expensive than crafting it himself.

A Double-Bladed War Axe from the system cost around Eighteen Gold Coins, but crafting one himself, including the cost of labor, materials, and time, came to four or five Gold Coins at most. The markup was too high.

Ultimately, after comprehensive consideration, the Lord decided that Low Tier Soldier Types from Tiers One to Four would use weapons crafted by High Cliff Castle itself, based on the system’s template equipment.

As for the High Tier Soldier Types, Tier Five and above, he would purchase their template equipment from the system to arm them.

This would keep High Cliff Castle’s finances from becoming too strained while also increasing its military strength.

Of course, the top priority at the moment was to have the Feder Blacksmiths build the Bed Crossbows according to Mier’s blueprints. Those things were truly massive contraptions.

Having Bed Crossbows versus not having them were two completely different things. The gap between them was no less than that of nuclear weapons in his previous life.

If High Cliff Castle mounted a few dozen of them on its walls, it would be enough to scare off most people with ill intentions.

However, the Feder Blacksmiths, including their apprentices, only numbered around fifty or sixty. Faced with the endless stream of iron ore being dug up by slaves at the former Feder Tribe’s location, they were severely short-handed.

Levi began to form a Slave Capture Team, which he led personally, to capture as many Giant Demons and Giants alive as possible.

No one understood. The Giant Demons were somewhat intelligent but unruly, while the Giants were complete morons—a deformed child would be smarter. Why capture these two types of creatures alive? To waste High Cliff Castle’s food?

No one knew the reason, and in any case, the Lord had no intention of running things like a democracy.

In this technologically backward place, manpower was the primary productive force.

The incredibly strong Giant Demons and Giants were excellent sources of labor, whether for mining or smithing, and the Lord certainly wasn’t going to let them go to waste.

Besides, the Lord had yet to repay the grudge from when the Giant Demons gathered the Wilderness Alliance Army to attack High Cliff Castle, or when the Giants and Wilderness Bandits had tried to seize the iron mine.

This time, they would atone for their sins by laboring for High Cliff Castle for the rest of their lives.

The loss of a dozen or so Giant Demon Warriors last time hadn’t cost the Giant Tribe all of its able-bodied adults. And so, after spending some time in anxiety, fearing retaliation from High Cliff Castle that never came, the Giant Tribe had finally relaxed and resumed living on the fertile pastures.

After all, relocating a tribe was no simple matter. Not only could it easily lead to conflicts with other tribes, but with winter fast approaching, they couldn’t afford to waste time on migration. Instead, they had been spending this period doing everything they could to stockpile food.

The male Giant Demons went out to hunt, while the females herded cattle and sheep.

But when a squad from the Beastman Guard Team, all wearing identical Horned Helmets, appeared, the outcome was already decided.

After easily taking down the two or three male Giant Demons who resisted, this Giant Tribe of seventy or eighty members became one of High Cliff Castle’s Vassal tribes.

The Giants, on the other hand, were a comical sight. When the High Cliff Castle Warriors found them, the idiots were just lying around in the mountains, sunbathing.

After the Lord leaped down from above and sliced off half of one Giant’s body with a single sword strike, and a dense crowd of heads popped up behind him, all nineteen Giants immediately prostrated themselves in submission, perfectly demonstrating the Lord’s talent for ’persuading others with virtue.’

The Giant Tribe was arranged to settle in a leeward spot at the foot of a hill. Upon learning that High Cliff Castle had only brought them here to serve as Vassals, the Giant Demons felt much more at ease, though they were still a bit uncomfortable with the idea.

In the past, they had always been the ones to act as Sect Leader over other, weaker tribes. When had they ever become Vassals and hailed another as their Sect Leader?

As for the Giants, those guys were penned up like livestock downwind of the hill. They ate and drank to their hearts’ content as if they had arrived in paradise, which was enough to make the subjects responsible for feeding them worry their hair white.

The appetites of these big eaters were just too good. Even when fed mud mixed with hay, the territory’s hay supply was plummeting.

Finally, when that fellow Old Neil heard about it, he proposed a solution. Just as the Lord was expecting him to offer some brilliant stratagem worthy of Zhang Liang, the man suggested that since Goblins often died from exhaustion or didn’t survive castration, they could be used as food for the Giants.

His main point was all about recycling waste and not being wasteful, squeezing every last drop of value out of the Goblins.

’Damn,’ Levi thought. ’I thought you were a Zhang Liang, but it turns out you’re a goddamn Cheng Yu.’

Levi had considered himself part of the Radical Faction, but now he felt that Old Neil, a supposed member of the Conservative Faction, was a bit too radical.

Regarding this, Levi adopted a policy of neither approving nor rejecting it, leaving the decision entirely up to them.

After all, he was the goddamn boss now. He couldn’t be the one to take the blame for something so detrimental to unity.

From the bottom of his heart, however, Levi wasn’t particularly disgusted by the idea.

’After all, are Goblins even people?’

Besides, this was a common phenomenon in the Wilderness. Why did some powerful Sect Leader tribes bother bringing along cannon fodder like Goblins to war? It was precisely so they could serve as rations when food was scarce.

Although the creature’s meat was smelly and unappetizing, it was filling. At the very least, it kept people from starving. Most importantly, these creatures, with a tenacious Life Force like that of weeds, were everywhere.

With the food source issue resolved, the pressure of raising these big eaters was greatly reduced for High Cliff Castle.