Merchant From Earth in the Magical World-Chapter 530 - 375: Each Makes Preparations_1

Yesterday, Dawnspirit City, still steeped in a festive atmosphere, was shrouded in a grim air after a single night.

The army that had once been inspected by the citizens now controlled the entire city. Streets were blocked, and warplanes circled overhead.

The occasional sounds of explosions and gunfire filled all the citizens hiding in their homes with terror.

They didn’t know what had happened.

Was it a coup? Or had the enemy breached the city?

The city trembled in an atmosphere of terror as vehicles loaded with soldiers continuously whizzed down the roads.

People were forcibly dragged from their homes.

If they dared to resist, they were shot on the spot.

It wasn’t until nearly dusk that the soldiers controlling the districts gradually began to withdraw.

The bolder citizens ventured out of their homes, staring blankly at the deserted streets and the festive banners still hanging high above the city.

Another day passed before the Royal Palace finally announced to all citizens the cause of the celebration incident.

A personal letter from Queen Karol was printed on flyers and distributed to everyone.

In the letter, Queen Karol bitterly denounced the corruption of the kingdom’s nobles and officials. They were greedy, wicked, corrupt, depraved—stopping at nothing to amass wealth and vie for power.

Even during wartime, they brazenly embezzled supplies desperately needed by soldiers at the front and dared to withhold the pensions of fallen soldiers.

They toyed with power, treating the kingdom’s interests as their personal property.

Nobles are not born great.

The truly great are the tax-paying merchants, the laboring workers, the food-producing farmers, and the soldiers who guard the kingdom.

You are the cornerstone of this country, yet you have long suffered unfair treatment.

But, from this day forward, this injustice will cease to exist.

Nobles will no longer be above the law!

People were puzzled upon reading this personal letter.

What did Queen Karol intend to do? Was she positioning herself against all the nobility? Had she gone mad?

Whether Queen Karol had gone mad was unknown, but she indeed showed her people her actions.

Under Queen Karol’s direction, the Royal Court of the Kingdom of Silvermane established a Special High Court.

It held public trials for all captured nobles and officials, inviting citizen representatives to observe.

During the trials, a vast amount of evidence was presented.

Only then did the citizens realize that the worst ’evil’ they could conceive paled in comparison to the actual wickedness committed by these nobles.

As the public trials unfolded, the image of the nobility completely collapsed in the eyes of the citizens of the Kingdom of Silvermane. Those who had previously sympathized with the nobles now hurled the most venomous words at these parasites who fed on the populace.

The reforms orchestrated by Yan Xing and Karol proceeded smoothly.

They aimed not only to physically destroy the noble class of the Kingdom of Silvermane but also to spiritually erase them from this emerging nation.

Noble feudal rule had once been advanced, but for the world of the future, their practice of binding peasants to the land hindered the development of labor-intensive industries.

National development required the ability to directly mobilize a large labor force, without an intermediary class that could profit from both sides.

The trials continued. All death sentences were carried out immediately. To expedite the executions, hangings were replaced by beheadings.

The guillotine fell like a cleaver chopping vegetables, head after head, until the execution grounds flowed with rivers of blood.

Initially, some who considered themselves bold watched how the high-and-mighty nobles died, but soon, not a single spectator could be seen at the execution grounds.

Many executioners suffered mental breakdowns while carrying out their duties.

So many! So many people killed! But this was the price.

If the Kingdom of Silvermane wished to continue on its path to strength and prosperity, it had to make a complete break with the old era. Any mercy shown now would mean reaping bitter fruits in the future.

During the Dawnspirit City celebration incident, Queen Karol and her loyal army rounded up all the nobles and officials who had come to the city.

Those marked for death were killed; those marked for imprisonment were jailed.

The kingdom’s entire noble class was virtually wiped out, their fiefdoms left without masters.

The clever ones immediately fled with their assets. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

But there were foolish ones vying for inheritance rights.

By Queen Karol’s command, the Royal Army marched into all noble territories. They seized the nobles’ private armies, confiscated their assets, and pacified their subjects.

Fighting occurred, but the resistance from the already doomed nobles was merely their death throes, giving the kingdom more justification to strip them of their land ownership.

Throughout this process, the peasants in the noble fiefdoms reacted with marked indifference, even cooperating with the kingdom’s inventory of noble assets.

The storm came fiercely and departed quickly.

The Kingdom of Silvermane’s vitality was greatly damaged by this incident. It faced a massive shortage of public officials, and its administrative capacity plummeted to an all-time low.

With the Royal Army dispersed into noble territories to secure the Queen’s control over the internal situation, border defense forces were reduced to less than one-third of their former strength.

Large swaths of territory were left undefended.

However, the Gryphon Heart Empire was powerless to attack the Kingdom of Silvermane. The Imperial Army was busy quelling domestic rebellions; indeed, the more they tried to suppress the rebel forces, the larger the insurgencies grew as imperial troops continued to defect.

The once-mighty empire teetered on the brink of collapse amid civil strife.

Yet, amid its own internal turmoil, the Kingdom of Silvermane was undergoing a rebirth.

The global situation was becoming increasingly clear.

The Cloud Alliance was rapidly heading towards complete failure in conventional warfare. To salvage the situation, their only recourse was for the Cloud Tower to officially and fully intervene.

This meant engaging Thunderous Swamp in a high-level, decisive battle that would determine the future.

「At Highland City in Wildwind Highlands, a secret summit of the Cloud Alliance was underway.」

The 150,000 troops assembled here were arguably the last elite forces the Cloud Alliance possessed capable of waging war.