Rise of the Legendary Emperor

A few days after the coronation celebration, Don continued to devote his energy to the economical and military prospects of the Kingdom.

Sitting in his room, there was a non-stop ticking sound outside the window as if it were raining. It was the sound of melting snow. When he was little, he loved crouching on the window and looking at the long ice icicles melting into transparent water droplets and slowly dripping down with Elena, his mentor, and his sister. At the moment, he neither had time nor Elena beside him to enjoy the weather. But it was still enjoyable to listen to the voice of the earth recovering while writing a plan.

He knew that soon the melted snow would be replaced with more snow. The roads connecting Emir, Agoria, and Ishikara were filled with snow makes traveling to either of those kingdoms extremely hard. Therefore, he decided to stay in Agoria waiting for Knight to return from dealing with the Lucroy family.

When he finished the construction projects in Emir and Agoria, he decided to build a hardened road suitable for carriages to pass through in the outskirts of Ishikara.

But now the priority was to slightly restructure the army. Without a reliable and more powerful army, it would not be possible to defend the kingdom in case someone tried to do something rash after his announcement to open the borders to Astrels as well as protect the Astrels already in his kingdom.

After the initial setup of the black-armored men, there were quite a number of militia who were basically citizens with no training joined in the army to become black-armored soldiers. Training the Militia was only the first step.

The specific preparation, discipline, punishment, and providing armors were the real headache.

Although he and Knight had seen many militaries in the divine continent, they were still not a trained Generals or Commanders. The Black-armored men might seem powerful compared to the armies of rank 4 kingdoms but the higher they climbed the ranking, there would meet terrifying armies and at that point, his army would struggle if he didn't choose to improve them.

After some deliberation on his part, he simply decided to keep the units as Knight created but slightly change the structure.

So the current Black Army of Everlight had the following units: Infantry, Archers, Dark Angels, Reapers, and Vivian's unit, the police force; 

The units had 800, 600,100,100, 400 people respectively and all of them were fully trained to earn themselves the dwarven forged armors and weapons. As for the Militia, Nanbu submitted the number of people who want to join the army. Among the 600 Militia, Knight gave the unit leaders to pick whoever they see fit to their units as Stodemar picked 200, Arwen picked 100, 50 were picked by Arrora and Vivian picked 200 new bloods for her unit and the rest were picked by Rio, who was the leader of the Reapers.

Aside from these units, Knight was planning to create another unit which would be led by Grey. After seeing the current framework of the army, Don let out a long breath and started to write the adjustments need to be made on a piece of paper.

"First, the Infantry should be renamed and split into two. One unit remains unchanged while the other should be trained as Cavalry, I'd recommend Hagu to lead this unit" Knight treated the army like his baby, so Don didn't go and order Knight but recommended the change to Knight and let the final decision to the Commander.

"Archers also need to be renamed and trained with several types of bows and other long-ranged weapons" he then noted the changes to the Archer unit and moved to the Dark Angels which was led by his sweetheart, Arrora.

"Need to be trained with wide arrays of weapons and coordinate with Joel's team of spies for additional training" He wanted Arrora's unit to be a highly trained group of spies who could not only assassinate his enemies but also mingle with the outsiders and gather information as spies.

"Reapers have to be trained with basic combat and spells that would help them to conduct their duties more efficiently and quickly" There were many spells that could be used to steal the loot from the battlefield.

"Plus, they have to train under Arrora and Joel and hone their ability to steal anything from anywhere. The Reapers should be highly trained thieves" It was a long shot to turn the demihumans and goblins into highly trained thieves but Don wanted to use them to steal his enemies' possessions, wealth, and their tangible secrets.

"Vivian is doing a good job" that was his final note on Vivian's unit as he didn't have any recommendations to make. Vivian was extremely good at her job despite being this was her first job.

After this, he moved the rules and regulations. These included obeying the military order, obeying the superior, no escaping, betrayal, and other similar cliches. But Don's first set of discipline was the prohibition of abusing their power and disturbing the peace. Plus, he made a special mention about the Reapers because allowing a unit to loot the battlefield as they wished had too many cons, and it would take several years to reverse the damage if they chose to loot the kingdom. The Reapers were only allowed to loot the battlefield and with the new training, Don strictly mentioned that they are only allowed to use their skills only in the missions approved by either Knight or him. What would happen if a bunch of highly trained thieves decided to use their skills in his kingdom?

Of course, just depending on discipline and punishment was not enough. As time went by, greed would increase with every winning victory. So the reward system had to keep up with the pace, in order to fundamentally eliminate greed and other disciplinary behavior.

In order to make the reward tempting enough for the people, Don decided to use another ultimate weapon which was land as a reward. Whoever made great achievements during a battle, could be granted a piece of land. 

There were still many uninhibited and unclaimed lands in Agoria and Emir, so this was not a hard thing to achieve. Plus, once they had titled land, these people would be closely attached to his side and became very loyal to him. 

At the moment, 80% of the land inside the Capital and small towns belonged to the noble, and only the rest belonged to the commoners.

But soon, he wanted to use every piece of the land and take his kingdom to the next level. 

Motivating the people did not rely on words or whips, but real measurable interests. In other words, as long as he could always represent the fundamental interests of the people, his rule would be stable. When his kingdom grew in size and population, he knew that he would face more and more internal struggles and couldn't do everything with violence but use democratic means to solve problems.

Also, he planned to give a retirement pension to the soldiers, so they would have a stable income after retiring from the army.

At the same time, in order to strengthen the centralization of authority, and to avoid the situation that "the servant's servant was not my servant", he drew a power hierarchy. Of course, he and Knight had the same authority and stood at the top of the power hierarchy. Following them, he decided to split the power hierarchy into two, military personals and non-military personals which he noted to change the name in the future. (Readers choice)

Knight was the highest rank member in the Military personals and chose Amaryll to be the head of the non-military personals since she was the one managing everything other than the military. As for the framework of the non-military personals, he decided to let Amaryll handle it as it was best if she designed the framework than him. Other than Military and Non-Military personals, he chose to form a separate unit for researching and developing under the leadership of Reghys, Ken, and Benedict. They would directly report to him and decide among themselves the framework of their departments.

After transcribing these preliminary ideas, Don stretched his hand and legs out. Next, he could devote himself to check out the industries and the productions. Currently, he gave the highest priority to the shipbuilding industry which included building a new harbor, shipyard, and port.

Then the second priority was given to the Wine Industry that Amaryll is spending too much time planning. Considering in two days, he would finally open the Hotels and Tea houses after a couple of delays, they could finally earn some money.

Then finally, he checked out the file from Ken which had all the details about their secret project, the cannon production, and Light bulb production. Since the speed of cannon manufacturing was increasing, soon, they would have to form a new unit that could use the cannons on land and on the ships.

Although the solution sounded simple, forming another unit was not as easy as it's on the paper. Fortunately, the army of Ishikara was there idling and it was up to Knight and Ken to choose and train people to use the cannons.

The light bulbs were not difficult to manufacture once the factory was built.

According to Ken, they would be able to create many new types of weapons and devices after he starts manufacturing generators that could turn the water flow into Life Energy. Don wanted all the weapons and devices he could get before going to war with other kings of the higher rank kingdoms.

He was also planning to beautify the kingdom to attract more nobles and tourists from the other kingdoms. And as the first thing to this initiative, he decided to make the dam a tourist place and ordered Uncle Dior to adorn the dam as well as the kingdom.

Finally, his eyes landed on the education file, he had no deep knowledge of starting a sect or academy from the scratch. Fortunately, Ukita and Kayako had experience in this and decided to let them handle it because his utmost attention needed somewhere else, Slavery.