Chapter 5: Springs and Lord Wink
Both Itet and Poole are from the town of Clear Springs, about 800 kilometres east of the megalithic fortress, an ordinary town on the edge of the Lazer plateau, near the Itassos Mountains, named for the sweet and delicious spring in the center of the town.
The town of Qingquan has more than 1,000 residents, most of whom are natives of Lazel, but a small number of refugees who fled the war during the fall of the town and did not return to their homeland after the war. Due to its remote location against the backdrop of rolling mountains, even when the orcs invaded, the werewolf knight's footsteps did not set foot here.
The kingdom of Lazer was founded in successive years of brutal conquests and endless crusades and gradually became stronger and stable, so the rule of the kingdom has always followed the system of the founding period, that is, most of the territory of the kingdom was divided into meritorious nobles and knights, and they helped the king manage the vast territory, managing and supervising the farmers in the territory to cultivate and collect taxes on weekdays, and quickly gathered the young and strong people in the territory to form a reserve army in wartime, and accepted the king's call at any time. As a result, most of the administration of the kingdom at all levels was in the hands of nobles and knights of all ranks, and the king only symbolically sent officials to serve as inspectors in various regions.
The town of Clear Springs and the area within a radius of nearly 100 kilometers are the domain of Lord Wink-Kailar, so most of the big and small things in the town fall under his jurisdiction. Of course, the Kingdom also appointed an Ombudsman here, and that was the Honorary Knight of the Kingdom, York Weinstein, but it is known that the Ombudsman was once a knight of the Lord's squire in the army.
Born in the foothills of the mountains near the town of Clear Springs, the son of a hunter, Wink Kiral grew up hunting with his father in the mountains of the Itassus Mountains. At the age of fourteen, he enlisted in the kingdom's army, and with his strong physique and keen awareness honed by years of hunting, he stood out among his peers, and five years later he passed the examination of the military department and became a professional soldier and was accepted by the main cavalry regiment of the Silver Fir Legion, becoming a glorious one-horned snow deer knight.
The one-horned snow deer is a mount unique to the kingdom of Lazer, and is also the standard mount of the Silver Fir Knights, the main combat force of the Silver Fir Legion, and they are the main force against the Orc Knights.
The Silver Fir Legion's main duty is to defend against orc attacks, especially the swift orc knights. The mounts of the orc clan are mainly werewolf knights' wolves and war lizards' sand lizards, which are both ferocious beasts, and the most popular mounts of human beings, war horses, tend to retreat out of fear in the face of such beasts, which puts human knights at an absolute disadvantage in the face of orc knights. In order to cope with and reverse this passive situation, humans spent a lot of energy and time to find and breed mounts that could compete with them, and finally found several corresponding animals to be tamed as mounts, and the one-horned snow deer was Chu Qiao among them.
Living in the alpine snowfields all year round, this snow deer is tall and strong, with a violent personality, only a curved and sharp horn on the top of its head, and an adult male snow deer can single-handedly take on a group of highland gray wolves without falling into the wind, even in the face of fierce wolves and sand lizards.
After becoming a knight of the one-horned snow deer, with his outstanding strength, Wink only took three years to become a squadron leader of the Knights and win the approval of the upper echelons of the legion, which is extremely difficult for a commoner child who is not from a noble background. Shortly after Wink became the squadron leader, he was cut off a lower leg in an encounter with an orc while he was ordered to carry out a special mission, and his squire Knight York lost an arm to protect him, although he was desperately saved by his companions, but Wink, who lost a leg, could no longer continue to fight on the snow deer, according to the rules of the kingdom, Wink received the title of Lord and returned to his hometown, in recognition of his contribution to the kingdom, His Majesty gave him his hometown of Qingquan Town as a territorial sub-entitlement, and awarded the title of Honorary Knight of the Kingdom of York to the squire knight who was disabled in the same battle, and appointed him as the Inspector of Qingquan Town。
In the non-war years, it was not easy for commoners to be able to obtain a title of nobility through their exploits, even the lowest honorary knighthood that could not be hereditary. Because in this society, there is a strict hierarchy, and there is a world of difference between commoners and nobles. In the kingdom of Lazer, there are five titles of nobles, namely duke, earl, viscount, lord, and honorary knight. Of course, above the duke there is the Prince, which is a title exclusive to the royal family and cannot be granted by non-descendants of the House of Harriet. Each rank of nobility is divided into three ranks, and the viscount and below are generally not hereditary, unless they are specially granted by the King and the Kingdom Council of Elders. Even if it is a hereditary noble, only one of the direct descendants can inherit, and the title inherited is to be inherited by a reduced rank, just like after the death of a first-order earl, he can only designate one heir, and the inheritance title is a second-order earl. Such a title inheritance method is also a last resort, because except for the honorary knights who only have salaries and no territories, other nobles must have corresponding fiefs and salaries, which are issued by the king, and in order to motivate people to serve the country, it is also to continue the tradition of the kingdom, every year there are new citizens who have made certain contributions to the kingdom and are knighted or promoted as rewards, in order to avoid the situation that the kingdom is unable to make ends meet due to too many nobles, so such rules are formulated.
Lord Wink is a third-order lord who owns a small town of Qingquan Town and the surrounding land of nearly 100 kilometers as a fief, which means that the arable land, woodland, and mines around Qingquan Town are under his jurisdiction, but because he is not a hereditary nobleman, his descendants cannot inherit his title and territory, and after his death, only the three-story hard-bluestone Wink Castle built by the kingdom for him and the dozens of acres of private fields and forest farms near the castle are the family property that the Wink family can continue to inherit.
Most of the inhabitants of Clear Springs were hired by Lord Wink's domain, as the land they cultivated and worked on was nominally owned by the Lord. And just like Eater and Poole's parents, Poole's father is Lord Wink's gardener, Eat's father is a blacksmith at Wink Castle, and their mothers are both cooks in Wink Castle, all of whom are hired servants by Lord Wink.
Lord and Mrs. Wink had two sons and three daughters, but the younger son and the second daughter died at a young age. The Lady was born into a family of viscounts in the Boulder Fortress, and in the minds of Eater and Poole, she was a beautiful lady of dignified elegance. Their eldest son, Kailar Jr., is much older than Itet and Poole, and was drafted to serve in the Silver Fir Legion when they were only six or seven years old, and it is said that he inherited the Lord's bravery and the Lordess's intelligence, and he is now an official Snow Deer Knight Captain in the Silver Fir Knights, and when he accumulates a certain amount of merit, he will be rewarded with a knighthood. Their eldest daughter married early to Falling Snow City, hundreds of miles away from Qingquan Town, and is said to be married to a descendant of the Ethanhart family in Falling Snow City with the title of Honorary Knight, and leads the child back to Qingquan Town every summer to spend the summer. And their youngest daughter, Wink Moer, who is two years younger than Eater and Poole, has inherited her mother's beauty and grace, and is only eleven or twelve years old, and is also the object of secret admiration for boys in small towns like Eater and Poole.
Born as a commoner, Lord Wink is a man of tradition, but in the eyes of former troublemakers like Ite and Poole, a serious and old-fashioned lame old man. The barren land around Qingquan has limited crop production in the harsh highland environment, and the production is barely enough to meet the daily needs of the town's residents, so the town's main sources of tax revenue come from the lumberyards in the north of the town and the green phosphorite mines at the foot of the mountains.
As fiefdom lords, their main income came from the taxes paid by the inhabitants of the territory, including the rent of farmland paid by the farmers in the territory, the output of various mining workshops, and the transaction tax payable for the purchase and sale of goods in the town. But for Lord Wink, who was born into a commoner and had a barren fief, the harvest left by the fiefdom farmers after paying the land tax due to the king was barely enough to survive, after all, the annual output of the barren land here was not even half of the output of the fertile farmland in the southern Emerald Basin. Therefore, Lord Wink exempted his own share of the lord's tax that should be levied on his own land, and there was no decent trade in goods in a remote town like Qingquan Town, and the trade tax collected every year was even few, and even fewer could end up in the lord's pocket. Therefore, the aristocratic salary of one hundred and thirty silver coins per year was the main income of Lord Wink. But these salaries were still a little less than enough to cover the living expenses of a lord who maintained a minimum of decent nobility, so he had to build a lumberyard and a green phosphorite mine to supplement his expenses.
In the eyes of the other nobles who had fiefs around him, Lord Wink was a country nobleman with strange manners and vulgar speech. This is also true, after all, compared with those noble children who lived in the upper class and learned strict manners and social skills from an early age, Wink, who was born as a hunter, had been stationed in the army until he became a nobleman, and had never been exposed to the so-called aristocratic etiquette, and it was indeed not a pleasant thing to talk about the aristocratic attire with folded gold rimmes that was now in vogue in Lazer, or to study the rhyming techniques and moods of the words of the twelve-line short poem.
But in the eyes of the residents of Clear Springs, Lord Wink is an easy and respectable aristocratic lord. He is not like some greedy nobles who will not give up until they squeeze the last copper plate out of their territory, nor like some arrogant nobles who always have their faces up, and never bother to look at the commoners. Lord Wink would even lead the servants of the castle to help the farmers in the fields when he was busy with the farming, and would occasionally appear in the low tavern in the center of the town, sitting alone in the corner with a crude pine wine glass, drinking the muddy and bitter ale, spending a leisurely afternoon, after drinking too much, he would boast loudly to everyone about his heroic past, and insist on settling the money for the wine, until he was drunk and was helped back to the castle by the butler and servants who had heard the news.