After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World novel Chapter 437

While in Altera the citizens were worrying about what to eat for dinner, where to train next, or even what the new products in the supermarket would come out, the status of other villages had very stark differences.

One example was a small village hundreds of kilometers Southeast of Altera.

It was called Mauin Village, after the original lord. Here, there were moldering houses, brackish waters, and an atmosphere seemingly bereft of all good things

It was also a Level 3 village, but looking closely at the people and the territory, it was as if they were poorer than the standard Level 2 village!

Not only were the buildings in poor condition, the people were even worse. Its people had totally different temperaments from that of Altera—the opposite, in fact.

The people here wore ripped clothing and had dirty faces, barely bothering to care for themselves. They lived in unmaintained houses, abodes no different from abandoned property, but they took no effort in changing it.

As if they had no reason to do so.

However, it could be seen that they still didn’t want to die considering how they were now scrambling around the dirt roads and grassy squares in a panic, in an attempt to safeguard one of the few things they had left.

That was: their lives.

This was because, a few moments prior, the too-familiar sound of an alarm—the alarm for war—resounded across the territory.

[Tome Village has attacked your territory. Please prepare for war.]

"It’s them again?!" A man yelled, screaming at no one in particular.

"How many times will they attack us this year?!" Another screamed, disbelieving.

Unkempt women and children sobbed, trying to find a place to hide.

They didn’t want to die, not like their sisters, brothers, and friends—

How long would this last? Older people asked, while the young people, who had known this sort of life all of their existence, simply sobbed, not knowing any better.

It was that damned village again—Tome Village, a village built too close, only a few hours away on a leisure walk, persistently hitting them at their weakest.

The previous lords were said to be friends, helping each other obtain a lord’s token for their own use. This was the ultimate show of brotherhood.

Although obtaining a token a hundred years ago was not as impossible as it was now, it was still not easy. The two Lords could be said to have gone through fire and used up several lifetimes’ worth of luck in order to obtain two.

It was just that, for some reason, they broke away from each other and became enemies. Legend said it was because one got too greedy and regretted sharing the token with the other.

It had been a fair fight until a few years back, one lost this time, and the next month the other one won. Lose some, gain some back. Further, the battles generally happened every few months, leaving both parties some recovery time.

For both parties, this was fair because they saw the other as a source of resources, which naturally had to be given time to recover.

The back and forth lasted for decades until the lords passed on the tokens to their respective children… who wanted to end the battles…

…by attacking to completely destroy the other, which was not an uncommon ideology in Xeno.

At the time, the food provided by nature to their village was nearly unlimited, as the population couldn’t grow too much due to the beast tides and multitude of wars. True wealth had become those obtained through wars.

The attacks soon became monthly and things tipped to one side when Tome allied with another village—a wild tribe, a tribe they heard ate people!

They found out about this when one of the attackers place tokens of their kills along their belts. Some of them were bones! Someone even used human bone to clean his teeth!

What they had done to the captured slaves from their village, they did not want to imagine.

It just got worse and worse for Mauin and somehow, during the past few months, the two villages had been maximizing the wars and attacked twice a month. Their poor village had to face these two villages every lunar cycle.

Because of this, every month, they lost huge amounts of resources, properties, and people.

Every time, the village lost half its current assets, and until now they only had debts and a fraction of the population left.

They also lost many strong men to food and a lot of women to the enemy.

Their food had to be taken deep in the wild every day, in contrast to being able to stock up a bit due to the ample resources within the walls.

Now, it was no longer enough. The resources would always be taken, so everyone had to go outside the safety of the walls to hunt and forage every single day.

It was also because of this new practice—with them being so closely exposed to the outside every single day—they soon came to notice an anomaly: