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Was the Mage Country strong? The answer was an obvious yes. However, even though the Mage Country technically counted as a mega-empire, everyone knew that it wasn’t even a country. It was simply a place where countless mages gathered. Ignoring the countless mid- and low-ranked mages, when one only counted those archmages that had obtained the Emblem of Endless Truth and considered if all these top-level mages acted together in unison...

Alright then, everyone knew that was basically impossible. After all, every mage had their own desires, their own goals in life, and their own research topics they were interested in. Wanting them to act together in unison for a country’s goal was unimaginable. This was also the main reason why the Mage Country had never expanded their territory ever since Arlodant had been founded. They lacked the necessity of expanding their borders.

Expand their territory and population? What a joke. There were only so many mages to begin with, and the city of Arlo could contain ninety percent of the Mage Country’s population itself. Why would they need to expand their territory with nobody to live in it? It would be all the more bothersome for them as they would need to plant more crops and maintain public order in more places.

Increase their population in order to increase the number of mages in the Mage Country? That was unnecessary as the Mage Country never cared about what nationality a person was from, nor did they care about a large base population in order to obtain more mages. Anyone willing to abandon an ordinary person’s boring life and choose the path of seeking knowledge would easily be able to become a member of the Mage Country.

The forever-neutral country, Arlodant. It wasn’t particularly because the Mage Country maintained neutrality, it was that most of the mages in this country, as individuals, consciously chose to remain neutral. This neutrality didn’t only extend to wars between countries, it even included the eternal Holy War.

They didn’t favor the Order Gods, but they also despised the Chaos Gods. It could be said that they only believed in themselves, that they only cared about magic and the truth. They were the most truly neutral third party in the Holy War.

Of course, since most mages were humans, it wasn’t technically wrong to say that they were in the Order Faction, but as for having them fight for the Order Faction... fine, the Mage Country didn’t even have a standing army. At any rate, the mages that cared about Order versus Chaos and were willing to go fight for their beliefs were free to do so. However, there would be no such collective action taken by the mages as a whole.

“They’re basically allies that were made for us.”

But just as I mentioned earlier, everyone in the Truth Symposium was an academic who hated politics. In such a situation, something like an alliance was meaningless. An alliance that wouldn’t do anything for you was basically no different from scrap paper.

There were plenty of ambitious individuals that wanted to borrow the powerful Mage Country’s strength in the past. However, those individuals all failed. No matter how loudly they shouted for assistance, very few mages would come to their aid.

But if I had to critique those individuals, I would say that they were too outdated in their methods of thinking. Alliances, inciting the population, bribing higher-ups, and other such typical plots were utterly useless when dealing with the Mage Country which had its own unique political system in the world of Eich.

As for me, I had my own opinions. We definitely couldn’t make a formal alliance of any sort with the Mage Country that completely lacked any unity as a country. After all, even if we obtained a certain percentage of the Truth Overseers to support us, all the mage organizations and individual mages wouldn’t listen to them... But looking at it from a different standpoint, we could simply bribe every individual mage. As long as we bribed enough mages, the entire Mage Country was basically on our side.

This sounded inconceivable? There were too many individual mages to possibly bribe? But, it was actually doable.

How does one make an originally neutral person suddenly become your ardent supporter? The answer was quite simple. Just fill that person’s wallet with your money or owe him a significant amount of money. Make it so that his and your personal benefits are intimately connected.

In that case, how does one make two different factions, or on a much larger scale, two different countries become as one? The answer was still the same. Just make their benefits connected. For example, if they used the same currency, the same language, and had zero trade tariffs for each other, they would stand on the same side for most benefits. They would naturally become one.

Back in my original world of Earth, many countries in history used this method to unify two countries. Emperor Qin of China, was such an example; he unified Chinese currency and all the Chinese dialects into one, which set the foundation for China to become a nation.

Alright then, by now, the idea was obvious. I only had to fulfill two conditions to bribe all the mages to be on my side. First, I needed to make sure their personal benefits were tied to mine. Second, I had to make them into my customers, friends, and even debtors. If I could accomplish this, then they would naturally feel that if they didn’t support me, they would be losing out. They would support me of their own volition without me even needing to do anything.

Originally, I had only thought about this plan before helplessly giving up on it. The resources and wealth needed would be astronomical. However, a sudden recent event helped make my fantastical dream of “bribing the entire Mage Country’s mages” to become a possibility.

“Justice Points! Our top-level products can only be purchased with Justice Points. And this is only a beginning. Our final goal is to make the entire Mage Country use Justice Points as its most important currency.”

I was completely confident that with the Gods backing me up with their countless years of accumulated treasures, my products and treasury would make any mage go crazy with desire. Yet this was only a beginning.

According to my plan, in the future, more and more stores would be using Justice Points as their currency. My most important goal was to make the majority of people in the Mage Country admit and think that Justice Points were the most valuable currency of all. They would then automatically join as “Contract Mages” and fight for our cause in order to obtain Justice Points.

That would help us obtain countless powerful Contract Mages. If a sufficient number of mages sought Justice Points and joined in battle, the entire Mage Country would gradually transform into my ally even without a formal alliance agreement.

Of course, realizing this goal still required countless steps and little tricks, such as how to make the Mage Country recognize Justice Points as their official currency, how to make other stores and mages want to use Justice Points as their currency, and how to ensure that the major mage organizations wouldn’t interfere with Justice Points as my system expanded. However, I had both confidence and patience. I could take things slowly here.

“Neutral? Soon, you’ll discover that, in this war, there’s no such thing as being neutral. This time, I definitely won’t repeat the mistakes of the past.”

In the game’s “history,” the Mage Country was just as strong as the current Mage Country right now. However, the story’s version of the Mage Country chose as always to ignore the Holy War, despite all the changes occurring in the world and all the death being wrought. They chose to simply remain as observers that would record what happened.

They remained neutral as always—no—neutral was no longer sufficient to describe them. They were arrogant, dense, and coldhearted. Well, since the Mage Country was able to ignore even the Yongye Calamity and other similar large-scale battles in the past, it was only natural that they would simply ignore everything that happened in the Holy War.

Even though everyone was at war around them, they chose to remain in the Cloud Tower and go about their daily lives, discussing their newest technological inventions or how bad the weather was. But, when the Holy War truly ended up involving the entire world, they finally discovered that they were caught up in the war as well. Yet Armageddon had already descended upon them, and it was too late to take action.

To be fair, even in the game’s storyline, there were perceptive mages that sounded warnings, and the mages stationed in other dimensions had reported on how the creatures from other planes were gathering their forces in an abnormally large-scale fashion. However, all the large mage organizations had already come to a conclusion because of the past—they had etched into their minds that this would simply be another two- or three-hundred-year war between different species. They would just need to ignore this war like always.

But the arrogant mages tasted bitter defeat and death in the end. When Arlodant finally realized that something was wrong with the situation and truly commanded all the mages to begin participating in the war, the entire land of Eich had experienced endless battle, and countless powerful existences had already descended upon Eich from other planes. The River Styx was filled with the souls of the dead, with SemiGod existences enjoying their wine glasses filled with human blood wrought from catastrophe. The demons and devils had organized themselves into colossal armies under the leadership of the Evil Gods, and those “powerful” mages were unable to do anything at all.

“...Sometimes, remaining neutral seems like it can’t possibly be a wrong decision. However, it’s also the most passive choice, which makes it the farthest possible answer from the correct decision.”

Although I didn’t want to admit it, from a certain standpoint, it was a good thing for me that the Bardi Empire began a war against the Mage Country. At the very least, the Bardi Empire informed the mages that remained in their ivory towers that there was no such thing as absolute peace in the world. Even if you remained as a hermit in your own home, it was possible that one day, a robber would break into your home and slap you in the face.

I truly looked forward to the next Truth Symposium conference scheduled to take place in slightly over one month from now. I wanted to see what the archmages that returned from the frontlines of battle would have to say. Also, I wanted to know more about the sudden forbidden spell ambush on the Bardi Empire’s frontlines. This didn’t seem like the Mage Country’s typical style of doing things at all, so I couldn’t comprehend what had happened. There was definitely something interesting behind that, a plot I hadn’t yet uncovered.

What I currently needed to do was forcefully wake them up to the situation. “Justice Points” and the magical secrets that they could exchange for would be the bait to get them involved. As long as enough mages were involved, there would be a sufficient number of reports sent to the Truth Symposium about the scale of destruction and chaos in the Holy War. With the mages’ Intelligence, it would be impossible for them to not notice and ignore the danger with so much information stuffed in their faces. By that time, the entire Mage Country would naturally become my ally.

Was it going to be difficult to bait the mages? Haha! Would a mage have no desires? Impossible! I had always believed that the seemingly calm mages were actually the easiest job class to tempt of all.

“Greed” Harloys was a classic example of a mage. Her endless greed and desire for magical knowledge was an accurate stereotype of the mages. I had already purchased a large advertisement in next week’s “Cloud Tower Weekly” magazine which would give a detailed introduction of Thorn Garden and our new products, even including a full list of every item one could exchange for with Justice Points. The items that came from ancient times or were Gods’ secrets were precious goods that nobody would be able to obtain otherwise.

There was nothing that could compete with the “unknown” in attracting mages due to their desire and thirst for knowledge. Justice Points would definitely cause many mages to act.

With Justice Points as the bait, my final goal was to wake the Mage Country up to the danger they were in and act much sooner than they would have otherwise.

However, things had to be taken slowly. This “plot” of mine, which was completely out in the open and had nothing nefarious about it compared to my usual plots, was one that could be taken slowly. As for how to drag the Mage Country into the Holy War with me? I first needed to make the Thorn Garden as popular as possible.

Plant magic products would have a limited market appeal. If I wanted to attract the entire Cloud Tower’s attention, it would be insufficient to utilize Amelia’s products alone. My new products were now prepared, and I could even make a huge profit while obtaining my goal.

“Mechanized mage squadrons? That seems like it would make for such an unusual art style.”

Archmage Andrei was currently in a bad mood. The vice leader of the Sword of Order, he was a mage who had the goal of raising the strongest magical pets possible. He felt like he had been away from his favorite lovely experimental laboratory for far too long. His clumsy acolytes wouldn’t even dare approach his precious pets’ cages, so he was afraid that maybe a few of his treasured pets might have already starved to death.

“However, I sense that my little preciouses are under threat from something far more dangerous than starvation. How strange. Is there some dangerous existence currently at the Cloud Tower?”

However, Andrei knew that it wasn’t time to consider such things as he looked at the thick sandstorm and smoke in front of him. The endless sounds of dragons roaring could be heard in the distance.

Ever since that forbidden spell transformed this area on the Bardi Empire’s frontlines into a living hell, two small squadrons of Bardi Empire dragon knights had already arrived (the western dragon knights loyal to Orloss—not Halent’s squadron). The twelve dragon knights’ constant ambushes were quite difficult to defend against.

Still, this wasn’t a big problem; there were a total of four Truth Overseers in this area. If they combined their powers and forced the Bardi Empire’s dragon knights into a direct confrontation, the Truth Overseers would likely win quite quickly.

However, both sides were in a stalemate for various reasons.

The archmages here didn’t want to escalate the level of the war, nor did they want to slay the dragons and dragon knights, which would antagonize all the dragons behind the dragon knights. Meanwhile, Bardi’s dragon knights seemed to be acting strangely as well.

While they still kept on with their ambushes, their ambushes lacked actual attack power. The largest-scale attack they used would be a single dragon breath which would set a few structures on fire. As they were the ones supposed to be taking revenge here, this was obviously far too peaceful.

“It feels like they’re under some sort of restraint as well, and they don’t intend to escalate the level of this conflict, either. I don’t understand what’s happening.”

Yet soon, Archmage Andrei didn’t have to worry about things on the frontline anymore—he received a letter from the Cloud Tower.