"I burned all the tax registers, leaving only a single copy, in the black box. Without it, the Church Court is blind in the Southeast."
"I've already cut off the grain routes. Now, the only one who can save those few million people is you."
"Remember, don't hand out grain immediately. Wait until they're starving to the brink of death, wait until the Knights work only for those two Gold Coins. Then give them what they want. Make the people of the Southeast understand that only you can grant them their lives…"
Reading this, in Louis's mind the southbound deployment of troops, the order of port takeovers, the temporary grain price curves and the public security nodes had already aligned, one by one.
He had long since begun these preparations.
Even certain details imperceptible to outsiders—such as quietly relocating his full-blooded elder sister who was still in the Southeast Province and placing her in the protection roster—had long since been completed.
