In the end, it was another failure. Another 6 points went straight down the drain. The goblin stubbornly refused to become my citizen, so I sent it to the raccoons and got back some points from selling its corpse.
However, as they say, failure is the mother of success. I was actually able to obtain some important information this time. It seems the requirements for Citizenship Granting were stricter than I first assumed:
The target must be intelligent enough.
The target must be aware of my existence and have sufficient affinity toward me.
The target must be able to recognize and willingly accept me as their Sovereign.
And as I thought about it more carefully, it actually made perfect sense.
After all, imagine wandering into an unknown place, and then suddenly some random, invisible voice asks you to become its loyal follower when you don't even have half a freaking idea who, or what, they really are. Would you accept?
(Haiya….)
(What a pain in the ass.)
I sighed again.
(How the heck do I leave a good impression on the goblins now? Do I bribe them with a mountain of food?)
Well, I could try to become like an unknown god who blesses them with endless food supplies!
But… how much food would it actually require? One hundred steaks per goblin? Or one thousand?
It was uncertain. It could very well sink hundreds or even thousands of Points just trying to domesticate these guys. Hell, there was no guarantee that food would even work in the first place!
But… it's not like I could think of any better idea for now, so in the end, I decided to go with it.
(Alright. Commence Operation Goblin Domestication!)
But before that, to buy enough food, of course I would need more points. A lot of points, to be precise.
So I would need to save up again — probably by killing more goblins first. After all, once I started seriously feeding them, I wouldn't be able to kill them that freely anymore, since doing so might completely destroy any trust in me if they ever found out this rocky guy had been feeding their friends to le raccoons!
Thus, I set a clear goal in mind: stockpile 300 points first!
***
For the next three weeks, I farmed those goblins relentlessly. It seemed like every week, one or two groups would show up like clockwork to donate Points to me. I ended up earning an average of 15 Points per day just from killing them and selling their corpses.
That said, I did feel increasingly bad for the raccoons. They weren't happy at all. The poor little guys always had their rest disturbed and were constantly kept on high alert. I noticed their fur getting increasingly ragged and patchy. Obviously, the repeated goblin invasions were stressing them out badly. At this rate, I might end up chasing them out of my castle, which I absolutely did not want. By now, those fluffy bandits were basically my little pets.
So, I decided not to bother them anymore.
Instead, I came up with another, much cleaner way to kill the goblins.
Turns out, it was actually super easy! I could just drop heavy stuff on them from above!
Apparently, whenever I chose to release an item from my inventory, I could choose not to place it gently on the ground, but instead… drop it!
There was a limit, though. I could only drop items from up to twenty meters above floor level. (For example, if I chose my second floor, I could drop items from a height equal to the floor height plus twenty meters.) Even so, that was more than enough for my purposes.
So when goblins came, I simply baited them into my front yard and then—
BAM!
Fifty kilograms of stone came crashing down from above, crushing them to bits! That was equivalent to five units of Stone, since 1 Stone turned out to be exactly 10 kilograms.
The same principle applied to Iron and Wood.
Thanks to that, the raccoons finally had their well-deserved peace and quiet again.
But there was a big problem with this new approach.
Because I crushed those goblins so badly, the corpses sold for far less since they were heavily damaged and mangled. Still, as long as I didn't have to bother the raccoons again, I was satisfied with the trade-off.
Then, as I kept doing this, another idea came to mind.
Instead of crushing them with blunt stones… what if I dropped something sharp?
I immediately tried that with the next group of goblins.
I bought a Wooden Spear from the shop. Then I carefully aimed it so that it lined up perfectly with the goblin below…
And sploosh!
Skewered!
The goblin died almost instantly!
Compared to my previous method, this turned out to be even better. First, the corpse remained in near-perfect condition and could be sold for maximum value. Second, I could always retrieve the spear back into my inventory afterward, so it didn't really cost me anything to kill the goblins.
And so, on Day 52…
I finally did it. I reached my point goal! After selling the corpses, I ended up with a huge number.
[Points Remaining: 336]
Now, it was time to get my first citizen!
***
However, on Day 53…
Instead of the usual two or three goblins, a large group arrived. No fewer than thirty goblins!
They didn't enter my territory right away. Instead, they stopped right in front of my gate, shouting loudly and waving their crude weapons.
Leading the group was a goblin who seemed much older than the rest. Its face was deeply wrinkled, and its body was covered in strange tattooed paint. It wore all kinds of bone accessories and held a long wooden staff topped with a deer's skull, like some kind of shaman.