After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World - Chapter 1122

Chapter 1122: The New Prisoners of War
A/N: We’re getting one extra chap today~! We’re not T1 Golden this week, but I wanna show appreciation for making last month’s T1 so stable!

Thank you for your support, everyone!

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The day was ending and most people—including those who were in the bunkers—had either gone home or went to see the trials happening in the Main Plaza.

Rather… except for those who were too tired or injured from the war and mobs, most people actually opted to join the latter.

They wanted to know what these people did—whether they could emphathize with them or to be guarded against them.

Although prisoners of war were often working in mines, gathering resources, cleaning up, and so on—there were definitely some crossed paths between them and the citizens.

They wanted to know whether they were pity-worthy… or spit-worthy.

Because Resso Village was legitimately an enemy territory, it would not be right to just grant them the option to free themselves after gaining some money.

Everyone from that side would be ‘Prisoners of War’, regardless if they were system slaves or not, and whether they were from Resso or one of the allied territories.

The Rosses 1handled the new prisoners. After the war, Mathilda had gone straight to the Center with Jun2 and her children to oversee the newcomers. They had started even while the mobs were ongoing, beginning with the ‘slaves’ they allowed to enter early on.

This was the last batch of slaves they’d rescue from attacking territories, so she hoped to allocate them impeccably.

By the time the mobs were completely annihilated, this batch was not even half done yet, so everyone knew this would take a while. They didn’t want to take breaks either so Mathilda and Jun decided to go on shifts, and same with Gwen and Gill, with the women to check in for the night after a couple more hours.

They set up tables in the plaza. Every one of the prisoners would be asked to make an oath (or die) before doing anything else. The oath was also extremely detailed—crafted by Mathilda and Jun themselves—to ensure they still had some rights, but still ensured Alterra’s safety at all costs.

After they made an oath, they would then confess to what they had done in the plaza, being as honest as the oaths forced them to be. From there, they’d judge the length of their state as prisoners of war here.

If it was a murderer, then the atonement points would reflect that—needing years in hard service, if not decades. Some of the minor ones—for example, those who had been victimized by wars for years—would have a lot less.

Speaking of that, there were many prisoners from previous wars who had shorter sentences. A few of them had already become either ‘free slaves’ —that was, the ones who could start to keep their money to save up for freedom.

In fact, just last month, there was one guy from the Fargo war who had already freed himself.

The man’s name was Ghetto1, and it was Silvia 2who judged him after the Fargo-Alterra War.

He had been a guard there, but refused to join the evil. Rather, he had volunteered to guard the gates with Victor and the others back then to defend, all while avoiding the disgusting things happening inside.

A month ago, he finally gathered enough money—some were personal loans from the friends he made along the way—to free himself. He immediately applied to be a guard, and was now on probationary status.

Anyway, his case was quite an inspirational story among the prisoners of war.

This went on and a few hundred more prisoners came through, confessing their crimes—especially their war crimes—most of which caused high blood pressure all over the plaza.

When the particularly annoying ones were placed on the side (they would be escorted as a group to the prison or in the prisoners’ dormitories), many of the citizens would spit on them, maybe hit them, and they couldn’t do anything about it!

They gritted their teeth and the citizens continued to annoy them. When they dared to attack—especially for non-system slaves—then they’d go straight to prison, and along with that were increased sentences.

At some point, some guards appeared dragging a bloodied man with them. They were guards who were on cleanup duty outside, and this meant they found more people outside the territory.

One of them was a little unexpected though.

“Miss Mathilda!” Angelo yelled. “The enemy lord is here!”

Lords were immune to becoming slaves as long as they held the token, so he had to be dragged there instead of just being ordered around.

Anyway, the announcement of his identity made everyone stare badly at him, making Tout want to bury himself in the ground again.

Angelo dragged him to the front of the table. The young lad—quite proud—also took out something from his pocket. “He also has the token,” he said, handing the token over to her.

Guards were duty-bound to give tokens they found to the leading parties, while citizens could keep the token—assuming they deserved it. This was applicable only to tokens found in Alterra or in any of its satellites. Otherwise, it was a free-for-all.

However, the guards could choose to keep it in exchange for paying half the minimum selling price of the token (and they could even take out loans to assist with the purchase).

Of course, the condition was that the territory would be subsidiary to Alterra for the next 5 years—though no one thought that was unfair at all.

Now that Alterra was a Town, many villages would be scrambling to become subsidiaries to it! However, Alterra was choosy and might not even look at them at all!

It would be an honor to become a subsidiary!

On the other hand, if they chose to surrender it, they would receive good pay and contribution points in exchange for it. If they decided to sell it, then the finder could get 10% of the proceeds.

Any of the deals would be very good, and it was an incentive for people to hunt down enemy lords as well.

Of course, they also wanted to avoid citizens fighting over the tokens or even backstabbing each other for it.

Hence, they added a rule that the reward would be given to whoever found it—not necessarily the one who delivered it. They just had to take a simple (and cheap) temporary honesty oath as they submitted it.

Mathilda’s eyebrows furrowed as she looked at it. They didn’t have any available Token Guards at this time, so they either had to give it back or give it to someone.

Althea had given her permission to do most things for the territory, and what to do with tokens from useless territories was one of them.

They would definitely not sell it back to the previous Lord, so it could only be the latter. But who’d they sell it to?