Chương 154: Written Characters

September 20th, Year 4353 of the Era of Gods. Following over five solid months of continuous campaigning, Li Qinwu had successfully executed his withdrawal from Boluoia. However, the trek back across the open highways took a staggering two months before the army finally set foot within the sovereign borders of the Alliance. The primary catalyst for this agonizingly sluggish pace was the relentless rain—heavy downpours, persistent showers, and misty drizzles plagued their march in an unending sequence.

This continuous precipitation transformed the dirt roads into a treacherous, muddy quagmire. Compounded by the naturally volatile geography, a journey that should have taken a mere month was dragged out across more than sixty grueling days. Throughout the bulk of the expedition, the column had tracked along the riverbanks. However, the heavy rainfall caused the water levels to surge violently, rendering the banks completely impassable.

The army was forced to divert into narrow, uncharted forest trails, hacking down dense thickets and clearing the path as they advanced. On multiple occasions, the massive trailers drawn by the Earth Dragons gouged deep, watery trenches into the soft earth; to ensure the trailing transport wagons wouldn't get bogged down, the vanguard had to continuously fell trees and hurl logs into the mud pits to stabilize the ground. Fortunately, they possessed a vanguard of Ogres to actively clear the dense foliage ahead.

Combined with the fact that several preceding columns had already traversed the route and roughly trodden down the path, the march was manageable; otherwise, the journey would have taken well over four solid months to complete. Leading the foremost column, Li Qinwu finally arrived at Gob-Burg. The high-ranking administrative officer stationed in command of the fortress was none other than Gob-One.

Having already processed several waves of returning troops over the past weeks, Gob-One had developed a highly efficient routine. The moment Li Qinwu's column crested the horizon, he immediately dispatched personnel to take official custody of the raw materials and logistical supplies.

The returning soldiers were swiftly directed to the grand mess halls to eat, bathe, and change into clean garments, while the massive influx of newly recruited goblin conscripts was funneled into the grand dormitories for temporary housing. Before long, they would be organized into structured labor battalions and deployed out to the frontiers for reclamation work. Gob-Burg had undergone a staggering transformation. The landscape was heavily dotted with newly constructed timber cabins and solid concrete structures.

Although the vast majority comprised rudimentary one- and two-story buildings that required minimal technical sophistication, they were exceptionally vast in number. Furthermore, a massive array of structures stood in various stages of active construction—clearly thrown up to accommodate the swelling immigrant population. In addition, the civilian populations that had arrived in the earlier waves had already commenced intense land reclamation efforts following a brief period of structural rest.

The dense primitive woodlands surrounding Gob-Burg had been systematically driven back over ten kilometers, replaced entirely by sweeping expanses of neatly cultivated farmland. Because the agricultural reclamation had been executed under a singular, unified state blueprint, the arrangement of the fields was astonishingly precise. Massive, perfect squares of arable land were subdivided into hundreds of smaller, identical square plots.

A large square represented the collective territory assigned to a standard hundred-goblin labor village, while the smaller interior squares represented the individual plots officially distributed to each citizen. The primary reason for enforcing such an rigidly geometric layout was simply because the wild goblins possessed incredibly simple minds.

During the initial phases of land distribution, their cognitive faculties were completely incapable of processing complex geographical boundaries or irregular terrain; thus, the state had simply mandated absolute geometric uniformity. During the clearing process, the land was carved up strictly according to these square grids, with each standard plot encompassing exactly 50 mu. Deep irrigation channels were excavated along the perimeters of the grids.

Consequently, a goblin peasant merely needed to recognize the location of their assigned plot; the moment they laid eyes on the surrounding trenches, they knew precisely where their personal property lines began and ended. This standardized blueprint held the added benefit of paving the way for large-scale, mechanized agriculture in the near future.

For instance, if the state deployed the Crimson Queen, hitching her to an ultra-massive industrial plow, she could thoroughly till the collective fields of an entire hundred-goblin village in a mere matter of minutes. Stepping into the inner chambers of Gob-Burg, Li Qinwu thoroughly cleansed himself of the grime of travel before proceeding to the grand Lord's Hall, where he officially granted an audience to Gob-One.

"Boss!" Gob-One hadn't laid eyes on Li Qinwu in well over six months. Beholding his leader now in the flesh, he instinctively sensed that the man's underlying presence had grown significantly more formidable. Li Qinwu gave a brief grunt of acknowledgment, taking his seat upon the central throne of the grand hall.

"Gob-One, give me a comprehensive breakdown of the infrastructural achievements you guys have pulled off during my absence."

"Boss, give me just a brief moment." Gob-One dashed out of the Lord's Hall, returning a short while later clutching a thick, bound notebook manufactured from coarse, unrefined paper. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Flapping the notebook open, he jabbed a thick finger against a sequence of bizarre, twisted symbols scrawled across the pages.

"Boss, during this period, we have successfully completed the paving of the hardened, all-weather highway extending from Gob-Burg all the way to Iron-City. We have also laid down the main roads connecting Iron-City to the Kobold Tribe, as well as the route from Iron-City to Sulfur-Village. Furthermore, that fellow Iron-Orc claims to have located several highly lucrative raw mineral deposits out in the wilds, so we currently have a new auxiliary road actively under construction tracking toward the new mining sector.

Regarding the hundred-goblin labor villages, we have officially completed the construction of 78 settlements, all of which have already commenced active farming. An additional 65 villages are currently in the middle of active development." The structural existence of the hundred-goblin labor villages was specifically tailored to align with the baseline cognitive architecture of the goblin species, making collective administration significantly easier.

After all, these creatures had only recently undergone cognitive awakening, and processing advanced mathematics or massive demographic figures remained incredibly difficult for them. However, by capping a single settlement at exactly 100 individuals, the computational data became instantly manageable for local administrators. Gob-One turned to the next page of his coarse ledger.

"We have successfully constructed 50 large-scale livestock pens, currently managing a total herd of 290 large beasts of burden and 1, 273 medium-sized livestock. We have thrown up 20 centralized nursery facilities, capable of processing a continuous influx of 2, 000 newborn infants per cycle, alongside two massive military training camps boasting a collective capacity to train 6, 000 conscripts simultaneously. Furthermore, 13 grand granaries have been secured, and housing..."

Gob-One rattled off the data in a non-stop torrent, meticulously detailing every single facet of the developmental achievements they had secured during the campaign season. While Li Qinwu had been away conducting external military campaigns, he had left Gob-One in absolute command of Gob-Burg and One-Ear in sovereign charge of Iron-City. The primary, explicit directives he had drilled into them were to build highways and reclaim land—to relentlessly expand the transport network and clear the frontiers.

Looking at the data now, it was clear that they had executed his mandates with absolute, unswerving fidelity. Li Qinwu's curiosity was thoroughly piqued by the ledger clutched in Gob-One's hands. He extended his palm and commanded, "Let me take a look at that." Gob-One immediately handed the notebook over without hesitation. Li Qinwu flipped the heavy pages open, only to find himself staring at a massive, chaotic jumble of contorted glyphs.

The composition of these characters was incredibly complex: some were standard Arabic numerals, others appeared to be fragments of the Human Common Tongue missing various strokes, and interspersed throughout were entirely unrecognizable, bizarre pictograms. Li Qinwu let out a soft sigh. This was the natural, inevitable consequence of a civilization lacking a formalized system of writing. A standardized script was an indispensable tool for effective state administration.

In the complete absence of a formal language, the sheer, crushing demands of managing a swelling population had actively forced the local administrators to cobble together this bizarre, hybridized linguistic chimera. As Li Qinwu's fingers traced across the strange glyphs inked onto the coarse paper, an inexplicable, profound sense of deep familiarity suddenly washed over his mind.

"Gob-One, what does this specific character represent?" Li Qinwu pointed his finger at a particular pictogram, immediately trailing which was the Arabic numeral 210. Gob-One craned his thick neck to get a closer look.

"Oh, that one represents Earth Dragons, Boss. It means we currently possess a total inventory of 210 Earth Dragons." Li Qinwu shifted his finger, pointing at an adjacent symbol.

"That one represents population. Boss, excluding the massive influx of captives and conscripts you just marched back with the vanguard, our sovereign tribe currently boasts a total population of 65, 700 citizens. Among that figure, roughly 50, 000 are goblins, approximately 13, 000 are humans, and about 2, 000 are kobolds." Li Qinwu was profoundly intrigued by how Gob-One had managed to conceptualize these symbols.

"Gob-One, did you personally engineer these characters?" Gob-One shook his head rapidly in denial.

"No, Boss. One-Ear was the one who initially put them into active practice. The two of us frequently need to exchange critical administrative data, but since we are stationed at different fortresses and cannot meet in person, we have to rely on runners to deliver official missives. He eventually dragged me into a meeting and thoroughly explained what each of these specific glyphs meant, so I simply adopted them for my own ledgers." Li Qinwu pressed further, "How many of these characters currently exist in total?

And how long did it take you to master them?" Gob-One pondered deeply for a long moment, scratching his chin with an uncertain expression.

"There are... roughly over 300 unique symbols, I believe. As for learning them—the moment One-Ear explained the logic to me, the knowledge simply locked into my mind instantly." Li Qinwu's pulse quickened by a few beats. He began to rapidly flip through the coarse pages of the ledger. The more he stared at the contorted glyphs, the more intensely familiar they became to his consciousness—yet he knew with absolute, mathematical certainty that he had never once studied this script in either of his lives.

If that was the case, this profound familiarity woven into his very being could only mean one thing... Could it be a racial bloodline inheritance? Li Qinwu felt as though he had struck upon the absolute truth of the matter. In this fantasy world, many naturally powerful transcendent species possessed inherited bloodline memories. Take the Dragons, for example—they were born with an innate mastery over high-tier magic and spoke the Draconic tongue instinctively from birth.

The Elves possessed an innate, biological affinity for wood-attribute mana, while the Dwarves were born with the instinctive mastery of metallurgy. The goblin race, however, had suffered under the profound curse of the Goddess of Life, causing their ancestral lineage to fracture completely. Up until this point—excluding the three unique individuals delivered by the Mage Guild—Li Qinwu had failed to detect a single shred of specialized bloodline inheritance within the population.

Yet now, as the population baseline surged exponentially and the intense pressures of managing a rising state forced their cognitive limits, One-Ear had apparently managed to awaken dormant, ancestral knowledge buried deep within the genetic code of the species. Thrusting the notebook back into Gob-One's hands, Li Qinwu spun on his heel and strode directly toward the exit of the hall.

Leaving Gob-One with strict orders to oversee the continuous processing of the returning personnel and secure the logistical stockpiles, Li Qinwu quickly changed into a set of lightweight garments and laced up his heavy Horned Crocodile leather boots. With long, explosive strides, he stormed out of the gates of Gob-Burg and hurled himself onto the paved highway. He needed to reach Iron-City at absolute maximum speed.

He had to look One-Ear dead in the eye and uncover exactly how he had pulled this miraculous script out of his ancestral memory.