Steel, Explosives, and Spellcasters

Subsequently, Winters meticulously recounted all the information he knew to Antonio.

The special envoy from The Federated Provinces, Mara, had not arrived at Sea Blue City by chance; he brought with him a treaty concerning the Tanilia Archipelago.

The Venetian desire for the Tanilia Archipelago was common knowledge.

Seven years earlier, the Freman people had begun a brutal tug-of-war with their eastern neighbors. To raise more military funds, the Freman Sultan, who controlled half the Eastern trade route, had started levying higher commercial taxes.

Therefore, since Debela took office as governor, Venetian tax revenue had plummeted, the current prosperity had begun to decline, and merchants who had grown wealthy from the Eastern trade route were going bankrupt one after another.

Meanwhile, within the internal trade circle of Senas Bay, the status of Venetia's central transfer station was facing a formidable challenge—from the Tanilia Archipelago.

The Tanilia Archipelago was no longer the savage islands it had been thirty years ago; amidst major powers' struggles, the islands had rapidly prospered as neutral ports and accumulated vast wealth.

Because tax revenue was reduced, tax rates had to be increased. But after the tax hike, merchants fled to the Tanilia Archipelago, where tax rates were lower. With fewer merchants, the tax base shrank, necessitating another tax increase to maintain the existing revenue.

As a result, a vicious cycle had set in.

"Veneta needs the archipelago," were Colonel Kongtai'er's exact words. It wasn't because of some damned pirates; piracy in the Senas Sea had been rampant for decades, yet it had been emphasized repeatedly in recent years for one reason—Veneta needed the archipelago.

Whether it was the need to eliminate competitors, to find new sources of raw materials and markets for dumping goods, or more importantly, new ports—ocean ports.

The harbors along the coast of Senas Bay were too small, too shallow. But scattered across the Tanilia Archipelago were deep-water good harbors, with the Storm Ocean to the east of the islands.

Securing Tanilia meant gaining new land and also a new possibility, the possibility of a new trade route, a possibility of a new route through the Storm Ocean straight to the Spice Islands.

The Freman Sultan's exorbitant taxes on merchant ships had damaged trade but had also caused prices of goods from the East to surge, making Eastern goods more profitable—the catch was to bypass the Flemish's control.

The Tanilia Archipelago represented this possibility. After decades of surveying, Venetian navigators had realized that if the Earth were a sphere, a straight line could be drawn from the Tanilia Archipelago directly to the Spice Islands.

To achieve all this, they needed to navigate through the tumultuous, wave-tossed Storm Ocean, an ocean that devoured the lives of numerous explorers.

And to traverse the Storm Ocean, they needed sturdy, seaworthy ships, large enough dry docks, and deep-sea ports.

For a myriad of reasons, more and more Venetians were recognizing the immense value and potential of the Taniria Islands, especially within the Venetian military.

Young Venetian militarists reached a consensus in heated debates over the future of their nation: Veneta must take the archipelago. To further this aim, at least one secret society had been established within the Venetian military.

The dying Kongtai'er refused to reveal more secrets of the group to Winters, attempting only to make Winters accept his ideology and recruit him into the secret society.

It was during this process that Winters obtained more information about the group.

However, it wasn't just the Venetians who saw the potential and strategic value of Taniria; the United Provincials had also recognized it. The Republic of The Federated Provinces had acted on the archipelago sooner and laid out plans earlier. Before the Venetians began to emphasize the island as a haven for pirate loot, the United Provincials were already striving to penetrate the Taniria Islands, intending to turn them into the eighth province of The Federated Provinces.

Even the political structure of the Republic enabled it to offer more generous terms than the Venetian Republic could. Becoming the eighth province of The Federated Provinces was certainly better than becoming another county of Veneta. Continue reading on empire

For this very reason, Veneta had become more aggressive. Governor Debela brought up the Taniria Islands in every parliamentary speech he gave, with his language becoming more intense each time.

But the Secretary of State for The Federated Provinces, Lionel, proposed a new possibility, one that could prevent conflicts within the Senas Alliance.

His special envoy came to Veneta in secret to conclude a treaty, a treaty that Debela and Lionel had been discussing secretly for a long time: turning Taniria into an overseas territory of the Senas Alliance, maintaining its semi-independent status, governed jointly by Veneta and The Federated Provinces.

This was bound to be a treaty that satisfied neither party, and also the reason why the special envoy from the Secretary of State for The Federated Provinces was assassinated.

Honestly speaking, Winters was not opposed to Kongtai'er's rhetoric that "everything was for the benefit of Veneta." Securing Taniria could bring great advantages to Veneta, and Winters agreed.

However, from the moment Kongtai'er's confederates assassinated the special envoy from the Secretary of State for The Federated Provinces because the political resolution did not meet their expectations, everything they said could no longer be trusted by Winters.

In Winters' view, while these people spoke of "everything for the benefit of Veneta," their actual actions served only their own political ambitions.