Chapter 1 The Freedmen of Block 8
clang!
clang!
There was a heavy sound of blacksmithing, and the fire in the room was strong. The steaming Romenghei's face was slightly red, his upper body was bare, his bronze-colored muscles, and his hideous scars trembled regularly with the movement of the ironsmith.
The red-hot wrought iron deformed a little bit under his movements, and the standard iron sword blank gradually took shape.
Opposite him stood a boy about ten years old. He picked up the fiery red iron sword embryo with iron tongs and threw it into the stone pool. The cold water mixed with the fiery red iron sword embryo, instantly steaming a large amount of mist.
Romon picked up a dirty towel from the shelf, carelessly touched the sweat on his face and body, and said to the little boy:
Ace, Dad, I'm going to the tavern on the east side of the street to quench my thirst. When you come back, you have to polish the sword blank, otherwise watch out for your ass.
I know, I know.
Without raising his head, Ace skillfully picked up the sword blank and threw it on the iron stone with sparks still remaining.
I don't care if you go to drink, don't get drunk and fight with others like last time. Not only my mother and I have to go to the municipal square to pay the fine, but you also received twenty lashes.
You brat, Romon's black face turned even redder, like an old cat with its hair blown.
That time was provoked by others. Ulu insulted your grandfather's grandfather, citizen Gnar. Your ancestors followed the great city builder Ronamus, escorted the people to escape the pursuit of the ice devil, and passed the thirteen trials. , came to the promised land of the goddess of elegance, and established a rich and powerful city-state of Medimus.
Romon took a deep breath and said loudly: We are not an ordinary family of free people, my son, you must remember that we are the descendants of citizens, and we have honor that we must uphold.
Yes, the honor of the ancestors must be maintained, of course. But the wallets at home are also dry, and we need to control our anger and put our energy into regaining citizenship efforts, such as making me read and write instead of banging the goddamn Sword blank.
Ace replied calmly.
He raised an iron hammer that was almost half his height, beating the sword blank with dang bang bang, gradually polishing the surface of the sword blank.
Romon opened his somewhat dry mouth, wanting to say something but couldn't say it.
Looking at his calm and busy son, he sighed, turned and left to go out, and murmured, I see.
Ace picked up the sword blank from the iron stone and walked to the sword sharpening stone.
The sound of hohoho sharpening the sword sounded rhythmically, and Ace sharpened the sword blank skillfully, but his mind returned to three years ago.
He was reincarnated from the earth. He remembered that the world was spinning when he just traveled, and he saw the process of being sucked into the mother's womb in a trance. In this life, he only awakened the incomplete memory of the previous life when he was seven years old. He forgot a lot and remembered a lot.
The high-rise buildings, the continuous flow of vehicles, and the endless streams of entertainment methods such as computers and smartphones have all gone away and can no longer be touched.
The fusion of the memories of the two lives caused him to have a high fever. Thanks to the careful care of his mother in this life, he slowly survived the side effects of the memory fusion.
The child doesn't know much, but at least he can speak the lingua franca of this area, and he has a complete family. He can be regarded as a serious local resident, not a black family.
After three years of conscious understanding, listening to Romon's bragging, listening to his mother's fairy tales, and not letting go of every bard's singing performance, he finally figured out the world roughly.
There seem to be gods in this world, and they live in the invisible and untouchable Mount Kaya.
The city-state of Medimus, where she lives, is the southern part of the Salia Peninsula, the promised land of the goddess of elegance. The king of the city-state is the son of the goddess of elegance, the builder of the city, Ronamus.
Since there are gods, there should be extraordinary beings.
Ace thought so, and was always paying attention to the surrounding phenomena.
He found that the nobles of the city-state are indeed far superior to ordinary people in strength, speed, bounce, and reaction.
Ordinary people, including soldiers of city-states, cannot be compared with nobles with half-grown children.
And in the deserted wilderness outside the city-state, it is said that there are many monsters roaming around, with various supernatural abilities.
Ace played on the child's talent for asking why, and asked many people how they can be like nobles.
The answers they got were that the nobles were the descendants of the gods, they were born far beyond ordinary people, and they were the rulers of human beings appointed by gods, and mortals could not become them.
Ace is a little bit unwilling to be a mortal in a world where extraordinary creatures are sure to exist.
However, he has a good mentality. His current position is too low, and he has too few contacts, so the information he gets is extremely limited.
Only by entering the middle and upper strata of the city-state can one obtain more information and have more opportunities.
Even if not, in the future, by capturing wandering monsters and even drawing the blood of nobles, it may not be impossible to research their extraordinary secrets.
Ace's goal gradually became clear, to become the middle and upper class of the city-state, that is, citizens.
The city-state of Medimus is a young colonial city-state that has only been established for a hundred years. It is full of vitality and has the ambition to actively expand abroad.
The city-state is surrounded by barbarian tribes and wandering monsters, far away from other civilized countries.
The nearest civilized countries are all in the northern part of the Salia Peninsula, so this is a very martial and expansionist city-state.
The city-state of Medimus is the promised land of the graceful goddess Medea. Her direct descendant, the son of god Ronamus, rules here. It is the top of the city-state pyramid, and below it are nobles, citizens, free people and slaves.
As for how to become a citizen, Ace heard his father ramble many times. There are three conditions for a freeman to become a citizen:
One is literacy, the other is that he has held low-level public office for more than three years, and the third is that he has achieved the equivalent of killing ten people.
Citizens who fail to meet the above three conditions after three generations will automatically lose their citizenship rights in the fourth generation.
In other words, Ace's family just declined in Romon's generation, from a family of citizens to a family of free people.
Romon is a good boy from the city-state, with a burly body and good sword and shield fighting skills. He brought his own weapons and armor several times, joined the army as a heavy infantry, and beheaded more than a dozen barbarian warriors and killed several monsters.
The only shortcoming is that he is not smart enough to learn to write, and he failed the exam until the age of thirty-five, and eventually lost his citizenship.
He also lost a series of preferential treatment for citizens, the right to the most favorable tax rate, the right to crime relief, the right to annuity, the right to participate in the Citizens' Assembly and the Meeting of Five Hundred, and other rights.
He couldn't live in the first block with the best law and order, so he could only move to the eighth block in the south of the city, and made a living by forging iron for the city-state and residents.
When Romon was young, he had been working hard to inherit citizenship rights. It was not until he completely lost citizenship rights and almost spent all the wealth left by his ancestors that he considered marriage. He met Marina, a freeman in the eighth block, and Ace's mother. settled down.
Over the past ten years, Romon is already in his forties, and he has gradually become a skilled blacksmith, and has his own stable home in the Eighth Street.
He loves to drink, and he always spends all his savings at home, so he has no financial resources for Ace to learn to read.