Chapter 375
Returning back to Palustris, Matt immediately went to Liz and discussed Frederic’s request. In the end, they decided that it was a good idea for no other reason than to give themselves more political relevance.
Honestly, a major portion of that was interest in the Orders themselves. There really wasn’t anything like them in the Empire, and Matt was tremendously curious about what sorts of Knights they might make. He’d looked up some of the most notable historical Knights and had been quite impressed by what he found. The Orders had created many, many Pinnacle elites over their histories, and any amount of additional power was welcome.
Of course, he’d also found a lot of abuse and corruption in their past, but the political leeway the Orders were being given in this revival had more to do with allowing them to perform ‘untested magical experimentation’ on the children of the Order themselves, rather than allowance to let their Knights-apparent have free reign when it came to killing other children with their magical powers.
Their testing would also be very much restricted to that of their own children, with fairly strict controls for who was even allowed to become a Knight the typical way. Not many Orders had kidnapped or coerced random commoner families to become generational test subjects with what could only be assumed was horrific mortality rates, but that was unsurprisingly explicitly cut off. It was the first time Matt could safely say he was glad that only the children of nobles were allowed to do a given thing.
It had also been something of a long-held undercurrent of discontentment with the Sophrons that they’d effectively killed the Orders, thereby weakening the nobles who had been supported by them. Hopefully reviving them would come with a substantial amount of goodwill from the oldest and most powerful noble families across the Empire. It was amusing that giving them the opportunity to open their coffers and create super-soldiers for the Empire made them happy, but hey, he wasn’t complaining.
He was also glad to see that there were explicit outs for the children involved. They weren't quite as robust as he would have liked, but no one would be going through with the awakening without a way out and a clear understanding of what they were signing up for.
A part of him knew that children raised to the life would be hard pressed to accept the outcome, but no method that relied on trying to breed pinnacle elites could get around the fact that the children were ultimately bred for that singular purpose.
This new version of the Orders was at least giving them a way to cut ties, which was better than the historical way the Orders dealt with prospective members who didn’t want to be their super soldiers.
Breeding farms were not a topic he wanted to read up on ever again, but that was all explicitly outlawed and came with incredibly harsh punishments for anyone even trying to restart such practices.