Chapter 54: Foundation
The heavy vault doors of Casterly Rock closed behind Arthur, cutting off the dizzying golden light. For a moment, the corridor seemed too dim, too cold, and too real. Gold had a strange way of making everything around it look poorer, even stone carved by generations of men convinced their bloodline would never fall.
He stopped in the corridor and slowly exhaled. The chill of the gold bricks still seemed to cling to his fingers, and the smell of metal, dust, old parchment, and sealed wealth lingered in his nose. House Lannister had gathered that treasure over centuries, one mine, marriage, tax, war, and terrified vassal at a time. Now most of it lay in his system warehouse, converted into numbers large enough to make any sane man nervous.
Arthur felt very little joy.
He returned alone to the former audience hall of Casterly Rock, now serving as his temporary main hall. He avoided the ugly imitation of the Iron Throne that some Lannister had apparently thought tasteful and chose instead a plain high-backed chair. There was no need to sit on a copy of a dangerous chair made of melted swords. Men already found enough creative ways to cut themselves on power.
With a wave, he dismissed the guards. Silence settled over the hall, broken only by faint shouting in the distance, the scrape of crates being moved, and the cold sea wind slipping through stone corridors. Casterly Rock was his, Lannisport was his, and the lion’s gold was his. Naturally, the first thing power offered him was a ledger full of bleeding numbers.
He closed his eyes and opened the system.
【Wealth】: 8,574,329 dinars
【Monthly Income】:
- Newroot: +1,200
- Brewery: +3,500
- Casterly Rock Gold Mine: +15,000
- Pendric Hills Gold Mine: +8,000
- Lannisport Taxes (Estimated): +5,000
- Other miscellaneous: +2,000
Total: +34,700 dinars/month
【Monthly Expenses】:
- Army Maintenance: -1,024,800
- Building Maintenance: -12,000
- Lord/Follower Salaries: -15,000
- Other miscellaneous: -5,000
Total: -1,056,800 dinars/month
Deficit: -1,022,100 dinars/month.
The red number stretched across the panel like a wound that had learned arithmetic. One million. More than one million dinars lost every moon. Arthur had expected the burden, in the way a man expects winter after seeing snow clouds. Seeing it fall on his own head was still unpleasant.
His hand tightened against the arm of the chair.
The reason was simple. To sweep through the Westerlands, seize castles, hold mines, capture Lannisport, and keep morale high, he had chosen the fastest and ugliest path: frantic recruitment, high pay, and war feeding war. Gold became soldiers. Soldiers took more gold. That gold became more soldiers. The snowball grew larger with every victory, but the coin pushing it forward burned faster each day.
The gold mines gave him capital, but war had damaged shafts, roads, tools, and labor. Mining could not return to proper output in a week because Arthur looked at it sternly. Lannisport’s taxes would also need time to recover. The city had burned, bled, panicked, and changed masters. Even merchants, those brave little insects, needed a moment before crawling back toward profit.
The army did not wait. Nearly sixty thousand men had to be fed, paid, armed, moved, healed, replaced, and kept from remembering that mercenaries with empty stomachs often discovered political opinions. Until now, plunder had filled every hole. Golden Tooth, Lannisport, Casterly Rock, the mines, the west coast. But most of the soft meat had already been swallowed. What remained were bones, hard castles in mountain valleys, damaged lands, and enemies gathering around him.
Tywin’s main force was returning. Randyll Tarly had brought fifty thousand Reachmen into the Westerlands. The next battles would not be easy raids against startled garrisons. They would be long, costly, and bitter. Loot would fall. Losses would rise. The beast would keep eating.
“Sustaining war through war is reaching its limit,” Arthur murmured.
It was a pretty phrase for a very ugly truth. If the army stopped moving, it would start collapsing under its own weight. Mutiny, desertion, unpaid soldiers, broken supply lines, ambitious captains, frightened towns. History had buried plenty of warlords who mistook momentum for foundation. Arthur had no intention of joining them just because his enemies had the courtesy to be rich.
He needed to change shape.
Not a rootless host eating whatever it crossed. Not a swarm of locusts dressed in leather and calling itself strategy. He needed a power with fields, mines, roads, workshops, taxes, granaries, patrols, courts, and enough boring structure to survive when the swords grew tired. Boring things kept kingdoms alive. Men wrote songs about battles because no one wanted to sing about grain ledgers, which was exactly why grain ledgers mattered.
His gaze moved through the system shop, to options he had ignored while fire was more urgent than stone.
【Basic Building Templates】 (Price: 100 - 10,000 dinars each)
- Basic Farmland (100 acres): 500 dinars
- Primary Mine (Iron/Stone): 1,000 dinars
- Woodcutter’s Hut: 300 dinars
- Fishery: 200 dinars
- Primary Artisan Workshop (Tools/Weapons/Armor): 2,000 dinars
- Primary Market: 1,000 dinars
- Primary Barracks (Training/Capacity for 100 men): 800 dinars
- Primary Wall (Wooden, 100 meters): 200 dinars
- Primary Road (Gravel, 1 kilometer): 100 dinars...
【Advanced Buildings/Special Buildings】 (Requires prerequisite buildings/technology/specific resource points, high price)
- Advanced Mint: 50,000 dinars
- Large Shipyard: 80,000 dinars
- Academy (Can slowly increase technology/culture): 100,000 dinars
- Wonder Building (Powerful effects, unique): 500,000 - 5,000,000 dinars...
【Lord/Internal Affairs Official Recruitment】
- Administrative Official “Old John” (Specializes in taxation, public security): Monthly salary 800 dinars
- Engineer “Stonemason” Brown (Specializes in construction, siege engines): Monthly salary 1,200 dinars
- Merchant Leader Flio the Silver Tongue (Specializes in trade, negotiation): Monthly salary 1,500 dinars
- Spymaster Grey Shadow (Specializes in intelligence, infiltration): Monthly salary 2,000 dinars
- High-level Internal Affairs Official/Governor (Can manage cities/regions): Monthly salary 5,000 - 20,000 dinars...
【Soldier Recruitment】 (Some high-tier units unlocked)
- Battanian Wildling Warriors (Elite guerrilla infantry): 150 dinars/person
- Battanian Oathkeepers (Heavy infantry): 200 dinars/person
- Battanian Falxmen (Unique two-handed weapon elites): 180 dinars/person
- Battanian Raiders (Fast assault cavalry/light cavalry): 250 dinars/person
- Battanian Horsemen (Armored cavalry, requires horses): 500 dinars/person
- Battanian Noble Horsemen (Elite knights): 800 dinars/person...
Arthur opened his eyes. The confusion had faded, replaced by something colder and more useful. It was time to stop behaving like a victorious raider and start behaving like a lord, which mostly meant discovering that killing men was sometimes less complicated than feeding them.
“Pass the order,” he said to the guard outside the door. “Bring Smith, Diana, Kator, Beland, Horgos, Noli, and the new arrivals to me.”
The guard bowed and left quickly.
Arthur looked again at the red deficit hanging in his mind. One million dinars a moon. The number was obscene. Then again, so was holding Casterly Rock after the Red Wedding and expecting the world to let him breathe. Westeros rarely gave anything without teeth attached.
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