Reborn As The Beggar Lord

003 Salted Dirt

Three days east, the roads worsened, and the villages grew quieter. On the morning of the third day, the cart stopped on a bare ridge.

"This is as far as I go, my lord." The driver wouldn't meet his eyes. "Whoever sets foot in Thornmere gets bad luck."

There was no spite in his voice, only pity. It stung worse than the capital's laughter.

Kingsley climbed down with one bag and started walking.

Far to the east, the Mist Wall stood between earth and sky, grey and churning. It moved in slow, wet rolls. Even from this distance, it made his skin crawl.

That thing breeding monsters borders my land.

From the ridge, he surveyed the village the way he once read a failing building site.

The fields stretched down to the river, white with salt instead of soil.

The houses had sagging roofs and patched walls. His ancestors had built strong foundations, but everything above them had been neglected for years and was falling apart.

Of forty roofs, only four chimneys smoked on a cold morning.

The people were thin figures moving between the houses, slow and bent, heads down even with nobody watching.

They have already given up.

The nobles in the capital had bled this place dry and then forgotten it existed.

There was no welcome. Shutters closed ahead of him, and nobody bowed.

As he passed the first house, a woman threw herself down in the mud in front of him.

"Please, my lord. Don't take my children. They're all I have left."

Kingsley told her to stand up, but she stayed down until he had walked on.

The village headman met him in the road with his cap in both hands and managed one sentence. "We have nothing left to tax, my lord."

Only one person crossed the road to him, a broad eighty-year-old woman.

"I am Mara, and I take care of the well. You look like your father, a little, my lord. Come and eat before you fall over."

Her soup was thin, mostly water and roots, and she watched him eat every drop.

Kingsley looked up the road at the closed shutters. "Every other person here hides from me. Why don't you?"

Mara spooned more soup into his bowl. "There's a rot in my belly, my lord, and I'll be dead before the snow comes. You can't take anything from a woman who is already leaving everything behind."

"Your father emptied his own pantry the winter he died," she said. "He fed half this village out of his own stores while the capital forgot we existed. We owe the name Carmine one bowl. Now you've had it."

Kingsley set down the spoon. So the debts weren't a waste. His father had beggared himself to keep three hundred people alive, and the capital had laughed at him for it.

"The well water is going bitter," Mara went on. "The grain won't last the month. And some creature out of the Mist took two goats this week."

The soup was still warm when the riders arrived from the capital.

Two of them were armed men in boiled leather. The third was a plump man in a fur-lined coat. He had a ledger chained to his saddle and a face made for smiling at funerals.

"Baron Carmine?" the man called out. "Excellent. I collect for the royal treasury, and I do hate wasted trips."

He didn't dismount. He opened the ledger and read the figures in a bored voice.

The late baron had borrowed from the Crown for decades. He had taken grain loans in bad harvests, coin for wall repairs, and seed the village never managed to pay back.

The debt passed to the title, and the title had just passed to Kingsley.

"One thousand gold, my lord. You have thirty days."

The village went silent. Even the children's voices died.

The collector looked Kingsley over and wrote something in his ledger.

"Forgive me, my lord. I am writing down your coat. We list such property early in cases like yours. It saves us a second trip."

"And on the thirty-first day," the collector continued pleasantly, "you shall go to debtors' prison."

"Your villagers will be sold into bonded labor, and the land will be stripped for whatever it will fetch. All perfectly legal."

A thousand gold, and this land might earn twenty in a good year.

Kingsley's hand moved toward the bracelet inside his coat and held there.

Princess Elizabeth had thrown it to him in front of a thousand jeering nobles, and she had not joined them. She wanted to see if he could hand it back to her one day. Selling it would answer her challenge before he even started.

Kingsley looked the collector in the eye and kept his head level. "You'll have the gold in thirty days."

The collector gathered his reins. He did not believe the penniless baron's promise. Then his gaze swept over the Mist, and his expression darkened.

"Thirty days, my lord. I will come back to count what is left."

They rode out the way they'd come.

Decades of debt, and the nobles had waited until the day it landed on a nineteen-year-old with an F grade talent.

They didn't exile me, Kingsley thought. It was the poisoned dinner all over again. They smiled, poured the cup, and now demanded payment for the wine.

That evening, he went out to the boundary stone. For generations, every baron of Thornmere had given it a few drops of blood at the start of each year. It was frontier superstition, but his father had never missed one.

Kingsley had thirty days, a thousand gold of debt, and empty pockets. Superstition was free.

The boundary stone stood waist-high. Its carved marks were worn almost smooth.

He cut his palm with his knife and pressed the bleeding hand flat on the cold stone.

"I'm home," he said to the empty field. "You're not getting much of a lord. But I'm what's left."

The birds stopped, and so did the insects and the wind.

Then the huge presence he'd felt beneath the sacred Stone at the Temple stirred again. It moved right under his boots, and the ground shuddered.

Glowing words appeared in his mind.

[S-grade Talent awakened] [Class: Settler]

[Territory: Thornmere] [Village: Tier 1]

Kingsley read them twice, and his shock passed quickly.

He did not stop to question the glowing words. He had already crossed worlds once. This was simply the next page.

The kingdom had not recorded an S grade in a hundred years. Whatever it meant, this world had forgotten it.

[Quest complete: Own ancestral land]

[Reward: Reclamation tool x1]

A wooden shovel appeared in his hands, heavy enough to drag his arms down.

"Farm tools," Kingsley said. "So the reward for claiming my land is farm labor."

[Reclamation tools can be used to restore or regenerate a natural resource]

Kingsley wrapped both his hands around the shovel's handle and struck the soil.

Warmth poured out of him through the tool and down into the earth. The shovel flashed white and crumbled into golden dust in his fists.

[Used: Reclamation tool x1]

A wave of light rolled outward from where he stood.

The field in front of him began to change. The white crust dissolved, and salt turned to dark, wet, living earth.

At the far edge, the wave slowed and stopped. Beyond that one black field, the valley was still white and dead.

All around his boots, green shoots were breaking out of the new earth. They were growing as he watched.