“So now that we cleared that up, we can continue with our conversation. Right, you’re here for a few centuries already? What was it like back when you first arrived?”
“As I mentioned before, all the gods are from Arcadia and that’s where I was summoned. Back then it was very undeveloped, roads were unmaintained or in some areas entirely nonexistent. Monsters and bandits were terrorizing the whole country. There were many factions that controlled small territories and fought against each other.
When I was summoned, my task was to develop and stabilize the lands. Over time, more heroes were summoned to help, sometimes with as many as a dozen years between summons. I was trying to do that for what would be almost an entire lifetime back on Earth. In truth, it was the happiest time of my life, I felt needed and appreciated like never before. Along with the other heroes, we brought people safety, and over the years, the country blossomed into a prosperous nation.”
The old dude grimaced as he continued. “One day, all the heroes received a summons from the God of War. We were tasked with expanding Arcadian territory. In the north were many independent countries and territories big and small, and we were ordered to conquer them all.” Then he adopted a firm expression.
“I was born after the First World War and witnessed the effects it had. I lived through the Second World War and saw the atrocities it brought. And now, they expect me to wage one myself? To commit the same vile acts that I have looked down upon.
And yet, it was god's command, how could I refuse it? I wanted to refuse it… No, I didn’t have the courage. So in the end we all agreed to it. I deluded myself into thinking that we were doing the right thing, I tried to justify our actions. But I couldn’t…
It was when I took my first life… it… It broke me, I just couldn’t do it. I was surrounded by corpses and could only watch in horror as people around me died. Like me, few of the heroes were also disturbed by the sight, but some others were just indifferent, and one seemed to enjoy it even.
Before we mostly fought against monsters, even when I battled bandits, I had enough power to apprehend them alive. But this was war. I couldn’t do it, I knew it had to stop. It was… I felt like I stood on the wrong side of the history.
Together with four other heroes, we decided that we had to do something. So, we turned our backs on Arcadia, consequences be damned. We united all the remaining countries that feared of Arcadian takeover and fought back. We united all of them under a single crown, and after that, I became the first and only king of the Crownland.”
“Oh right! Now I remember, I saw your statue not too long ago. That’s why you seemed familiar, but you certainly look older in reality. But I am pretty sure most people think you died? Why are you hiding away?”
“I had my reasons, it’s a bit more complicated…”
“That’s fine, I am interested in hearing it.”
“Alright. Where should I start… You see, back around like three centuries ago, not too long after I became the king, I needed to deal with a monster problem around the whole country. I would normally use the army, but we were getting invaded by Arcadia, and I couldn’t afford to spare soldiers.
I created the adventurer’s guild with the help of a few of the younger heroes that arrived here from Earth’s early twenty-first century. They said that it is the perfect way to handle monster infestation, and their arguments seemed sound. It would be a separate, independent organization that would specialize in monster extermination.
It didn’t take long before I implemented it countrywide. We trained adventurers while we could and invested billions of runes to increase their strength. The military was busy with Arcadian advances so that arrangement would allow us to focus more resources toward the war effort. That war seemed like a much more important issue, so we put our focus on it first and foremost.
It took us years, but we eventually pushed the Arcadian forces back. Although we ended the war, when I took a good look back at my country, I found it in a state of ruin. Cities lay in ruins, and monsters roamed freely across the surface, unopposed. Due to their attacks, farmers feared harvesting their crops, leading to a great famine. Adventurers were supposed to prevent all this, but instead, they focused on selfish gains.
After they gained strength from our training, investments, and fighting in dungeons, they became cocky. Being left alone must have inflated their egos. All of the soldiers were sent to the frontline, and they became an unopposed force.
It started with extortion; they extorted money from businesses because there was no one to stop them. Some even started taking over property and, eventually, whole cities. Nobody could stop their criminal activities. While dungeons were dangerous, gaining wealth through illicit means was not only safer but also more profitable. They abandoned their responsibilities, entering only the most profitable dungeons and leaving some regions with barely any protection.
Well, not all of them were bad. They weren’t a united group, there were many factions among them, some good, many bad. Infighting wasn’t uncommon, but that only served to create a lot of collateral damage as they turned cities into battlefields.
They formed gangs and took over property and resources of others with unopposed strength. Civilians had no way to resist and could only suffer under their oppression. They ravaged my whole country before I even realized that there was anything wrong.
It was then that I finally realized how incompetent I really was. Back on Earth, I was just a random nobody, but after receiving divine blessings, my self-confidence soared. I started to believe that I was the chosen one, the first and the strongest hero, the king of a powerful nation with many millions of lives under his rule. But after my many failings, I realized that I haven’t really changed, I was still the same incompetent person from Earth. People listened to me just because of my borrowed power and nothing more.
I wasn’t fit to rule, but there was no one who could replace me either. I was stuck in the position where I didn’t belong.”
“Right. Now I have so many questions. It’s a bit off-topic after your history explanation, but there’s something I don’t quite understand. If so many people from modern time are in this world, and they have been here for a few hundred years already, why is this place so underdeveloped?”
“Well, there are two main reasons. Firstly, most of the heroes were quite young when they got reincarnated, not all of them but the majority. So many of them didn’t really have that many life skills. They had a general idea of how things worked, but didn’t actually know how to do it themselves.”
“I see, I haven’t considered that.”
“Well, although most of them were like that, there were some who would be able to introduce technologies from Earth. However, just because they could, doesn’t mean that they would want to do so. It requires great effort to actually do that. I can give you one example, we wanted to build a modern plumbing and sewage systems and one of the heroes had just the right knowledge and experience from his previous life to be able to do it.”
“I am guessing that he refused.”
“He said something along the lines of, why should I crawl in shit if I have more money in my pocket right now than all of my earnings in my previous life combined. I have a big mansion, many servants and plenty of women, I have powers like from a movie, and he went on and on about how he is respected now and stuff like that. He said a lot of things I didn’t even understand, like he went on to say that if he ever met Batman, he would kick his ass and after that, he started to list all of his friends from Earth that were now poorer than him. It was a pretty long rant, he went on for about twenty minutes, I don’t remember even half of it.”
He listed all of his friends that were now poorer than him? Wait a minute, are you sure that he didn’t just list all of them?
“They could live a life of luxury and all they need to do is to go to the dungeon every once in a while. Most of them simply chose to rely on their newly gained power instead of their old experience. It’s a bit sad, how everyone abandoned all of their previous skills that they were polishing throughout their whole life the moment they received a bit of power.”
“So it’s like that… But some of them had to try it at least.”
“Sure, a few of them decided to bring modern technologies to this world, but most of them aren’t even in this country. So you won’t be able to see the impact of their work very easily. There’s just so much each of them can do anyway, just because you have a general idea of how something works, doesn’t mean that you know how to make it. And even if you know how to make it, that doesn’t mean that you even have access to the right tools or materials to do so. And even if you actually do it, that’s only a half of the work. You need to teach others how to replicate it, and you need to convince people to actually use it. Some just don’t like the change, you can’t expect them to start using everything you make on their own initiative. There are just too many hurdles to overcome.”
Now that I think about it, those alleged magic schools looked quite Earth-like, and that ship from before seemed to be ahead of its time. But other than that, everything else seemed to belong to the medieval time period. “That’s quite disappointing. Even with hundreds of years passing... Man. You’re old, old dude.”
“Did you really have to say old twice?”
“Thrice would be more accurate. Won’t you be a quadruple old soon old, old, old man?”
