Chapter 131: The Census
30th of Forgerest, 250 AF — Sovereign’s Eve.
The last day of the year.
The kingdom counted itself.
Census Day was not a celebration — it was an inventory. Every province, every settlement, every household submitted its data to the Ministry of Scrolls through the administrative infrastructure that the Sovereign had built for exactly this purpose: a network of census clerks, district recorders, provincial coordinators, and central analysts who processed the raw data of a million lives into numbers that a god could read.
The process took the entire day. From dawn to midnight, the data flowed — couriered from provincial capitals, processed at regional hubs, aggregated at the Ministry of Scrolls’ central office in Ashenveil, and finally compiled into the document that the Sovereign received at the stroke of midnight: the Annual Kingdom Census.
Zephyr received the document. He read it the way he read everything — completely, instantly, with the divine processing capacity that turned pages of data into strategic picture in the time it took a mortal to blink.
He started where he always started — population — and the first number confirmed what the last three censuses had been whispering: the Human majority was widening.
Fifty-five percent. Seven hundred and seventy thousand Humans out of one point four million total. A decade ago it had been forty-nine. Two decades before that, forty-one. The trend was demographic gravity — Humans reproduced faster than Lizardmen, settled more aggressively than Kobolds, and filled the new provinces with the particular efficiency of a race that had no ancestral attachment to any single terrain. Ashenveil itself was still mixed — a hundred and eighty-four thousand souls, the capital’s cosmopolitan character preserved by institutional design. But in the Shimmerfields, the Southmark, the Northern Reach, Humans dominated the census numbers the way they’d come to dominate the market squares: thoroughly, quietly, and with an air of inevitability that no one had voted for.
The Lizardmen held at fourteen percent. Two hundred and three thousand — the founding race, still disproportionately represented in provincial administration and military command, their institutional authority far exceeding their demographic weight. That imbalance was a problem he’d been managing for a century, and a problem he’d need to keep managing for a century more. A founding minority that held power beyond its numbers was sustainable only as long as the majority believed the arrangement was fair.
The smaller populations told simpler stories. Kobolds at twelve percent, thriving underground and in logistics. Minotaurs at seven, concentrated in Ironfields. Gnolls, Wolf-Beastmen, Fishfolk, the rest — the diversity that made the Dominion function but that didn’t drive the demographic engine.
The province he watched most carefully was the one most people forgot: Veilwood. Twenty-three thousand. Still the smallest. Still the most difficult. And still the province most likely to produce a crisis, because Shroudism — Lythari’s shadow-faith — operated in ways that made the Crucible’s census clerks uncomfortable and the Knowledge domain’s analytical frameworks unreliable.
***
The faith breakdown was where the census earned its weight in policy decisions.
Seventy-two percent Ordinist. Over a million personal believers. In a Covenant of eight religions, one faith held nearly three-quarters of the population — a dominance so complete that the vassal religions functioned less as peers and more as regional flavours of a cake that was fundamentally Ordinist in recipe. That was by design. Zephyr had built the Covenant structure to absorb rather than compete, to make each vassal faith a department within the divine bureaucracy rather than a rival enterprise.
But dominance created its own fragility. If the Bloomerists on the Pale Coast or the Howlists in the Frostmarch ever decided that seventy-two percent meant they were being absorbed rather than included, the Covenant’s architecture would crack along religious lines. He’d designed safeguards — local shrine autonomy, regional feast days, vassal gods maintaining their own communion channels — but safeguards were maintenance, not cure. The tension was structural. It would require management for as long as the Covenant existed.
The faith economics were where the gamer in him still felt satisfaction. The tier distribution — sixty-one percent casual, thirty-one percent devout, eight percent fanatic — hadn’t shifted by more than two percentage points in fifty years. That stability was the product of a faith infrastructure so deeply embedded in daily life that belief had become ambient, like weather or taxation. The Fanatics at the top — a hundred and twelve thousand souls whose conviction was absolute and self-sustaining — generated disproportionate FP relative to their numbers. The Devouts formed the institutional backbone. The Casuals were the base that everything else stood on.
Daily income: eight hundred and ninety-one thousand FP. Expenditure: seven hundred and forty-eight thousand — domain maintenance eating the largest share, then blessings, then military, then the vassal subsidies, creature upkeep, hero maintenance, Paradise operations. Net: a hundred and forty-three thousand per day, flowing into a reserve that had crossed nineteen million. Eighty-nine percent to the Rank 8 threshold. Late Ashbloom, if the expenditure side behaved.
The margins were comfortable but not generous. A sustained military engagement would flip the net negative within days. A creature emergency — the Hydra’s age, the Ironwyrm’s episodes — could drain reserves that had taken months to accumulate. The FP economy ran hot by design: every Mark of divine income reinvested into the machine that generated it.
***
The military and economic inventory he scanned quickly — these numbers changed slowly, and the trends were familiar. Eighty-four thousand active soldiers, two hundred and ten thousand reserve militia, twelve thousand naval. The economic output at eight million Marks annual — agriculture leading, mining second, manufacturing third. The infrastructure spread: eight thousand four hundred kilometres of road, fourteen cities, sixty-seven towns, nearly two thousand temples across all eight faiths.
The number that caught his eye was the dungeons. Seven mapped. Down from eight — the Hollowspire complex in the Northern Reach had collapsed during a mining survey six months ago, sealing whatever remained inside. He filed a note to reassess the site in spring. Dungeons produced domain fragments, and domain fragments were one of the few inputs his civilisation couldn’t manufacture.
***
Zephyr absorbed the census.
One million four hundred thousand people. Twelve provinces. Eight religions. Seven races. Fourteen cities. Four hundred and ninety-three population centers. Eight thousand four hundred kilometers of maintained road. One thousand eight hundred and forty-seven temples.
Two hundred and fifty-one years ago: twenty-four Lizardmen in a swamp.
The numbers told a story that no Shimmerfields theatrical performance could match — a story measured not in narrative but in scale. The distance between twenty-four and 1.4 million was not a gap. It was a civilization. Built from nothing. Built by design. Built by a god who had arrived in a ruined shrine with nothing but game knowledge and a voice, and who had spent a quarter of a millennium turning that knowledge into a system that produced people who produced output that produced faith that produced power that produced more system.
The compound interest of civilization.
Eighty-nine percent to Rank 8. The reserve filling at 143,000 FP per day. Late Ashbloom — four months, perhaps five. The calculations were clean, the projections reliable, the outcome certain within acceptable margins.
And beyond Rank 8?
Rank 9 was theoretical. No god on this continent had achieved Rank 9 in recorded history. The threshold was estimated — extrapolated from the exponential growth curve that governed each previous rank transition — at approximately 100 million believers and a daily FP income of 50 million. Numbers so large that they belonged to a different game entirely. A game played across continents, not territories. A game where the board was the planet and the pieces were civilizations.
But that’s the game I’m playing. That’s always been the game I’m playing. Not the board in front of me. The board behind the board. The game that the game is part of.
The Census settled into his awareness. The year ended. A new year — 251 AF — began at the stroke of midnight, and with it, the next phase of the longest strategy in the kingdom’s history.
Rank 8 was coming. The Green Accord was watching. The Mechanist thread led south. The inscription in the Seventh Library asked a question that had no answer. The boy from the Northern Reach had gone home and come back different.
Everything was moving. Everything was connected. Everything was part of the machine.
And the machine worked.
Year 251. The game continues. The board grows. The player plays.