"O-oh, Y-yes, YES!" The man nodded frantically, his movements jerky and desperate as he wrapped up several pieces in dirty cloth and handed them over with trembling hands.

Viktor took the bundle without comment and walked back to the old woman.

He crouched down again, placing it in her trembling hands with the same gentleness he'd used to treat her wound.

Her eyes went wide.

Tears spilled down her weathered cheeks, cutting clean tracks through the dirt and grime that coated her face.

Her mouth opened, but no words came out—only a strangled sob that seemed to contain years of suffering.

"Thank you," she finally whispered, clutching the moldy bread to her chest like it was the most precious thing in the world. "Thank you... thank you..."

Viktor stood, his jaw tight with an emotion he refused to name.

That's when he noticed them.

Children. At least a dozen, creeping out from the shadows where they'd been hiding and watching.

Their hollow eyes were fixed on the bread in the old woman's hands with the intensity of predators spotting prey.

But there was no aggression in their gazes—only desperate, aching hunger that made them look decades older than their years.

Viktor's stomach twisted.

Not with compassion—he wasn't fool enough to pretend this was about nobility or kindness.

But with the automatic recognition of a problem that needed solving.

These people were assets in his new territory, however damaged. Letting them die served no purpose.

'This place is as if plagued by some—!'

'Demon of plague?!'

His eyes widened as the fragments suddenly coalesced.

The title. He remembered the title of that demon from his nightmare, the one who got killed by that purple-horned individual.

Not only that—he didn't just recall the title, but memory after memory hit him, one after another: the demon being from Millbrook, and him being the demon of plague. Viktor's eyes snapped between the people.

And looking at them now—seeing their wasted bodies, their sickly pallor, the way disease seemed to cling to them like a second skin...

His gaze dropped to the ground beneath his feet.

The poisoned earth. The strange plants. The way nothing healthy could grow here.

'The land is plagued.'

Understanding crashed over him like a wave.

'Haah... I see.'

Viktor blinked, his mind racing through the implications.

This wasn't just poverty or neglect.

This was active corruption, a spiritual rot that had seeped into the very soil.

And if the land was plagued, then everything it touched—the plants, the water, the people—would be infected too.

'He was killed... right?' Viktor, through the haze of that dream, recalled how that demon—if he was right—was killed at the last moment.

And if he was, then it meant these plagues were not active, but rather a side effect of the demon's corpse.

Everything was much easier to pull into place once he got the idea.

He had already realized that the dream was not just a coincidence. But now it became even more certain that the dream was pointing toward none other than this place.

'And if I think...' He narrowed his eyes, lifting his gaze toward the horizon. Several mountains rose in the distance. His eyes tightened further as he tried to think, as if he'd at least found the source of this land's corruption.

Only two things remained: first, confirming his suspicion, and second, healing this land.

But now that the problem of this land was crystal clear, another issue surfaced.

He looked at the children, then at the shopkeeper still staring at his coins, then at the old woman clutching her moldy bread.

A system. He'd need to establish a proper, functioning system. Create work. Purify the land. Train people to maintain it.

So many things...

'Fuckers. This is going to be so much work.' Viktor had just come out of one issue and immediately found himself burdened by another. He ruffled his hair in frustration before taking a deep breath.

'Let's deal with the matter at hand first...' He switched his attention to the immediate crisis.

He turned back to the stall, pulling out more copper coins. "All of it."

The shopkeeper blinked, confusion washing over his gaunt features. "W-What?"

"All the bread. I'm buying it."

"L-Lord—Yes..." The man hesitated, his eyes darting between Viktor's face and the coins as if trying to determine whether this was some cruel joke.

Then he nodded quickly, his hands shaking even harder as he wrapped up the remaining loaves with desperate speed.

Viktor took them and turned toward the growing crowd that had materialized around him like ghosts gaining substance.

He handed out the bread one by one.

Some people wept openly, tears streaming down their faces as they accepted the moldy pieces with both hands.

Others just stared at him with hollow, grateful eyes that held more emotion than their starved bodies could express, clutching the bread to their chests like sacred relics.

A young mother with a baby at her breast—both of them nothing but skin and bones—pressed her forehead to his hand in thanks before shuffling away.

An old man, bent double with age and malnutrition, kissed the bread before taking a bite, his eyes closing in something like rapture.

Children crowded around his legs, their small hands reaching up with practiced politeness born of desperate need.

And then the bread ran out.

Viktor stood there, empty-handed, surrounded by dozens of gaunt faces still looking at him with desperate hope that hadn't yet registered the supplies were gone.

'So, where could that demon's body be?' As one problem went unsolved, another popped up. He stared blankly, pursing his lips, closing his eyes as he hammered his brain to go through that dream again—not the battle between the two demons, but the surroundings. 'Come on, THINK, DAMMIT!!'

His mental state mirrored that frustrating phenomenon of trying to remember a dream after waking.

The details were there, just beneath the surface of consciousness, but reaching for them directly only made them slip further away.

He knew from experience that dreams, once partially recalled, often sank into the subconscious rather than remaining accessible to active memory.

The storage system for information that might otherwise overload conscious processing.

It was the same mechanism that made childhood ghost stories leave such lasting imprints—the subconscious storing that fear of the unknown, which would later surface in fleeting moments to manifest as trauma or hallucination.

But he'd remembered "demon of plague," which meant the memory had been tagged as important before sinking.

He just needed—

"You're the new lord, aren't you?"

Viktor's racing thoughts screeched to a halt. He blinked, his expression going calm and blank as he turned toward the voice.

A middle-aged man—thin, with bitter eyes that held the peculiar courage of someone with nothing left to lose—stood a few feet away.

His posture was tense, his fists clenched at his sides as if preparing for violence he knew he couldn't survive.

Viktor noticed the calculation in the man's eyes. The way he was working himself up to something—as if those eyes were filled with the intention to commit suicide. Not the true kind that required absolute despair and courage, but the "provoking a bull to hit yourself" kind.

'This one's decided to die today...'

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