Only through decades of war could enough land and space be cleared to ennoble new lords with military merit.
The core logic was simple: there were only so many positions to fill, but the number of aspirants was always growing.
Every reshuffling meant a collision of countless ambitions and desires. Old noble houses were weakened, while new powers rose to seize the opportunity, filling the newly empty positions.
And those nobles who failed to secure their footing during the reshuffling could only watch as their family's glory and status waned, eventually becoming sacrifices in others' scrambles for power.
Altan knew the cruelty of it all. What he sought was merely to secure a stable foothold for himself and his family in this endless game of power.
The Battania Bay region, that stretch of largely undeveloped land, was the new opportunity he saw.
