If Luding continued gathering, he would soon reach a level that would at least appear to challenge his peers – already the mighty black serpent of the Gray Hills was awake to him, raising, as it were, a scaled black eyebrow at Luding's speedy accumulation of power and lesser creatures, men, and resources. The old Shadowmaw in the mountains did not love him either. And at some future point, the Yanshi, scarcely people and more like cruel animals as they were, would come to resent his chains and find a way to throw them off.
So might one feudal lord of this wild be alarmed—or at least deeply curious—when learning that a neighbor of theirs had called in his vassals and raised an army. Luding will have problems.
But it was not his fault that he was better than them he had once been a man—a man capable of raising armies.
Before he'd learned the truth.
