Chapter 135: Discussing Labor

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Olivia turned the page.

The paper was so thin it was almost translucent under the oil lamp, the words on the back faintly bleeding through.

“What does it mean? ‘Those who labor more grow poorer, those who labor less grow richer’—this line…”

Gorky’s eyes lit up.

Not the kind of glow reflected from the candle, but a light rising from deep within his eye sockets—something pressed down for a long time, finally surfacing.

He set down the enamel cup, revealing his thick-knuckled wrists.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

The cuffs of his gray shirt slipped down.

“What chapter are you on?”

“The beginning of Chapter Three.”

“What about the earlier parts?”

“I skipped them.”

Gorky let out a chuckle.

This time there was sound in it—a low rumble rolling up from his chest, like a bear sneezing by the hearth.

He reached out, took the book from her hands, flipped back nine pages, and ran his finger across line after line of Urske script.

“Let me give you an example.”

He extended one finger, pointing out the window.

“There’s a blacksmith in this city. He works eight hours a day at the forge, and the horseshoes he makes earn him just enough to rent a single room and eat two meals. His boss—also a bear—doesn’t forge anything. He just sits behind the counter collecting money. What the boss earns in a day is more than what the blacksmith makes in a month.”

Olivia lowered her gaze to her own fingers.

She remembered a few days ago—a few days ago, she too had been returning from that mine.

The workers choking on dust in the mine earned only a few coppers a day, while the Archduke could let a few tens of thousands of tons of ore slip through his fingers without a second thought.

“Isn’t the blacksmith’s labor different from the boss’s labor?”

“The boss doesn’t labor. The boss owns the factory and the raw materials, then uses wages to buy the blacksmith’s labor. The value the blacksmith creates—the portion that exceeds his wages—all of it goes to the boss. I call that surplus value.”

Olivia rolled the term around on her tongue.

She had never heard the word before, but the way Gorky said it—without any ornament, without any defensive self-justification—simply stated a fact, and that made it sound strangely undeniable.

“There’s a gap between the value actually created and the wage. That excess—ore, ironware, train tickets, silk, gems—all of it flows into someone else’s pockets.”

“Including nobles like the Border Archduke?”

“All of them. Not just in Urske. Go look at the factories in Osteria, the colonial estates in Eldron, the docks in the Shiimi Sunrise Kingdom, the state-run workshops in Wuling. As long as a gap exists between the value labor creates and the wage paid, that gap will sooner or later flow into someone’s pocket.”

Her fingers traced slowly across lines of Urske script on the page, the pads feeling the slight indentation of the ink.

She was still trying to digest it.

All the things Olivia had ever seen labeled “forbidden” before were just Prunier’s few privately hoarded romance novels.

The Red Dragon captain kept those books in a small wooden box under her bed, locked with an imitation of the Red Dragon Queen’s seal.

After Grey accidentally caught a glimpse of the cover, her entire face went red as if she’d been blasted by dragon breath, and she vowed to burn every pink bookmark in the stronghold.

Those books were forbidden too—in the territory of the Red Dragon Queen Yigenikesi, romance novels were “vulgar reading material that corrodes a dragon’s will to fight,” and they were burned on sight.

But that kind of “forbidden” was completely different from this book.

Romance novels just earned a few eye rolls from the dragon elders, while Gorky’s book could get a bounty posted on someone’s head at any moment.

And here he was, sitting right in front of her.

“So as long as someone possesses the factories, the land, the machines—it’s impossible for them not to possess other people’s labor?”

“Correct. When those things are in the hands of a few—everyone else can only work for them forever.”

“The Archduke… that Archduke in the distance, he has the mines, the railroads, the complete set of production tools—he always takes the biggest share. The blacksmith has his craft, his hammer—he gets the smaller share. The miner has only his two hands—he gets an even smaller one.”

Gorky’s finger traced a faint line across the tabletop, as if drawing an invisible boundary.

“Then why don’t those people go and possess those things themselves?”

Gorky looked at her, his gaze suddenly growing heavy.

He bent lower, his finger slowly circling the rim of the enamel cup.

His finger stopped, then moved to a thick Urske dictionary resting on the inner side of the table.

“You see, every word in this book is printed clearly because the people who printed it have seen the same answer countless times throughout history—they will use every means to stop them from doing so.”

“The military, the law, the police, the prisons, morality, religion. Every superstructure you can think of—it all exists to protect that gap. So even if the blacksmith knows he’s being exploited, even if the miner knows he’s being drained, they have no way to change it. Because the entire system is protecting the one who takes that gap.”

The military.

The law.

The police.

The prisons.

Morality.

Religion.

Olivia suddenly thought of the legend of the Holy Mountain.

Saint Sergey Mountain—the locals all revered the mountain god Sergei.

She had always assumed it was just a religious custom, but now she suddenly realized that beneath the Holy Mountain lay a city of countless miners.

They carved into the rock, dug out iron ore, ate black bread and drank cold soup for themselves, while the Archduke’s manor was hosting banquets, scooping caviar from porcelain plates and tossing it away half-eaten.

The god watches them from the mountain—the god tells them, mine honestly, obey orders, and after death you will return to the Sacred Lake to enjoy your reward.

Her throat moved as she swallowed.

Gorky didn’t answer immediately.

He picked up the enamel cup and took a drink.

“Little girl, you’re very sharp.”

“Is Saint Sergey Mountain… also a superstructure?”

His voice was soft, but that softness wasn’t dismissive.

He set the enamel cup back on the table, his bear ears slowly rotating half a turn atop his head, then leaned back into the chair.

“I’m not familiar with theology. But I can tell you one thing—whenever something can make people lower their heads, hand over the wealth they created, and endure a fate they know is unjust—that thing, whatever it’s called, is standing guard for that system.”

But gods and religion were different.

The gods were real.

Victoria was the true goddess of balance, yet she didn’t rely on mortal worshippers—and she had never taught anyone to bow their head.

Nuolina was the elf race’s goddess of love, but she didn’t even want a physical form.

The true gods lived under a different set of rules, with no connection to miners or archdukes whatsoever.

“Then gods are different from gods.”

Olivia flipped the page back to where she had been reading, and paused.

“Do you have a union?”

Gorky’s bear ears shot straight up on his head.

“How did you—”

“I just thought,” her finger traced slowly over the Urske letters at the top of the page, “if a person’s writings could be borrowed and annotated by so many different people, then he must have already tried to organize them.”

Gorky fell silent.

A ring of tea stain had gathered in the chipped notch on the enamel cup’s wall, flickering dimly in the lamplight.

His finger lay still on the cup’s rim.

“Workshops.”

“I spent some time in the Federation,” she said.

“I’ve seen a few workshops.”

Gorky looked at her quietly for a while.

This might have been the first time in his life someone said that to him—not “you really dare to write that,” but “do you have a union.”

He sank his back heavily into the chair, and the wooden frame let out a dull creak, as if it could no longer be bothered to support his weight.

Then he smiled—a smile completely different from before.

Not the bitter grin of a man amusing himself in a locked room, but a smile that spread across his entire face, carving deep lines at the corners of his eyes and across his forehead.

Like a man who had walked the tundra for a long time, suddenly realizing he wasn’t the only set of footprints in the snow.

“I do. For that, I spent two years in prison.”

He lowered his eyes to his hands.

Those hands had thick knuckles and heavy calluses on the pads of his fingers.

A faded scar ran across the skin of his wrist—worn away by long years of shackles.

“And you still wrote in prison?”

“I wrote there too. The guards would confiscate what I wrote. So I wrote it again—in a different way.”

Olivia said nothing.

She suddenly recalled the way this man had taken the enamel cup at the stronghold, watching his faded gray hair hang low as he slowly turned the cup in his hands.

She had thought he was just old—but that was the stillness of someone who had grown used to repeating the same motions behind iron bars.

She had seen demons in Wolfgang’s Dark Alley, seen Victoria among the angel ruins.

But what truly made it hard to look directly at him was this old exile sitting across from her, holding an enamel cup—with no magic, no divine power, no bloodline advantage at all—only a pen and a book, dismantling the entire system and laying its parts out on the table for her to see.

Powerlessness can sometimes weigh more than power.

“One last question.”

She flipped the pages back to the beginning of Chapter Three.

“The surplus value business—did you come up with it yourself, or…”

Gorky raised the enamel cup and took a drink.

His pinky tapped lightly against the cup’s wall from the outside, like a period slowly drawing itself across the page.

He seemed to have known she would ask this.

“Part of it was proposed by others first. People in Urske academia had already been working on this—though most of them stayed in the universities of Froststone City, writing in jargon no one could understand. No one was willing to go talk to the workers in the mines and factories about any of it.”

“And you went.”

“I went.”

“And that’s why I became an exile.”