It has always been like this, is it right?

This was actually no issue in itself.

Much like feudal knight-nobles.

The mighty donned armor for defense and patrol.

Upholding order.

While the weak tended smallholder farms.

Paying tribute to sustain the elite.

Who, in turn, shielded the frail.

But among the Demon Clan, it was utter waste!

Beyond the game’s lore, the Demon Clan’s recorded history spanned thousands of years—

Over millennia, Demon Clan annals hadn’t stagnated.

Their power systems had matured to a fine art.

What did that imply?

Even in remotest hamlets, should a Demon Clan child show the slightest mana aptitude—and chance upon basic inheritance, be it crude family lore passed by word of mouth—

They stood a strong chance of blossoming into a “professional” wielding modest might and specialized skills!

Perhaps a wood-affinity farmer deft at spurring crops.

Or a fire-attuned smith versed in ore smelting.

Or a shadow hunter with keen senses for the track…

Such powers were meant as precious engines for production.

For forging wealth.

For mending lives!

Yet reality?

These rustic-raised Demon Clansfolk, brimming with untapped might,

Once discovered or “awakened,” were swiftly conscripted by local lords or armies!

The sole value drilled into them: “combat”!

Their finest fate: donning armor, taking up arms.

Becoming soldiers, officers in the ranks.

Or guards, enforcers for lords and Demon Lords!

Their strength, their cunning, their unique gifts—

All shackled within the crude scaffold of “slaughter” and “intimidation”!

While domains truly craving power—agriculture’s tilling deep, crafts’ reinvention, mining’s breakthroughs, transport’s forging, even magic tech’s pivot to civilian ends—

Were abandoned wholesale to the lowliest Demon Clansfolk.

Those with scant mana, reliant on raw sinew alone.

Then the strongest, those with the richest mana—even the most learned among them—

Shunned production outright.

Spurned R&D and innovation.

Pocketing swords instead: where next to war?

Leaving the weakest dregs to face the soil dawn to dusk.

Squandering lifetimes on that pittance of output?

Absurd, profligate waste!

Channeling the most innovative potential, the peak “productivity,”

To the least wealth-creating “consumptive” toil.

While saddling the frailest, least efficient masses

With society’s foundational productive burdens!

The upshot: the Demon Clan’s overall productivity hobbled.

Wealth accrual sluggish.

The underclass not quite in penury,

But lives withered all the same.

While the elite chased endless armament.

Outlandish folly.

The Demon Clan had divisions of labor, true.

Yet it lingered at the superficial.

Take the erstwhile Evernight Territory: no paragon of plenty,

But rife with specialties ripe for deeper mining.

Like Evernight crystal extraction—

When a powerhouse like Old Stonehammer, that obsidian giant troll,

Belonged squarely in the crystal pits to shine fullest!

…Sigh, no—thinking on Demon Clan history left Vivian with a sense of martial mania, brainless to boot.

Granted, Vivian knew the rationale for such systems in the Demon Clan’s early epochs.

Those annals sealed in ancient parchments, the Dark Eras chronicled a world a hundredfold crueler than now—

Demon Clan tribes manifold, warring ceaselessly.

Might made right, the sole creed.

Flanked without by foes unnumbered, perils lurking.

In that dawn-to-dusk terror, power had to funnel maximally to battle and bulwark.

The strong ever at the fore, bodies as shields.

Carving scant breath for kin behind.

The weak, pouring all to rearward sustainment.

Then, [“all armed, the mighty as blade”] was survival’s lone gambit.

So Bai An found it absurd in retrospect—

Times had turned!

Millennia elapsed!

Demon Clan frictions lingered internally, but grand civil wars had all but vanished.

A rough equilibrium held among the Demon Lords’ domains.

Outward unity the consensus.

External threats persisted, yet no longer that clan-ending cataclysm.

Objectively, Demon Clan society now met the criteria to shift from “wartime footing” to “building mode”—

Tragic: the regime, like rusted cogs, clung obstinately to yore!

The ironclad martial heritage, the “power equals arms” mindset—

An unseen fetter, clamping the entire Demon Clan.

Old Stonehammer and his obsidian giant troll crew—high dark-resistance to a one—epitomized this ossified creed’s spawn.

When Vivian wrenched them forcibly from combat rosters,

Reassigning to Blackrock Town’s core mining ops,

Their knee-jerk wasn’t eager uptake.

Nor flat refusal.

But bafflement, incomprehension.

They hadn’t wished detachment from ranks.

To turn full-time producers.

They yearned to quest alongside As and the rest.

But Vivian had denied them outright.

“Demon Lord!”

Old Stonehammer had fronted for the lot then.

Bearing a warrior’s blunt candor and query.

Bewilderment etched on his crag-hewn face.

“We obsidian giant trolls—our line especially—have always been prime fighters!

Charge and hold, safeguard the hearth—that’s our charge, our pride!

Mining… vital work, aye, but leave it to fitter commons!

Of course we’ll dig for the domain, for rebuilding Evernight City—but you can’t doom us to that forever, cut from combat rolls!

As and his are still patrolling, linking outposts—we want in too…”

“Ever thus, makes it right?”

Bai An had regarded her protesting subordinates in silence.

Replying faintly.

Old Stonehammer froze.

And fell mute.

Those seven airy words struck like thunder.

Sundering the hoary tenets in Old Stonehammer and kin’s hearts.

Mouths agape, their stone visages cracked with blankness for the first time.

“Ever thus, makes it right?”

Of course not!

The Demon Clan’s power inheritance had, in truth, evolved most organically, most soundly.

Like trees in a wood, each to its bent.

And now, what Vivian needed was to wield the blade of exigency and reform.

To shatter, sever that outdated “pruning code” stunting the forest’s bloom.

Reforging a fresh order—efficiency paramount, talents maximized, productivity unbound at its core!