After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World novel Chapter 648

Before heading inside the meeting room, everyone in the team signed a non-betrayal Oath in the Village Center. And, as with others, the loyalty oath would be completely voluntary.

The oath was a standard perpetual non-betrayal oath made by Mathilda and Lawyer Jun to ensure there were no loopholes. This was something every territory employee, Terran or Aborigine, had to do before they get hired.

They would be given a choice to continue with the employment after seeing the oath, and so far no one had refused to do so.

At the same time, Altera wouldn’t demand a loyalty oath asking for people’s lives. Altera wanted to ensure its safety present and future, but didn’t want to take away people’s freedom.

Hence, the oath still guaranteed the territory could trust these individuals with sensitive information, while giving them a choice to undergo it or not. It was also insurance that the individuals would in no way undermine the safety, interest, or well-being of Altera (or any of its satellites) in any way or form.

Even if the damage was genuinely by accident, they would be receiving some form of punishment proportional to the damage they did. This was still under discussion, but the punishment could be monetary or even forced labor.

This would ensure proper care and quality in the work of the officials and the employees.

Henry and the others didn’t react much with the oaths, knowing it was necessary. There were a few frowns—after all, even if they weren’t planning on betraying, getting so many rules imposed did not feel good.

Finally, the oaths were also perpetual—that was to say, like the hired aborigines, they would not be able to cause damage to Altera even when they were no longer associated with it.

The wordings were also much more detailed than what the aborigines signed back in the Chancery—something Jun and his team interviewed aborigines a lot.

For one, they included indirect damage, so they couldn’t send people after Altera in their stead (as what Belize would’ve done, if he was alive). This would also control the entry of future spies in key positions of the territory.

At the very least, most territories would hesitate to plant spies in their midst, because it’d have been useless—maybe even counterproductive.

They even added ’perpetual beyond the grave’ in order to avoid unnecessary leaks even if the employee, or even the territories themselves, fell. As it was now, they could take the hired aborigines of fallen territories (like Rona and Mogi) and get everything they knew about the territories that were no more.

Speaking of this, when they found out about this (Jun was asking a lot of questions about the existing oaths), Mathilda and the others also got more information about the world.

Interestingly, most of the ’fallen’ territories were exhausted villages overpowered by mobs. Fall from wars, and more especially getting taken over, was actually uncommon.

This was not entirely a surprise because, technically, wars could only be among territories of the same rank. So, while there was a 50-50 chance of losing the war, it was a rare case for a territory to actually fall from it—not unless they were specifically targeted.

Sadly, Fargo was a deeply untrusting individual, so what they got from Rona and Mogi was nothing they didn’t already know.

Leny and most of the others’ experiences were similar because the villages they were hired in before Altera were all unremarkable. The fall of these territories was also typical of this world.