The next morning, there was quite the exodus from the city. It seemed like just about everyone outside of diplomats were beginning their journey's home. Zaka has a meeting tomorrow with Kao to discuss culture exchange cities, and from what I gathered, diplomats both foreign and domestic have meetings lined up that are expected to last for weeks. While Kao has unofficially been running the country for the duration of the war, since it's official now, a lot of promises and deals have to be formalized under the new government. Beyond the meeting for our cultural exchange cities, we'll have to have our own diplomat working along official channels moving forward.

The cultural exchange cities, given their dual purpose, are going to be discussed directly between Zaka, Kao, and myself. Since we have quite a few dwarves with us currently, deciding things quickly and returning to Kembora was put in as a high priority. My understanding is that today, the majority of the day is being taken up by internal dwarven politics. There were quite a few previous dwarven lords who perished in the war, and there is probably a lot to consider politically as a result. While temporary representatives have been assigned and were present at last night's reconstruction banquet, on a longer term basis, I'd expect things to get redrawn.

As was explained at the banquet, the crown itself is the actual guarantor of the agreements that were made last night, so even if the representative is replaced, it won't affect the deals or their enforcement. Those representatives at the banquet who weren't the historic rulers of their region were given a few weeks notice to study the regional records that they were in charge of negotiating for, to ensure that the deals made were reasonable.

While that had initially left me confused why they wouldn't wait until after appointments to start those kinds of negotiations, I realized as I watched people begin leaving the city that for some further regions, it might take months to actually make the trip to the capitol. The process of redrawing territorial lines can take months in itself, which would delay reconstruction by a needlessly long period of time. It seems that this is a somewhat common practice after particularly devastating demon lord wars, so I didn't bother to dig deeper.

The meeting we had with Kao was fairly short on the matter of the cultural exchange cities. In short, a handful of dwarven representatives will join us on our return trip. When we make it to Kembora, they'll conduct a census of our island's dwarven population, and survey them on attitudes about moving to Kembora permanently. They'll then meet with us to discuss the maximum population of dwarves we'd be willing to house on Kemobra. There will be other factors involved as well, like sharing construction plans for their city, along with what rights and the charter that they'll be ruled under. After that, they'll return back to the dwarven continent.

On the dwarven continent, they're still doing some damage assessments, but in essence, those who's villages or cities were completely destroyed will be offered the opportunity to resettle on Kembora. That'll happen on a first come first served basis until our maximum we provide is met. While most are expected to want to remain in their homelands, it only takes a very small percentage for there to be tens of thousands who would end up relocating to our island.

Negotiations for other matters, like formalizing all the previous deals during the war, will happen in a few weeks from now between our diplomatic representative and a representative of the new government. We'd previously agreed to give them a degree of leeway before having to repay us, since they'd have to do reconstruction. While that will be maintained, Zaka and I discussed the fact that we're still producing and shipping tanks and machine guns to the dwarves, despite the fact that they're officially declaring the war over.

Everyone knows, however, that there are still isolated pockets of resistance that their armies are fighting and clearing out. Since they're likely to want to continue buying weapons from us, the new negotiations should involve a compounding interest rate on goods that will be provided from this point on. Basically, we'll halt shipments until new negotiations can occur, and we'll also stipulate that they have to pay off the original agreements before they can pay the debt on new weapons, should they want them.

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If they decide that they don't want more weapons, we can find uses for them increasing our own defensive capabilities until we get some of the production switched over to producing civilian products. In all likelihood though, they'll agree to reasonable terms, which should also encourage them to pay off their initial, interest-free debts quickly, to prevent interest from accruing on new debts.

The primary focus for our trade deals isn't money either. It's raw resources. While continental sized regions have an abundance that will last millennia of most resources, we can easily go through the majority of ours in a century. Money, while more versatile, is also more volatile. It doesn't do us any good to have a bunch of money if another war breaks out, since we can't easily trade it at those times. As such, keeping a strategic balance, or better yet, surplus, or resources coming and going from our island is important for our long term survival.

While all of that discussion was technically well outside of my technical purview as a minister, I felt it was good to have the discussion with Zaka directly. Perhaps the other ministers would see things differently, but from direct evaluation of how quickly the dwarves have been mining out our island mountain, resulting in stockpiles of ores and minerals, it's becoming more and more apparent that the total amount of available resources is limited. While they have only mined a small fraction of the total mountain, it's also enough to likely quantify a few percentage points of the total resources on Kembora.

Without the need to travel all the way back to Ostark, we were able to reach the sea in three days, then it took another six to make it back to Kembora. There, we received some disturbing news. It seems that one of the mine shafts higher up in the mountain had breached what was likely a collapsed magma chamber in the mountain. When it did so, a large volume flooded the tunnel, and spread through the rest of the mines. All the lower levels drained were flooded completely, and a large amount of water drained out of the tunnels for days before they could re-enter and assess the situation.

In total 44 dwarves and 32 demons died in the accident. Apparently, this isn't an unheard of occurrence on the mainland. Often times collapsed magma chambers apparently present similarly to other ore formations through the dwarven equivalent of tectonic sense. Nevertheless, it was a real tragedy, and was very unfortunate timing, given the presence of the representatives there to survey the dwarves about staying on the island.

As the chamber drained, it had also triggered a number of landslides and collapses along an unpopulated side of the island, where the lack of water caused the voids to collapse in the stone of the chamber, resulting in changes to the surface. Thankfully, those occurred in the unpopulated craggy sections of the island.

The amount of tunnels has also steadily been increasing the passive water flow out of the main tunnels for some time, as a large amount of the stone has some amount of water held in it. The minister who is in charge of our natural resources has noted a marked decline in freshwater springs around certain sections of the mountain. The amount of freshwater flowing into the city, however, has increased slightly in that same amount of time, likely indicating that a lot of that water is now simply being directed through the inside of the mountain, then out, rather that out through surface springs.

The lower levels of the mines are still being actively pumped out with more powerful pumps now, to drain all the extra water that flooded them. They'd already installed some mana powered pumps to handle the passive water collection that was occurring, but with the sudden influx, it'll take some time for them to be drained.

In the meantime, the central climb to the top of the mountain has been steadily growing despite the interruption. I doubt it will be ready by the time I've completed the basic radio design, but it might be ready once I've made some revisions to it. Since I can see the next island from the summit of Kembora, we should be able to establish stable radio connections between the two islands easily.

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