魅魔的庄园

This was a fairly slow paced “farming” or “infrastructure” novels. It’s set in a western pseudo fantasy world (think elves, minotaurs, dwarves, holy clergy and royalty) but without the magic.

Essentially, the world is super backward, low productivity, and every non-human race is a slave (though human slaves exist too). The sole religious group parades as being compassionate and while some members certainly follow those values, most are pretty corrupt. The royalty is somewhat sidelined by the religious group, and the Queen wants to overthrow her husband, brother, children to become the King. There’s also another country out for blood and so on.

MC’s goal is basically to smooth out all those problems in race/slavery, poverty at the start in his own little corner of the world, and overthrowing the religious group, royalty and other countries gradually. And yeah, he does a pretty good job.

Slow-paced

This was a slow paced story where the MC didn’t really have a golden finger. He doesn’t have magic, doesn’t have a system, and actually doesn’t know nor produce that much about infrastructure classics that pretty much every other time traveller knows. He’s very restricted in his development at the start because his territory simply doesn’t have many things. For example, he doesn’t do the classic salt production because his territory doesn’t have anywhere that can produce salt. He finds a substitute for the classic potato/sweet potato as high-yield crops, but they aren’t in the story.

So yeah, this isn’t one of the more satisfying reads if you’re looking from an infrastructure point of view, but he definitely very slowly upgrades from just a manor owner to being a worthy king!

Oh wait, MC does kinda have a golden finger. He’s a succubus so he has a “charm” ability, but he doesn’t really use it much. It causes him a bit of grief in the first part (people keep trying to climb into his bed supposedly, or they just try to flirt with him), and towards the second half he uses it as a truth serum (but it often brainwashes certain people to just follow him because it gets progrressively stronger). Anyway, I didn’t feel like it was a big part of the story.

ML, MC and their relationship

Demon king x succubus.

ML disguises himself as an elf at the start, thinking MC is a silly lil succubus. As a demon king, it was likely that he would’ve just destroyed the entire world. Eventually he falls for him and long story short, they’re a perfect match because of their lifespan and everything. I’m too lazy to describe it, ML doesn’t really seem to do much except for offering to fight for MC (fairly common in these stories), but for a farming/infrastructure story of decent length, I’d definitely say they had a decent amount of a romance line (it’s usually so little)! Mainly because there was a decent amount where they rolled the blankets haha.

Other thoughts

There were two things that felt like a bit like a wow! moment. Or maybe I’m just stupid haha.

1. The “Holy Mother” in the story. So, this was the “god” the MC eventually pivoted the other believers to because she couldn’t really help in disaster, but could provide hope. Anyway, there was a chapter where some people rumoured the MC was her son. Then in the author’s note, the MC was like I heard I have another mother? And the author was like … So yeah, basically it seemed to imply that the author was his creator mother xD
2. Ahhh, MC had an old steward who was very loyal to him from his manor days. He was pretty much the earliest confidant of MC, and taught a lot of MC’s later confidants. He was just mentioned as “the steward” for much of the story. After his death, he was granted dukedom and his full name was mentioned! I thought that was so bittersweet.

It was definitely rather regrettable that MC never got to reunite with his family. Especially considering how much he missed his family at certain points. Well, he doesn’t mention his family or original world in the end, so I guess that’s all right too.

Conclusion

Pretty solid story overall! Some might say the story could be more in depth, especially towards the end where the power struggles were quite skimmed over.