CHAPTER 68: MODERNIZATION OF OTHERS IN PROGRESS

The sun climbed high over the sweltering tropics as the Aragonese flagship Resolución coasted gently into the harbor of Iloilo. From its polished deck, Prince Lancelot stood beside Juliette, eyes tracing the verdant landscape ahead—dense jungles, winding rivers, and hills speckled with stone terraces. The city below was alive, not with cannon smoke, but with chatter and construction.

Banners fluttered over government buildings bearing both the sun crest of Aragon and the native emblems of the local sultanate. This was no conquest. This was a promise.

As the gangway descended, Lancelot was the first to disembark, greeted by the island’s provisional governor, a wiry man in white linen named Emilio Balase. Behind him stood farmers, scholars, and soldiers—not in rows, but in shared purpose.

"Your Highness," Emilio said with a respectful bow, "Welcome to Panay."

Lancelot smiled and returned the gesture. "Governor Balase, it’s good to finally walk on the soil I’ve only seen drawn in ink."

They proceeded toward the colonial capital—a modest city named Nueva Vitoria, a grid of newly paved roads intersecting rice paddies, bamboo homes, and colonial-style buildings lined with arched colonnades and glassless windows.

The streets buzzed with motion. Caravans carried construction stone. Children darted barefoot through the plazas, trailed by mothers weaving baskets of sea grass. Local craftsmen erected scaffolding around a domed structure—the island’s first polytechnic institute.

"This city," Emilio explained as they walked, "was built with your plans. The rail is being laid from the copper mines in the interior to the harbor. And the trade school, just past the plaza, opens next month. We’ve already enrolled sixty-seven students—many are the sons of fishermen."

Lancelot’s eyes lingered on a line of students carrying books across a muddy road. "And the curriculum?"

"A blend," Emilio replied. "Agricultural engineering, mechanical basics, tropical medicine. Half our teachers are locals; the rest came on the last steam transport from Kareya."

They reached the gates of a tall white building ringed by palm trees—the newly established Colonial Administrative Hall. Its inner chamber had high ceilings, thick wooden beams, and a long table around which officials sat, studying charts, land records, and economic forecasts.

Juliette leaned close and whispered, "It reminds me of Firewell... in its infancy."

Lancelot nodded. "That’s the point. Not to mirror Firewell, but to let each colony build its own version of it."

He greeted the officials, asked questions about irrigation, flood prevention, and school attendance. For nearly an hour, he listened more than he spoke.

Finally, he turned to Juliette. "Let’s visit the rural districts."

Three days later, Lancelot’s party set off inland aboard a covered steam wagon, specially modified for uneven terrain. The dirt road twisted through thick jungle, where workers in straw hats cleared foliage to make way for the eventual railway.

The first village they reached—San Emilio—was deep in the hills, where red clay caked the feet and the air smelled of mango and soot. There, a cluster of Aeta tribespeople waited near a small Aragonese outpost, arms crossed, skeptical.

The local translator bowed slightly. "They fear being displaced, Your Highness. Some say Aragon will take the land like the Spanish before."

Lancelot dismounted. Slowly. Calmly. He approached the chieftain, an older man whose skin was weathered like tree bark.

"I won’t take what you already own," Lancelot said, speaking slowly, measured. "I want to build with your permission, not without it."

He pulled from his coat a series of illustrated papers—drawings of irrigation systems, school plans, sanitation wells, and steel tools adapted to tropical agriculture.

"We can teach your people how to use these," he continued. "Not to make them ours—but to help them remain yours, longer."

The chieftain’s expression didn’t change, but he raised his hand to accept the papers. He passed them down to a younger tribesman. Murmurs rippled through the crowd.

The translator waited, then leaned in. "He says... he’ll allow you to build a small workshop here. But it will be watched. And if his people fall sick or hungry, the deal is over."

Lancelot bowed. "Then we’ll start with water first. A well. And a school."

He turned to Juliette, who had been noting every detail. "We’ll send an educator and an engineer. Just two. No soldiers."

"And if bandits come?" Juliette asked cautiously.

Lancelot’s eyes didn’t waver. "Then we build walls after trust, not before."

Across the archipelago, Aragonese envoys followed similar paths. In Cebu, they signed a development pact with local landowners to co-finance textile mills. In Zamboanga, they set up marine weather stations and invested in port expansion, promising better storm forecasts in exchange for docking rights.

The jewel of their efforts, however, was Mindanao.

In Davao, where many locals had resisted foreign presence for centuries, a turning point came not from soldiers—but doctors. After a cholera outbreak ravaged three coastal villages, an Aragonese medical team deployed from the Resolución and set up mobile clinics. They brought not just medicine, but field sanitation kits, filtration systems, and volunteers who taught villagers how to purify water with local herbs and boiling techniques.

The mood shifted. When Lancelot arrived weeks later, a tribal elder presented him with a carved wooden spear—not as a threat, but as a sign of trust.

"You came not to enslave," the elder said, "but to teach. For that, your house will be remembered."

Lancelot took the spear with both hands and whispered, "And so will yours."

But not everyone was pleased.

In Batavia, Dutch traders cursed Aragon’s bypassing of their monopolies. In Saigon, French agents sent encrypted letters to Paris warning of "Castilian encroachment cloaked in scholarship." And in London, maps of the Pacific were updated with new red marks: "Aragonese Influence Zones."

At an emergency meeting of the Francois Republic’s foreign ministry, a diplomat slammed his fist on the table.

"If they build steam ports in Manila, then they control the South China Sea. We’ll be boxed out of Asia!"

Another snapped, "And what will we do? Bomb schools? Target irrigation projects?"

Silence.

They couldn’t.

That was Lancelot’s genius.

He colonized with chalk, with textbooks, with medicine.

And any nation that dared oppose it risked looking like tyrants.

Back in Aragon, the Civic Council reviewed maps of their expanding influence.

Juliette stood at the balcony of the palace library, overlooking Firewell’s train yard, now linked by iron threads to distant ports.

"They’re calling it the Civil Empire now," she murmured.

Lancelot approached from behind. "Better than a bloody one."

She turned to face him. "But still an empire."

He didn’t flinch. "Only if we rule them. We’re building partnerships, not plantations. Ideas, not taxes."

He unrolled a document on the table—The Kareya Doctrine, a proposed charter that would formalize Aragon’s foreign territories as Commonwealth Partners, with local autonomy, education guarantees, and the right to leave the alliance with two years’ notice.

Juliette scanned the draft. "You’re putting it in writing?"

Lancelot nodded. "So that if I ever forget, the world can remind me."

A month later, from a schoolhouse in Samar, a ten-year-old girl wrote a letter addressed simply:

"To Prince Lancelot, Firewell, Aragon."

The parchment passed through six ports, two trains, and one steamship.

When it reached Firewell, Juliette opened it first.

It read:

"I used to think people like you were dragons. But my teacher says you are just men. Thank you for the books. I want to be a doctor one day. When I do, I will visit you.

My name is Maria. I hope you do not forget us."

She brought it to Lancelot, who read it in silence.

Then he folded it, placed it in his coat, and said:

"We’ll build a medical college in Samar."

Juliette smiled. "Another seed?"

He looked toward the horizon.

"No. A forest."

The plan was drawn up by dusk.

Architects in Firewell and Davao exchanged sketches by telegraph wire. The Civic Academy would dispatch instructors. A vessel was rerouted from Zamboanga, its cargo hold filled with textbooks, microscopes, and vials of quinine. The foundation stones for the Maria Samar Medical College were scheduled to be laid before the year’s end.

But more than buildings moved—hearts did too.

That week, Lancelot visited the classrooms of Nueva Vitoria once more. He entered a modest lecture hall where a local teacher guided a roomful of barefoot children through the basics of human anatomy, using chalk drawings and banana leaves for diagrams. One boy eagerly raised his hand to answer a question. Another helped his blind sister trace the lines on the blackboard.

Lancelot lingered in the doorway, unnoticed, until the teacher spotted him.

"The Prince," she whispered, and the room went silent.

He raised a hand. "Don’t stop. Please."

But the children were already rising to their feet, bowing as one.

"I’m not here as a prince today," Lancelot said, stepping in. "I came to listen."

He sat cross-legged beside the students, accepting a makeshift textbook one of them handed him. The children laughed, giggling at the idea of a royal struggling with the names of bones in Visayan. And for a moment, there were no borders—only learning.

That night, Juliette wrote in her journal beneath lamplight aboard the Resolución.

We set sail tomorrow for Kareya. The tide of empire is ever tempting to seize—but Lancelot resists the crown of conquerors. He sows not dominion, but dignity. We have not built a kingdom here. We have helped others remember their own strength.

And perhaps that is the most radical act of all.

On the deck above her, Lancelot stood alone beneath the stars, a folded letter tucked near his heart. His gaze was fixed southward, toward Samar—toward a name written in careful ink by a girl who once thought he was a dragon.

And in the silence of the sea, he whispered to himself—

"Let them all become doctors."