Ohan Province is the Zolian-administered former Kingdom of Aquafa, a frontier territory where imperial rule is made tangible through legal classification, population records, taxation, migration, and the transformation of local land and livelihoods. Its story links the empire’s administrative reach to the lives of people who are not equally recognized as citizens, and to ecological changes whose costs are borne locally.

From Kingdom to Province

Aquafa secured the status of an imperial province by allying itself with the invaders. Its people thereby became ordinary citizens under Zolian rule, but that arrangement did not extend to every group within the former kingdom. The mountain clans of the Toga region spoke Aquafa’s language and had defended its borders against incursions from Mukonia; under the former king, they had remained independent in their internal affairs in exchange for allegiance. Zol nevertheless refused to recognize them as Aquafaese citizens.

The distinction carried practical consequences. After consolidating control of central Aquafa, the empire turned to the subjugation of Toga. The former king could negotiate only to spare the clans’ lives, not to decide their status within the new imperial order. Zolian policy called for lower-status populations to be relocated elsewhere in conquered territory, so the clans faced expulsion from their homes and an uncertain existence in unfamiliar places. Their leaders hoped that a show of resistance might instead persuade Zol to accept them as useful allies and defenders of the western frontier against Mukonia.

Administration and Frontier Settlement

The province belongs to a wider system of frontier management. Zolian tax officials collect information even on nomadic groups in remote places such as Oki Valley and the Toga Mountains, recording the populations and ages of people in each area. This detailed system helps the government identify communities and assess them for taxation; it also gives officials a practical means of locating people who might otherwise remain hidden in the woods.

Settlement policy extended imperial influence beyond direct administration. Poor farmers and herders from the edges of the Zolian realm were ordered to move into conquered territories and build communities in the Zolian manner. As an unarmed vanguard, they raised familiar crops and livestock, constructed towns, and mingled with conquered populations, gradually remaking the frontier as Zolian land. Settlers could benefit from lower taxes and ownership of the land they cleared, yet many grieved the loss of their homeland and could not return. The policy offered advantages to some people constrained by landlords, while making their displacement part of the machinery of conquest.

Land, Livelihood, and Displacement

The province’s environments and economies were altered alongside its population. The broad Yukata Plains had been home to the Ahfal Oma and their fire horses; after conquest, Zol requisitioned the breeding stallions and converted grasslands to sheep pasture for Zolian immigrants. The newcomers also planted rye and beans. Rye could grow in the plains’ poor soil, but the crop had serious consequences for the local horse economy: fire horses died after eating it, and conflict between the Ahfal Oma and immigrant farmers ended with the execution of those held responsible for an uprising and the Ahfal Oma’s expulsion from the plains. They became a people without a homeland.

The ecological effects were not simply a matter of replacing one crop with another. The Yukata Plains might resemble Zolian fields, but their vegetation supported particular local fauna, and converting them to rye fields and sheep pasture disrupted that balance. Officials could view hardy black rye and population growth as signs of future prosperity; that calculation stood in tension with the losses already borne by the fire-horse people and the altered conditions of the plains.

Imperial categories also shaped the survival choices of families in the Oki region. Tohma’s family, living with scarce means, owed a head tax on each reindeer. Zolian blood brought lighter taxation for Kiya and Tohma, but not enough to relieve the household’s hardship. Ohma sold reindeer and turned to raising pyuika, which were taxed less heavily, only to find that the family lacked essential breeding knowledge. Traders’ failure to share information about mohoki left local families in debt and exposed to heavier taxes if their animals did not reproduce. The attempt to adapt livestock to the new economic pressures thus risked deepening the very insecurity it was meant to solve.

A Province at the Crossroads

Ohan Province joins the novel’s political and ecological histories in a single landscape. The empire’s records make distant populations legible to its officials; citizenship rules determine who may remain in a homeland; settlement orders move people across conquered territory; and taxes press on households adapting their herding practices. Meanwhile, imported crops and livestock reshape the land and intensify conflict over resources. The province’s transformation is therefore not only a change of sovereignty: it is a continuing redistribution of recognition, place, and the means to live.