Crusade against the Pope

Chapter 8 Future
As far as Gellis himself is concerned, the stew that the Franks are accustomed to has nothing to do with soup in China.

After all, Chinese people usually drink soup as a main dish, while Franks' stews can often be used as staple food.

There is no fixed recipe for stewing soup, and the production process is overly simple. It is nothing more than throwing various foods that can be found into the pot, adding seasonings, and then taking the time to stew it.

During the stewing process, you can also add bread, cereals, etc. to increase the viscosity of the soup and provide more satiety.

As for the cooking result, Garys felt that it was perhaps closer to porridge than soup.

But with this kind of random cooking process, you can imagine how the food will taste.

In the absence of spices to remove the fishy smell, even with a lot of meat in the soup, Gailis still found it a little difficult to swallow. However, because he was really hungry, he was able to eat a few more bites.

But now that the troublesome guy has come again, Garys has even less appetite and doesn't want to eat any more.

After swallowing a few mouthfuls quickly to finish the soup on the plate to avoid wasting it, Gailis pulled the girl away from this crowded place.

During this process, the girl was silent but did not resist. Her expression was complicated. She subconsciously used more force on the hand that was grabbed by Garys, trying to grab it back.

When Gailis led the girl all the way to the river bank, which was a little far away from the village, the two stopped and each found a stone to sit down.

"So, you are avoiding me, right?"

The girl lowered her head slightly, her eyes not looking directly at Gailis, her gaze wandering around in a scattered manner, and her hands kept opening and closing in front of her chest, sometimes with her five fingers open, sometimes with her hands clasped together, and the hunched shoulders revealed her state of mind more clearly.

"My brother passed away not long ago, and the old lady, Pierre, and Jacques all died two days ago. Balian and the others are far away in Jerusalem. You are the only one who is with me, and you don't want me anymore?"

Isabella spoke in a rambling, scattered voice.

It was a little difficult for Gailis to answer. Facing the girl's complaints, he couldn't give a direct emotional response for a moment. He could only stand up, come behind Isabella, put his right hand on the girl's shoulder, and give a little comfort.

Having had many years of experience with the girl, combined with the memories of his past life, Gailis actually knew very well what Isabella was missing. Peeling off the glamorous exterior, she was ultimately just a child from a broken family.

Isabella lost her father before she could remember, and her mother remarried. Although she had half-brothers and sisters to take care of her, her brother, the Leper King, was destined to have a short life and no descendants because of leprosy.

Under such circumstances, Isabella was regarded as a potential heir to the throne. As a child, she was involved in the political wave and had to engage in an inexplicable struggle with her own sister over the royal power.

Who could she trust? Those she could trust had died one after another, or were separated from her because of disputes over royal power.

In the end, all one can do is try to grab something in panic, just like a person falling into the water.

Time passed by minute by minute, and Garys and Isabella were silent, but this was not a solution after all. After organizing his words for a while, Garys said directly: "When I die, I see the future."

"Ah?" Isabella opened and closed her hands slowly, subconsciously crossing her fingers quite tightly, with a look of surprise on her face. This was a response she had never expected.

"In a year, the holy city of Jerusalem will be conquered by Saladin. No matter how hard Balian tries to defend the city, he will not be able to wait for reinforcements."

"At most, you can try to get a chance to buy off the people of the city with money to avoid being massacred or sold into slavery, because your brother-in-law, the future new king, will easily destroy the entire kingdom's army."

Saladin was the target of the joint attack by the whole of Europe during the Third Crusade.

The reason why he was declared the target of the Third Crusade was that he swept across the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187, a year later, and recaptured the holy city that Muslims had lost for years. Saladin was the Sultan of the Ayyubid dynasty. At its peak, his territories included Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Hejaz and Yemen, and ruled over a population of over million.

Indeed, compared with the Celestial Empire, there are only tens of millions of crickets, but what about the Kingdom of Jerusalem... This is the most sacred country in the Christian world, and its population cannot exceed one million no matter how it is counted.

With a size gap of more than ten times, if the Kingdom of Jerusalem had not been more brave and capable of fighting, the Kingdom of Jerusalem would have been destroyed in the Battle of Mongizar several years ago.

Now Saladin has regrouped and the kingdom is facing a powerful enemy, but there is constant internal dispute over succession to the throne.

Any discerning person can see that the current situation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem is extremely precarious, but like a person caught in quicksand, those in the world of fame and fortune cannot save themselves.

This is also one of the reasons why Gailis was unwilling to go to Jerusalem to participate in the king selection. Even if Gailis really turned the situation around and let Isabella win the king selection, so what?

In just one year, he was able to get a bunch of scum who had been fighting among themselves to put aside their past grudges and fight the enemy together? What a joke.

Gellis knew that he could not abandon Jerusalem, but Jerusalem did not have to be the Jerusalem of those princes and nobles.

As for Balian, Garys had seen the movie "Kingdom of Heaven" in his previous life.

Unlike the artistic treatment in the movie, Balian was not the illegitimate descendant of some Crusader nobles found in France, but the second son of the Ibelin family, a wealthy family in the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

In the movie, the protagonist Balian and the Leper King's sister Sibylla are in love with each other, but in reality, Balian is actually the father of the Leper King and Sibylla.

He married Isabella's mother, Maria Komnenos, and was Isabella's stepfather. He was also one of the few people who could be trusted by Isabella both politically and personally.

"So, you did receive divine revelation?"

"Yes."

"So, can it be changed?"

"No."

"So? Where are you now?"

"Now, I hope to sow a seed and unite the people's strength. After the Holy City is conquered, there will be a base to regroup and wait for the arrival of the Third Crusade."

Why must Jerusalem be the Jerusalem of those kings and nobles?

There are some ambitions that Gellis has never made clear to others, but he knows that if he wants the people of this land to no longer experience war, he will have to take an unprecedented path.

　Let me talk about the update. Because of the pressure in my life, I am now working three jobs, one for my main job, one for delivering food, and one for writing...

　　I have to try my best to coordinate the time of these three jobs, so the updates in the past few days have been as inexplicable as crazy.

　　Starting today, I have been trying my best to adjust my writing time.

　　Future updates will be mainly in the afternoon.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)