by Dojyomaru
“Why can you not be more certain?!” Aisha shouted.
“Well, I don’t remember what happened before I went to sleep,” I said. “Why are we together in the same bed with our clothes on, anyway?”
“What really happened?” Liscia demanded. “Why don’t you try to remember what you did last night?”
Following Liscia’s suggestion, I went through the events of last night in my head.
I recalled having done some work to sort things out after the annexation of Amidonia, in order to adjust the taxation scheme (the Principality of Amidonia had a lower population than the kingdom, and to compensate, the individual tax burden was higher). I had summoned Roroa, Colbert, and bureaucrats from the finance ministries of both countries for meetings that had lasted late into the night.
Those talks had been going on since the day before yesterday, and we had already pulled one all-nighter on them. We had been taking breaks as we went along.
In the end, by the time we’d come up with an overall plan, the day had changed, and it was around 3:00 in the morning today. Everyone had been pretty out of it then.
Colbert and the bureaucrats had shambled out of the room like zombies, while I had taken a dive into the simple bed set up in the office with my clothes still on... and fallen asleep, probably. Some time had passed between then and now. Perhaps Roroa had slept here rather than return to her own room.
I shook Roroa’s shoulder as she continued to greedily indulge in more sleep.
“Hey, Roroa. Get up.”
“Hm... What’s up? Darlin’... I’m still sleepy.” Roroa rubbed her eyes as she sat up in bed.
“No, not ‘What’s up?’” I demanded. “Why are you sleeping here?”
“Cut a gal some slack,” she said. “I was downright exhausted after all the meetin’ yesterday. I didn’t have the energy for draggin’ myself back to my own room, so I joined you in bed, Darlin’.” Roroa stretched, then stood up from the bed on unsteady legs. She was still groggy and couldn’t see straight. “It’s no good. I’m still tired. Gonna go back to sleep in my own room.”
“Yeesh...” Liscia said, with an air of one who’s washed her hands of the whole situation. “Aisha, please, would you carry this girl back to her room?”
Aisha snapped to attention out of her daze. “Yes! At once, princess!”
“Also, haven’t I told you not to call me ‘princess’?”
“U-Understood. Pri... Lady Liscia.”
Now that Aisha had become the second candidate to become a primary queen and their positions were close, Liscia had started telling Aisha not to address her as princess, but to use her name instead. Aisha was still getting it wrong, though.
Aisha supported the groggy, staggering Roroa and led her out of the governmental affairs office.
Having watched the two of them go, I hesitantly looked to Liscia.
“Um... That’s how it is, so could I perhaps ask for your forgiveness this time?” For some reason, I sounded like a man making excuses after he was caught cheating, but this is what it means to live as a man.
“Honestly...” Liscia puffed up her cheeks a little as she plopped herself down on the bed. “These things happen because you have a bed here. Maybe I should break it?”
“Please don’t,” I said. “Where would I sleep?”
“You finally made a room of your own, didn’t you? Or would you rather use my bed? Use a different one each day.” Liscia gave me a heavy stare.
Did she mean that I should use her, Aisha, Juna, and Roroa’s beds, taking turns in a different one each day...?
“I think I’d be too nervous to sleep, so let me pass on that, please,” I said.
“Geez,” she muttered. “I’m being hounded by Marx to ‘Produce an heir, quickly!’ you know?”
“Urkh... Could you wait a little longer on that? I do have something in mind.”
“Something in mind?” she asked.
I rose from my bed and stretched. “I’ve finally stabilized the internal political situation in the country. I’ve got a secret pact with the Empire, too, and though there are some countries nearby that worry me, things should be stable for the time being. Well, that’ll depend on what the Demon Lord’s Domain does, though.”
“I suppose...”
“Also... I’ve managed to convince myself that I should become king,” I said.
“I wish you’d say you’ve resolved yourself to do it instead.”
“Resolved myself to it... Maybe I have? I’m prepared to face the consequences.”
“I’m not really getting the difference there,” said Liscia.
“There’s nothing standing in my way. So...” I puffed up my chest to look more confident. “Now I’m going to do as I please. Up until now, securing my power was the first priority, so I was avoiding policies that would cause too much of a stir in society. If a policy had been too out there, it would have caused needless internal confusion, and that could have benefited a foreign adversary. But now, I don’t have to worry about that. I’m going to do more and more to remake this country.”
I declared this pretty forcefully, but Liscia still had a dry look on her face.
“That’s fine, but... what does that have to do with you still not having laid a hand on me?”
I was silent.
It looked like I’d failed to dodge the issue. I’d thought I’d managed to change the topic, too...
Let me say now, it wasn’t that I was adverse to doing those things with Liscia and the others. No, really, I wanted to act all lovey-dovey with them. I mean, the current situation was giving me a serious case of blue balls. But, before that, there was something I needed to accomplish. For Liscia and the others’ sake, too.
“W-Well, you’ll find out the answer eventually,” I said.
“You’re not just dodging the issue?” Liscia demanded.
When Liscia tried to stare into my eyes, I averted them the best I could manage.
“I really do need more capable people working for me,” I said.
I was seated around a “kotatsu” table with Liscia, Aisha, Juna, and Roroa, who had woken up after having gone back to sleep, and we were eating lunch. I’d decided it was a good time to broach that topic.
This was my room in the castle, which I’d made after Hakuya had informed me, “It’s about time you got a room of your own.” The truth was, I had been allotted the room much earlier, but I’d been using it as a storage room for the Little Musashibos. Since he’d insisted I use it, I had given it a major remodel. For that, I’d used the financial support for supporting the king’s lifestyle (my salary) and went wild with major renovations to suit my tastes... and what was the result?
The two small rooms, each of which were around the size of a six-tatami-mat room (which would be 106.7 square feet), were connected by a door between them, creating a room almost like a Japanese apartment.
One room had carpet laid over wooden flooring, and that was where my work space with a treadle sewing machine was. It was a room where I could focus fully on making clothing or accessories, purely as a hobby, or dolls like the Little Musashibos.
The room that would serve as my ordinary living quarters was, thanks to some nice touches by the designer (me), a perfect reproduction of a Japanese-style room. As soon as I’d heard that there was a tatami culture in the Nine-Headed Dragon Archipelago, I had procured a number of those straw mats and laid them in this room.
Also, there was an area in the center of the room that had been dug out, on top of which I’d placed a round table with a blanket stuffed in between the space where our legs went and the bottom of the table. There was another hole dug out inside of that dug-out area, and beneath it I had installed the heater Genia developed based on an idea I gave her.
Basically, I had recreated a hori-gotatsu.
In the dug-out area where our feet rested, there was a dome-shaped iron grate, keeping us from touching the heater. It was a lovely space, warm in winter, and nice and breezy in
summer once you took the blanket out. Truly, it was a space that let you feel the designer’s (my) attention to detail.
And, well, that was the sort of room I’d made, but all of my fiancées really liked it, especially Liscia, and they had taken to staying here. The hori-gotatsu was really popular with them. It had gotten pretty cold outside, after all.
After the annexation of Amidonia, Hakuya had said, “Please, understand, this is necessary to maintain your authority,” and forbade me from using the general cafeteria, so I had taken to having my breakfast and dinner (lunch was usually in the governmental affairs office) here around the table with Liscia and the others.
Most of the meals were made for me by the castle chefs, but on days like today, when I wanted to eat something Japanese, I made it myself. I had rice, soy sauce, and miso to work with, after all.
The meals I made were a novelty to them, so Liscia and the others liked them, but Hakuya and Marx weren’t happy about it. It wasn’t the taste they didn’t like. It was that I was making plain-looking food, serving it to my fiancées, and we were all eating it like it was delicious, which was pretty far from their image of what a king should be like. I didn’t see why even the food I ate had to be fit for a king, though...
For starters, neither Liscia, I, nor the others were the type to indulge in luxury. Juna and I were both former commoners, Liscia had lived a military life where supplies were limited, and having grown up in the forest, Aisha would eat anything so long as it tasted good. Even Roroa seemed interested, saying, “If we could make eatin’ food from your world a hot trend, it’d sell, don’t ya think?”
Besides, even though the food might be simple in appearance, it used rice, which wasn’t that common yet, so the cost was actually pretty high.
Today’s lunch, by the way, was oyakodon, miso soup, and nukazuke.
“Big Sister Ai, could ya pass the pickles?” Roroa asked.
“Mmf, mm-mm-mf (Here, Roroa),” Aisha said through mouthfuls of food.
“Hold on, Roroa,” said Liscia. “You have rice on your face.”
“Hm? Thanks, Big Sister Cia.”
Roroa let Liscia pick the grain of rice that was stuck by her mouth off of her face for her.
Juna looked on warmly as Aisha shoveled food into her face.
If you could cut out just this scene of all of us around the kotatsu, we looked like a real, happy family.
“Lady Aisha,” said Serina. “Would you perhaps like another serving of miso soup?”
“Mmf. I-I would, Madam Serina.”
“Ma... Lady Juna,” said Carla. “We’ve got... There is another serving of rice for you, too.”
“Hee hee! No need to be so stiff and formal, Carla,” Juna giggled.
“Y-You are too kind.”
I have to correct myself; there was one thing that was strange here. There was something like the sort of serving table used at elementary schools during lunchtime in the corner of the room, and there, the maids Serina and Carla were waiting to serve us food. That was out of place.
“And wait... Were any of you listening to me?” I protested.
“Sure,” said Roroa. “We’re listenin’, we’re listenin’.”
“There’s a response from someone who’s clearly not...” I muttered.
“I am listenin’. You’re short of hands, right?”
When Roroa said that, Liscia furrowed her brow. “Are you going to gather people again? I think we have a pretty diverse group of people already...”
“The more talented people we have, the better,” I said. “What I’m after this time is a bit different, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hm... It’s not good to say this, but if I were to rank people on a scale that goes S, A, B, C, D, E, the kind I’m looking for now fall into the B to C range. I want a very large number of them.”
“Sorry,” said Liscia. “I’m not sure I get what you’re saying.”
I put my hand on Roroa’s head. She was sitting next to me with a spoon in her mouth. “For instance, Roroa’s economic sense is anything but mediocre. She can manipulate large amounts of money, find funding, and bring in greater profits. If I were to rank her as a member of my staff, she’d get an S. But one Roroa isn’t enough to run a country, now is it? Roroa needs a bureaucratic system that will serve as her arms and legs. On top of that, she needs people who are capable of doing math to work under her. What we’re short of is those people who can do the math.”
The literacy rate in this world was low, and pretty much the only ones outside of the nobility and knightly class who could do arithmetic were the merchants. Basically, in this world, those who could both write and use numbers would be B or C class personnel. Right now, in this country, we had a shortage of them.
“If that’s what you’re lookin’ for, how’s about hirin’ some merchants who’re closin’ up shop ’cause they couldn’t turn a profit, or who were reduced to bein’ slaves for one reason or another?” Roroa suggested.
But I shook my head. “I tried that already, but it didn’t pan out. If anyone is the least bit talented, someone from the nobility or the knighthood will already have taken them in. Well... that’s my own fault, though.” I said, scratching my head.
Roroa tilted her head quizzically. “What do you mean, your fault?”
“I changed the way evaluations work,” I explained.
In this country, the nobility and knightly classes were, to put it simply, the landholders. Military officials with land were called knights, while civil officials with land were called nobles. That was why there was no distinction between counts and viscounts in the nobility, and anyone with a large amount of land was just addressed as “Lord.”
There were “bureaucrat nobles” who traveled to the capital and regional cities to work in the bureaucracy, leaving their lands in the care of magistrates. There were also “regional nobles” who went to their own domains to manage the land personally. In terms of those I knew personally, Hakuya and Marx would be bureaucrat nobles, while Weist, the Lord of Altomura, would be a regional noble.
The balance of power between the two groups worked in a variety of ways. There were bureaucratic nobles who were involved in affairs of state like Hakuya, while there were also bureaucratic nobles who went to serve in the cities of powerful regional nobles.
In comparison, knights generally left their lands in the hands of a magistrate while they served in the military. This wasn’t absolute. Retired knights, like Weist, might become nobles, and there were also knights who passed their duty to serve in the military on to their children while they managed their lands.
Now, as to the promotion and demotion of these nobles and knights (or, to put it in another way, their acquisition or loss of territory), up until now, the knights had been promoted if they’d distinguished themselves in battle and their rank had risen in the military, while if their conduct had been bad and they’d violated orders, or they’d failed to carry out an operation successfully, they’d been demoted.
In other words, knights had never been held to account for the management of their lands. So if their lands had been mismanaged, the fault had lain with the magistrate, and if they’d sacked and replaced that magistrate, the knights themselves would not have been held responsible. Then again, if the same thing had happened over and over, there would of course have been repercussions.
As for the nobles, they could be promoted by traveling to the capital or cities to work as bureaucratic nobles. For those who didn’t have a strong desire to involve themselves in the affairs of state, it was normal for them to switch to being regional nobles once their lands had expanded to a degree. That was because being a regional noble was more profitable. If there was a noble who had no strong drive for self-advancement, if they were satisfied with their current holding, in many cases they would become a regional noble. However, once they did become a regional noble, they were responsible for any mismanagement of their lands.
Now, as for how
I changed our policy on the assessment of nobles and knights...
“In addition to the policies in place up until this point, I’ve placed a heavy emphasis on their ability to manage their land,” I said.
To put it simply, in addition to the assessment metrics in place before, I had announced a system of evaluation that gave more land to those managing theirs well, while reducing the size of their holdings or confiscating them entirely if they were managed poorly.
I had sent the clandestine operations unit that reported directly to me, the Black Cats, to keep watch, and those nobles or knights who ruled well were being given more land, while those who ruled poorly were having their holdings reduced or confiscated.
This clamped down on evil lords and magistrates of the variety you might have seen in period dramas, and my aim was to make the lords communicate with their people and bring them closer together. For good government, it was necessary to know what the people wanted, after all.
Now... as for what had happened as a result, the nobles and knights who had, until now, left their affairs to magistrates had hurriedly begun to pay attention to their holdings.
If their magistrates were capable or average, there were no issues; but if they were incompetent, that could now affect a noble’s own advancement.
There were nobles that had left their positions in the bureaucracy to return to their domains and start to focus fully on managing them. However, for the majority of knights who had no talent for ruling, and for the nobles who still had a path to advancement in their bureaucratic positions, they had rushed to find capable magistrates and personnel to serve under them.
When I explained that, Juna brought a finger to her lips as if recalling something. “Now that you mention it, Grandmother was saying that it had thrown things into utter chaos. There was a time when the nobles and knights would wander through the streets like hungry ghouls chanting ‘peopleeee, peopleeee,’ or something like that.”
“...Yeah,” I said. “Honestly, I think it was a hasty decision on my part.”
The passion of the nobles and knights to find talented personnel had far outstripped my imagination, and anyone able to write or do basic arithmetic, even if they were a commoner, had been welcomed almost like a sage and treated as an equal. This was because, if a noble or knight used authority to take such people away by force, they would face punishment for it.
