novelraw Chapter 11 : Chapter 11
Chapter 11 : Chapter 11
Chapter 11
The moment Douglas sat down, I seriously asked him about the situation one more time.
“The district next to the palace has roads that are completely wrecked.”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“And instead of properly sorting waste, every kind of trash imaginable is rolling around in the streets.”
“What is sorting waste?”
“Never mind that.”
“There are people reselling drinking water too, right?”
“Because of the water shortage.”
“Yes.”
Bang!
I slammed my hand down on the desk at once.
Was this country insane?
What kind of deranged nation was this?!
“It is not just the district right beside the palace, is it?”
“That place is not especially infamous as some sort of slum or anything?”
“As far as I know, it is the most well-kept urban area in Yeramerian.”
“The best-kept?!”
“Good grief~”
The state of this country truly made me want to smack my forehead.
“Then why did you not suggest dealing with the bastards behind this sort of thing the moment you joined the Audit Team?”
“Did the audit project targeting the Corrupt Officials not only finish yesterday?”
“That is true.”
“It is, but still... haah.”
I drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly.
Maybe I was just viewing the situation too bleakly from the perspective of a modern person.
“No, but...”
No, that was not it.
There was no way.
If things kept going like this, Yeramerian was going to fall to an epidemic.
“For now, the most urgent matter is the Purification Facilities, right?”
“That seems to be the most immediate source of harm.”
“This is the list of the people responsible for the Purification Facilities.”
“Throw every last one of them into prison by tomorrow.”
“I will inform Sebastian as well.”
“Good.”
“Tomorrow will be busy, so go back and rest quickly.”
“Or I can have a room prepared for you, and you can sleep there.”
I barely managed to collect myself again and send Douglas out.
Then I searched up more materials related to the Purification Facilities.
The amount of water produced by a single facility, the ratio at which it was being used, the repair history over the years, the repair costs, and so on.
“What had everyone been doing while every Purification Facility in the country broke down?”
As I went through the materials in mounting irritation, the cause became painfully clear.
Money.
They had not fixed them because they did not have the money.
There were too many parts that had to be imported from abroad, so the financial burden had been enormous, and even when they managed to obtain the parts, they had not had the budget to pay the laborers required to do the work.
“They really did bring the parts in one by one, but... ah, the numbers are strange here too.”
The reason there had been no budget for labor was equally obvious.
They had been importing the parts at absurd prices.
It did not even look like an overseas monopoly company was involved.
You could practically see the money laundering laid out in perfect detail.
“Looks like Baron Horn will have work to do again starting tomorrow.”
It was the sort of situation that made me do nothing but sigh, yet also the sort of situation where I absolutely could not afford to do only that.
A whole swarm of things that needed to be dealt with immediately starting tomorrow came rushing into view.
“And there still has not been a single protest?”
“No way.”
“I need to call in the records officer too.”
Thankfully, Yeramerian did not entirely lack the parts.
What it lacked was the money to hire workers.
Because this would require an enormous amount of manual labor.
“Simple labor.”
“Large scale.”
“Budget.”
“Manpower.”
As I quietly organized my thoughts, a good idea suddenly struck me, and I clapped my hands together.
Right.
There was that method!
“Your Highness!”
“What are you saying?!”
“Was I not speaking loudly enough?”
“No, that is not it.”
“That is far too harsh a punishment!”
“What exactly is too harsh about it?!”
The first person I shared my idea with was Baron Horn.
The moment he heard it, he shot to his feet.
“It does not even apply to you.”
“Is this not an insult to the nobility itself?!”
“Do you want me to show you what a real insult looks like?”
He only quieted down after I let my temper show openly.
Still, it seemed that this idea of mine really was a shocking one to people of this era.
“Noel!”
“No matter what, to treat nobles like that!”
Even the Queen raised her voice in alarm the moment she heard what I had to say.
These maddening people.
“What about nobles?”
“They are nothing but treasury rats who would not share so much as a sip of water with commoners while living lives lavish enough to shower themselves!”
“But still...!”
“Ah, and when an epidemic breaks out, what are you going to do about the budget it will take to restore the country afterward?!”
“And what about the wages for the day laborers?!”
My plan was very simple.
There were already dozens of people in prison, including nobles serving prison sentences.
I intended to assign them to the work of repairing the Purification Facilities.
“Even if they are currently imprisoned, they are still all nobles, Noel.”
“They are criminals being held as criminals.”
“They are elites who have never done this kind of manual labor in their lives!”
“Then if they are elites, they will learn quickly!”
“Even if we hired day laborers right now, they would still be doing tasks they would all have to learn from scratch anyway!”
I could not say I completely failed to understand why the Queen was reacting the way she was.
It was already enough to stir resentment among the nobles that fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and nephews from noble houses were sitting in prison.
And now, on top of that, to make them do physical labor?
Naturally, the nobility would object.
“The nobles are already full of resentment because we have not even allowed beds to be brought into the prison, Noel.”
“Then they should have kept better watch over their own families so they would not embezzle, so why are they throwing tantrums at the people punishing them for doing wrong?!”
“T-tantrums...?”
But why should I care about that?
I was already furious enough that we were feeding obvious criminals for free!
“If the nobles complain to you, Mother, just tell them you could not stop me.”
“Noel!”
“Ah, then perhaps we should wait until all the commoners are dead from lack of drinking water before thinking about it!”
“Read the materials I gave you properly instead of worrying about the nobles’ feelings!”
At my shout, the maid pouring tea beside us had her hand start trembling.
She seemed quite startled to see a son raising his voice at his own mother.
But so what?
There were clearly people dying because they could not even drink water.
“Rainwater is being sold on the black market.”
“Rainwater.”
“In an era where people even use soap, how is this possible?”
Only then did the Queen slowly squeeze her eyes shut.
Then, with trembling hands, she began reading through the documents I had given her one by one.
“Douglas and Sebastian are already dragging in the bastards connected to this, and once we have them properly under control, whether we kill them or do something else, we are going to make an example of them.”
“So nothing like this ever happens again.”
“......”
“You say you love the people, do you not?”
“The people are not even drinking or washing with something as good as the tea we are having now—they are washing in muddy water and drinking it!”
“Even babies are!”
The Queen slowly covered her face with both hands.
She looked as though she could not believe it.
I understood.
I had not known it either before I stepped outside the palace.
“If you do not believe me, then go out in secret and look around anywhere you like.”
“If you are an elite, you will come back thinking it is a miracle there has not already been an epidemic.”
Ordinarily, I had never intended to come at the Queen this hard.
No matter what, she was the king’s wife.
My mother.
But I could not sit there and keep indulging someone this frustrating when she was educated enough to know better.
“I am leaving first.”
“I have to meet with the prison administrators.”
I strode out of the Queen’s office without hesitation.
Everyone who had heard me shouting looked at me nervously, but none of them seemed inclined to say anything to me.
The nobles were afraid they would be affected themselves, and the commoners agreed with what I had said.
I was not even asking for anything grand to be done for the commoners, and still people kept worrying about what the nobles might think.
“Where is Monardo?”
The moment I arrived at the prison, I immediately asked for the person in charge of the Central Purification Facility.
Then, from somewhere in the distance, I heard a thin male voice.
“That would be me!”
“I am Baron Monardo, the man who has managed the bottled water for the royal family and the nobles!”
So this was the bastard.
All shriveled and pale, like some little rat.
“I was overseeing the water-quality control facilities when I was summoned here!”
“Even though no mechanical problem had yet occurred!”
I folded my arms quietly as I watched the rat babble out his grievances at high speed.
At that, the rat suddenly faltered and started watching my expression.
“You, the one managing the water-quality control facilities.”
“Yes!”
“Tell me the daily average volume of water fit for use as drinking water, and the daily average volume of purified water fit for other uses.”
At my question, the rat’s large eyes rolled around.
Then, as if something had occurred to him, he clapped his hands together.
“It is capable of producing enough water to supply roughly twenty thousand people a day!”
“There is no problem with drinking the water produced by the Purification Facility!”
I let out a small sigh.
It was not bad that he had at least answered what he could answer.
But that did not mean I had any intention of praising him.
“What is the current average amount of purified water used per person?”
“Pardon?”
“Ah.”
“I do not know that.”
“You produce it, but you do not know how much is being used or how it is being used?”
“Well...”
“Then forget the total amount it can produce.”
“Tell me how much it is actually producing these days.”
At my words, the rat quietly shut his mouth.
He clearly had no idea what to say.
Even so, perhaps because he disliked the questions I was asking, his lips had started sticking out in a faint pout.
“Put your mouth back where it belongs.”
“M-my lips naturally stick out a bit!”
“Do I look like I cannot tell the difference between lips and a mouth?!”
At my roar, the entire prison fell silent.
I could even feel the people locked up in the communal cells clamp their mouths shut and turn to stare in our direction.
“Yeramerian started producing water through its filtration method in quantities sufficient to supply roughly twenty thousand people a day, based on an average of one hundred liters per person.”
“Y-yes, yes.”
Hearing those concrete figures, the rat seemed to feel anxious enough that he could not even lift his head.
So I started going through the problems he had caused, one by one, in even greater detail.
“The palace roughly keeps to the one-hundred-liter-per-person standard, but some nobles are using as much as two hundred liters per person.”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you not levy the progressive water tax?”
“The law clearly states that it must be collected.”
As my questions came one after another, the faces of the other waterworks administrators began turning pale as well.
The rat cowering in front of me was, of course, in even greater turmoil.
“At the time, well, because consumption had not yet exceeded production, there was no presented necessity for collecting it separately.”
“What?”
“According to the bill, the progressive water tax is to be collected in preparation for the event that an imbalance between production and consumption creates social disorder!”
Bang!
At that clearly enunciated piece of nonsense, I kicked the iron bars of the cell.
He knew absolutely nothing that he ought to know as an administrator, yet had memorized the legal loopholes in perfect detail.
Bastards like him were the worst kind.
“Haah~ no, you really are beyond saving.”
Only now, apparently, had he realized just how furious I was, because the rat began backing away.
Hey.
However far you went, you were still inside a prison.
“There are people all over the streets who cannot even get drinking water because consumption exceeds production by a fucking mile.”
“That—”
“I mean all over the place, you bastard.”
“People need water to live, do they not?!”
“Aah!”
My temper flared, and I grabbed the bars and kicked the rat through the gap.
He went spinning to the ground, then looked up at me with a face full of grievance.
“This is unfair, Your Highness!”
“I sincerely did my utmost to ensure that no harm came to the people under my area of responsibility!”
Seeing him still answer back so clearly and neatly even now, I nearly kicked him again.
But the rat noticed, and shuffled backward just enough to stay outside the reach of my foot, tears streaming down his face.
Did he truly not understand what was wrong with him?
“Unfair?”
Then let me make it clearer for you.
“The people you were responsible for were never once divided into ‘royals and nobles’ in the first place.”
“Pardon?”
“Come here.”
I raised the contract and law book I had been holding so he could see them.
Then the rat slowly rose to his feet and walked over toward me.
SMACK—
And I brought the law book down squarely on the top of his head.