novelraw Chapter 6 : Chapter 6
Chapter 6 : Chapter 6
Chapter 6
A country rich in resources, yet with a ruined economy.
A country corrupted to the core, yet still temporarily maintaining the pretense of peace.
That was Yeramerian’s universally acknowledged image.
But for the past few days, things outside the palace had been noisy.
“Have you heard the rumors lately?”
“What rumors?”
“The rumors about His Highness. The prince.”
“Ah. You mean that he has become... like this?”
It was because of the rumors that Prince Noel, who was acting as regent, had gone mad.
“They say that this time, at a family dinner, he even declared that he would kill the Corrupt Officials!”
“Oh my, really? That gentle man?”
The citizens perked up their ears at the flood of rumors about the royal family.
And they reacted to them with great enthusiasm.
“It looks like he has finally come to his senses!”
“Exactly. I heard he has been going all over the place lately. Do you think he was hurt somewhere?”
“If getting hurt is what changed him like this, then honestly, I kind of hope he stays— ah, no, I should not say that.”
“Keep your voice down. Quiet.”
It was hope.
Hope that Yeramerian had finally produced a ruler with a functioning mind.
That hope was what had turned the citizens’ attention toward the kingdom.
“The prince said he would kill the Corrupt Officials?”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“He really said kill? That Prince Noel?”
“Yes.”
The prince was going to kill the Corrupt Officials.
Naturally, that rumor quickly reached the ears of the Corrupt Officials themselves.
And those who already had a more concrete grasp of Prince Noel’s recent behavior all broke into cold sweats.
At this rate, I really might die.
“Since when did he say he was going to start killing them?”
“He said it would begin today.”
“Today?! Why did the news come so late? What time?!”
“It seems he said no more than, ‘The killing of Corrupt Officials will begin today.’”
The Corrupt Officials began trembling in genuine fear.
They said Baron Horn had already been dragged off to prison.
If even he had been taken, then people like themselves, who held even less important posts than the Mernia diplomat, could truly be killed at any time.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Ferguson! Ferguson!”
“What is it? Have they come for us already?!”
“Ah, no, I do not think so. That is Baron Roberto’s voice.”
Many of them hurried to seek each other out.
“What is wrong with you, storming in here and frightening people like this?!”
“So you have heard the rumor too, then. Have you thought about what to do?”
“What else is there to do? We have to restore as much as possible to its original state! If they catch our trail, it will be summary execution!”
In reality, Prince Noel was not actually planning to kill all the Corrupt Officials.
If he did that, too many people currently holding office would be swept away, and finding replacements would be difficult.
But in a situation where their very lives might be on the line, there was no one capable of making that judgment calmly.
“B-but that would mean losing too much property—”
“Then go die under Prince Noel if you hate it so much! Get back to work. I have to deal with the recent transactions first.”
Did anyone still have confidence that they would not be found out?
No one did.
Even Baron Horn, the cleverest Corrupt Official they knew, had been dragged off to prison and vanished without a word.
“Do you really think it is best to deal with the recent transactions first? Should we not start with the larger cases?”
“As if we have time to calculate that! We are dealing with a man who says he is going to start killing people today!”
Amid all the frantic scrambling, the state treasury was slowly being restored bit by bit.
This was the exact scenario Prince Noel had been hoping for most.
“Baron Horn.”
“Yes, sir.”
That did not mean he intended to sit back and merely watch the final flicker of conscience in the Corrupt Officials.
There was something he needed to finish as quickly as possible before Baron Horn changed his mind.
“You must feel refreshed after sleeping in the palace instead of a prison cell last night, right?”
Prince Noel had secretly confined Baron Horn in a guest room.
No one could suspect that Baron Horn had been released, yet at the same time he had been given back the comfort of sleeping in a bed.
“Yes, that is correct.”
Of course, that alone was not enough to make Baron Horn feel grateful.
But with no desire to cross Prince Noel’s temper, Horn obediently answered his questions for now.
“If you are grateful, then let us get to work quickly~”
“Yes, sir.”
Forgive me, my comrades!
Baron Horn squeezed his eyes shut.
From this point on, his duty as a member of the Yeramerian Audit Team was to betray his acquaintances.
“Is there any particular kind of person you want? Any specific field, or profession?”
“I will decide after I see what you write down.”
“Yes, understood.”
That rude little bastard.
How had he ended up so completely deranged?
Baron Horn pressed the urge to click his tongue down into the tip of his pen.
Prince Noel had already noticed the sentiment long ago, but he did not bother to pick a fight over that much resistance.
“You really do have a good memory. Must be because you are an elite. You are writing the list out so neatly and smoothly.”
Instead, he simply tossed out one or two words of praise to gently soothe Baron Horn’s wounded pride.
Nothing significant.
Just trivial remarks.
Yet Baron Horn, who had been reduced to ruin over the past few days, had to struggle to keep the corners of his mouth from lifting.
You are stating the obvious, he grumbled inwardly.
“I have written down all the people for whom I have solid evidence.”
“And write the ones you only suspect over here as well.”
“Yes.”
If you left someone no room to breathe, greater resistance would only follow.
Knowing that, Prince Noel kept his attention fixed on Baron Horn even as he read through the list of Corrupt Officials.
Baron Horn was the sort of man who might become useful if he could be properly coaxed into reform.
“Douglas. Let us start by arresting the one who embezzled the largest amount.”
“Proceed with the arrest first, then confiscate the property. At the same time, assign Surveillance Officers to monitor the family. Is that correct?”
“Yes. You can go with Sebastian.”
Sebastian, who had kept a close watch on Baron Horn, had also gone from being a simple prison guard to a member of the Audit Team.
Me? An auditor? What even is an audit?
Naturally, what had persuaded the bewildered Sebastian in a single blow was the fact that the first digit of his salary had changed.
“Bring this one back on your way too. If he stands stiff-necked because he is a count, use my name.”
“What do you mean by use your name?”
“I mean you can lie if you have to. Say something like, ‘His Highness said to kill you if you refuse to come.’ Use whatever method is most convenient.”
At Prince Noel’s chilling words, sweat streamed down Baron Horn’s back once again.
Douglas merely nodded quietly.
There was clearly no reason to worry about Lèse-majesté here.
“If only the Audit Team could have gone out in force and thrown all ten of them into prison today. What a waste.”
The situation was frustratingly short on people he could trust, so the execution of his plans was lacking.
Prince Noel smacked his lips in regret.
But as Baron Horn watched him mutter to himself, he quietly came to a conviction.
So long as Prince Noel’s resolve did not waver, Yeramerian might truly begin to change.
“Hm? Your pen seems to have slowed down.”
“Not at all!”
Though I do wish he would start by fixing the way he talks.
These past few days had been the most enjoyable and rewarding I had had since becoming Prince Noel.
A considerable amount of money had already been returned to a nation that had been in immediate danger for lack of funds.
And the process itself had been quite satisfying too.
“I have been wronged, Your Highness!”
Another Corrupt Official crying that he had been treated unfairly.
These people were even easier to manipulate than Baron Horn.
“Someone turned you in as an embezzler and brought you here. Who do you think it was?”
“I do not know!”
“You do not know?”
The nobles who had been dragged in so suddenly did not realize that we did not actually possess clear evidence against them.
So they either denied everything outright or launched into long, rambling tales about how falsely accused they were.
Every time, all I had to say was simple.
“Name your accomplices, or the other embezzlers. Do that, and your crime will grow lighter.”
“I truly know nothing, Your Highness!”
Naturally, at first they all insisted they knew nothing in response to my abrupt demand.
“For your information, the people who informed you received reduced sentences.”
But everyone reacted the same way to that line.
“Who was it?”
“That is a secret. We already have a rough grasp of the evidence anyway, so if you do not want to talk, then do not.”
Someone had sold me out and reduced his own sentence because of it?
And if I kept denying everything to the end, I might still be executed, all because someone else had left me exposed?
“Confess, and your sentence will be reduced. Cooperate with the investigation, and your sentence will be reduced.”
“......”
“Keep denying it to the end and get caught, and it is execution.”
It was an exceedingly simple prisoner’s dilemma.
Either everyone stayed loyal and kept their mouths shut, or only one side got severely punished on embezzlement charges, or both sides received tolerable punishment.
“O-one of the barons is probably moving funds around right now.”
But among these sorts, there was never anyone loyal.
“Does the more people I name, the more my sentence will be reduced?”
“That would depend on both the number of criminals and the quality of the evidence.”
The ten Corrupt Officials for whom we had solid evidence soon turned into a sausage chain of more than thirty.
Watching them rattle each other off and tear each other apart was delightful.
Even so, there was still no one among them as clever as Baron Horn.
And these were men who supposedly each held an official post. Yet every last one of them was beneath even the minimum standard.
“Sebastian. Put this one back in prison.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Y-you will spare my life, will you not? Yes?”
“We will see.”
The ones who listed out long records of embezzlement and evidence were filled with nothing but anxiety for their own survival.
Apparently they were all throwing fits in prison because the stone floors were uncomfortable.
“Oh dear, more new faces again?”
Shaking my head at the endless work, I returned to my office.
Even with Douglas and Baron Horn handling most of the clerical work, there was still far too much to do.
The duties of Acting Regent kept pouring in, and I still had to deal personally with part of the affairs related to the people locked up in prison.
“I need more people like Douglas, who are steady, or more people like Horn, who know how to use their brains.”
Muttering to myself, I reached the front of my office and found an utterly unexpected visitor waiting there quietly.
“Huh?”
“Ah. So you are back.”
It was the Queen.
“What brings you here, Mother?”
Slightly flustered, I looked around.
People who appeared to be the Queen’s attendants were carrying armfuls of something, and the Queen herself wore a serious expression.
What was this?
Had she come to request explanations on behalf of some acquaintance of hers?
“Noel, I heard you have arrested quite a number of nobles.”
Ah... that would be troublesome.
If the Queen started making emotional appeals here, it would become annoying.
“Please, come into the office first, Mother.”
“Very well.”
Even so, I calmly kept my smile in place.
It was one thing to behave recklessly with criminals, but it would not do to let people see members of the royal family arguing with one another.
“Would you like some tea?”
“No. I already had some before coming. Quite a lot of it.”
At that, I quietly fell into thought again.
Where had she gone, what kind of tea had she had, and how much of it?
Surely she had not accepted something like a bribe?
She did not seem like the sort of person easily swayed by material things, but perhaps she might have accepted something without even realizing it was a bribe.
“Noel.”
The Queen called to me with perfect calm, while I was busy imagining the worst.
“Yes, Mother.”
I sat down calmly as well and met her gaze directly.
Only then did I realize that the Queen had changed.
Those eyes were no longer full of kindness and radiant innocence.
“Tell me the steps that come after the order to recover the embezzled capital.”
So she had finally come to her senses.
“Yes.”
I calmly explained what I had done so far, and what I intended to do next.
I omitted only the detail that I was making them expose one another.
When I finished, the Queen listened to it all and then spoke in a composed voice.
“You do know that in our country, physical assets hold greater value than currency itself, do you not?”
“Yes.”
“Then it seems you have skipped the stage of verifying the authenticity of the physical assets that have now been returned.”
At that sharp feedback, I nodded quietly.
“Did you merely fail to mention it, or did you overlook that step entirely?”
“I thought I would handle it all at once later. It was careless of me.”
The moment she heard my answer, the Queen gestured to her attendants.
At once, they laid the heavy documents they had been carrying across my desk.
“You were right. It is a complete mess.”
“Yeramerian?”
“Yeramerian’s economy. Yeramerian itself is a beautiful country.”
The Queen wore a cold expression that did not even bother with a sigh.
The bright, cheerful Queen I had known only days ago was nowhere before me now.
This must have been the side of her I had never seen—the economist she had once been, decades ago.
“There is much to do, Noel.”
“Yes. It certainly seems so.”
“But it also appears you have no one truly fit to entrust with it.”
The Queen carefully spread out the papyrus sheets.
They were documents organizing each of the country’s problems.
Even to my own rough eye, the economy looked disastrous. What must it have looked like to the Queen, one of the greatest economists in the nation’s history?
“Starting with Baron Horn’s diamond affair—the one that got him imprisoned—I took a broad look through the state finances as a whole. I have not examined it in detail yet.”
Which meant that even without examining it closely, she had already found enough problems to produce that volume of paperwork.
“For now, every side effect that can occur when a currency loses value has already occurred. This is not something that can simply be glossed over with the word inflation.”
With a dark expression, the Queen briefly walked me through Yeramerian’s economic problems.
She was not flaunting difficult terminology.
She was explaining them step by step because she wanted to make sure I understood even a single thing properly.
“I think it would be good if Mother gave me some help.”
I did not beat around the bush. I stated plainly what I wanted.
The Queen did not look startled the way she had at our last meal.
If anything, it seemed she was trying to hide an expression of satisfaction.
“This seems fairly urgent, for one thing. So I should help. Your father is not here, after all.”
“This?”
“I did put some thought into the current situation once I had a rough grasp of it. Well, for now, take a look.”
Mother.
For someone pretending she had no choice, the plan you brought is quite detailed.