After a grueling day of brutal labor, Seraphine dropped down onto the boundary ridge right beside the peasant woman, Marta Reiss.
The two shared a heavy leather waterskin filled with cool wine, both greedily quenching their thirst. Seraphine wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her practical women's tunic, the fabric entirely soaked through across her chest and back, clinging tightly to her firm, athletic frame.
As the refreshing wine slid down her throat, she suddenly remembered the second, equally pressing reason for her excursion into the countryside.
Yes, dragging the Karsfeld valley into the agricultural revolution was a foundational pillar of her grand strategy, but there was a far more mundane, daily torment that had been driving her absolutely insane.
"Marta, do you happen to have a spare pound of good, rendered lard that I could purchase from you?"
Yes, lard!
While modernizing the domain’s agriculture was a campaign measured in years, Seraphine desperately needed animal fat right here and now to brew her very first batch of proper, nourishing hair pomade to style and maintain her thick, golden hair.
Sure, the castle kitchens were practically overflowing with supplies, but the cooks running them were notoriously stingy, obsessively tracking every single barrel of tallow. If she started pilfering raw fat from the pantries, sooner or later she’d be forced to explain to her Sire exactly why the firstborn heir was boiling cosmetics in her bedchamber to style her hair.
Only once - on the very first morning after waking up in this body - had she relied on the natural accumulation of sweat and sebum to slick her hair back, and the mere memory still sent violent shivers of utter disgust down her spine.
She had felt absolutely filthy all day long, agonizingly aware that her hairstyle was being held together by literal grime. After recovering from the initial shock of transmigration, she had sworn a blood oath never to sink to such barbaric methods again.
Since that day, she had simply parted her hair to the side using a carved horn comb, but she firmly believed such a polite, domestic style completely clashed with her sharp, aristocratic features. She vastly preferred the sleek, glossy, and dangerously alluring look of tightly slicked-back hair that fully exposed her slender neck and proud jawline.
Marta Reiss stared at the young heir with her mouth hanging wide open, still struggling to process the reality unfolding before her eyes.
First, the firstborn Karsfeld had worked shoulder-to-shoulder in the dirt with a lowly peasant, and now, instead of simply confiscating a jar of fat under the absolute authority of feudal law, she was asking to buy it?
"My lady... this entire valley belongs to your bloodline. Every single thing this earth produces belongs to - "
Before Marta could finish the sentence, Seraphine raised a slender, mud-caked hand, cutting her off with a gentle wave.
A warm, fiercely sincere smile graced her lips.
"I am a devout believer in a very simple rule: fair compensation for honest labor. Tell me exactly what you believe the lard you rendered with your own hands is worth, and I will pay that exact price."
Marta froze in absolute shock. She had never in her life encountered such an enlightened feudal lord. What Seraphine said next sounded to the simple farmer like a promise straight from paradise:
"One day, when I take the reins of this valley, every single woman and every single futa will receive a fair, living wage for their sweat - regardless of what kind of hovel or silk-draped bed they were born in."
Tears pricked the corners of the hardened farmer’s eyes. Had those words slipped from the mouth of any other powdered aristocrat, she would have dismissed them as a cruel, mocking joke.
But Seraphine - a tall, young highborn futa with a still-fragile frame - was standing right here in front of her, hands caked in mud after swinging a hoe all day, actively revolutionizing their crop yields without demanding a single copper coin in tribute.
After a moment of profound, reverent hesitation, Marta held up three heavily calloused fingers.
"Three pfennigs, my lady."
Seraphine considered the price more than fair. She reached into the pocket of her leather vest and withdrew a heavy silk coin purse. She fished out three small, whitish coins and pressed them into the peasant’s palm with a bright smile.
Marta looked down at the coins and completely lost her voice. When she said "three pfennigs," she had meant the cheap, debased copper disks - not these heavy white coins forged from over fifty percent pure silver! These three pieces alone were worth vastly more than a single clay pot of rendered fat.
Shaking off the initial shock, the farmer immediately thrust her hand out, desperately trying to return the silver to the heir.
"My lady... I meant copper, not silver pfennigs!"
Seraphine blinked at her in genuine confusion. The freshly recovered memories of the Karsfeld treasury only featured these bright silver coins. She had absolutely no idea there was an entirely separate, heavily debased currency circulating under the exact same name for a fraction of the value.
The mere thought triggered a violent flare of engineering and economic frustration inside Seraphine’s skull.
How the hell is anyone supposed to run a functional economy in such an utterly chaotic monetary system?!
She swore a silent oath that the absolute second she seized power, she would violently gut and rebuild the minting system from the ground up.
Fortunately, as the future sovereign of Karsfeld, she would have the absolute legal authority to do exactly that once she succeeded Adelgarde. In the sprawling Alarian Empire, the right to strike coinage had long since slipped from the central crown's grip, fracturing into the hands of local lords and free cities. The value of a single coin from one barony could drastically completely differ from a coin struck just across the river.
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The entire Alarian Empire was drowning in catastrophic monetary chaos. While the Kingdom of Alaria relied on dozens of wildly fluctuating pfennig variants, the other imperial provinces minted entirely different currencies altogether.
Seraphine fully intended to ruthlessly exterminate this mess in her own backyard. She would enforce a brutal, binary standard: heavy silver pfennigs for daily commerce, and thick, pure gold marks for grand trade and external exports, personally guaranteeing their weight and purity.
She smiled and gently closed Marta’s rough fingers around the silver.
"To me, a pfennig is a pfennig, and a deal is a deal. Keep it. When I finally take the helm in Karsfeld, I will strike an entirely new currency from pure bullion, and its value will be absolute."
Marta tucked the silver away with shaking, reverent hands, and hurried to the pantry, returning with a heavy, bulbous clay pot brimming with pure, rendered white fat.
However, sheer feminine curiosity eventually won out. She simply couldn't stop herself from asking why the young aristocrat needed an entire pot of the stuff when the castle pantries were practically overflowing.
"What do you need this for, my lady?" she asked, immediately biting her lip as she remembered her place.
Seraphine chuckled softly, expertly packing the heavy clay pot into the leather saddlebags of her mount.
"You’ll see the next time I ride down here!"
She vaulted smoothly into the saddle, gathering the reins and throwing a casual wave to the stunned woman:
"I will see you soon, Marta! I need to head back, grab something to eat, and finally make myself presentable."
She kicked her heels into the horse’s flanks and broke into a steady trot toward the imposing castle looming atop the hill.
By the time she reached the heavy iron gates, the golden-orange fire of the sunset was bleeding into the deep, bruised navy of twilight.
Her only coherent thought was sinking into a long, steaming bath.
But the very second her boots hit the cobblestones of the inner courtyard, Marielle practically exploded from the shadows of the gatehouse and launched herself directly into Seraphine’s arms.
The tiny girl plastered herself against Seraphine’s sweat-soaked body, immediately smudging her little nose with a streak of dried field dirt transferred from her sister's tunic.
The little girl looked up, dramatically pushing her bottom lip out into a thoroughly offended pout.
"You came back so late... and you're completely sticky!" she scolded with freezing, childish disdain, pinning her elder sister with a severe, highly critical stare.
This behavior was utterly uncharacteristic of the old Seraphine - she used to spend days locked away in her quarters, and she certainly never returned caked in mud like a filthy farmhand after the harvest.
Seraphine let out a warm, booming laugh and gently stroked the little girl’s golden hair.
"I appreciate your concern, little princess, but I am perfectly fine. I just had some critical business to attend to down in the valley."
Marielle’s sharp blue eyes instantly locked onto the heavy clay jar tucked securely under Seraphine’s arm, sparking with intense curiosity.
"And what is in there?"
"Lard," Seraphine answered without a second thought.
The girl tapped a tiny finger against her lip, furrowing her brow in deep thought.
"Lard? What exactly is that?"
A wicked, thoroughly mischievous grin spread across Seraphine’s face. She simply couldn't resist a bit of teasing:
"Rendered pig fat."
In a fraction of a second, Marielle’s adorable face contorted into a hilariously dramatic mask of sheer, unadulterated disgust.
She violently scrambled backward away from her older sister, acting as if Seraphine were holding a live, venomous lizard.
"Eewwww! Gross! That’s disgusting!"
With a high-pitched squeal, she bolted across the courtyard, wildly waving her little arms in the air, while Seraphine laughed so hard she had to bend over and brace her hands on her knees.
The sheer, unbridled panic of a pampered aristocratic child was absolutely priceless. Suddenly remembering the muddy smudge on her sister's face, she yelled out loudly across the stones:
"Marielle! March straight to the bathhouse! Your entire nose is covered in mud!"
Consequently, Seraphine was forced to wait a short while for her turn in the tubs, yielding priority to her little sister.
As she walked down the chilly stone corridors toward her chambers, the heavy jar tucked securely under her arm, her finely honed instincts suddenly flared to life.
Somewhere between the freezing, shadowed stone arcades, she distinctly felt a hidden presence and the heavy prickle of a hostile, penetrating stare drilling into her back.
She knew instantly she was being followed.
However, she didn't betray a single flinch or micro-expression to suggest she had noticed a thing - that would only spook the spy into hiding deeper. She maintained her brisk, confident stride, keeping her face carved in an mask of absolute boredom.
It wasn't until she finally crossed the threshold of her bedchamber and violently threw the heavy iron deadbolt shut that she let out a long, slow exhale.
The situation was crystal clear: Cordelia had actively begun saturating the castle with her own loyalist spies. The younger futa sister was never going to stop until she made another attempt on Seraphine's life.
But Seraphine had absolutely zero intention of being caught off guard a second time. If Cordelia wanted to play a lethal game of shadows and daggers, she had picked a fight with the absolute worst possible opponent.
By slowly and methodically winning the absolute loyalty of the common folk - the cooks, the laundresses, and the peasant farmers - Seraphine would soon weave the most terrifyingly omnipresent intelligence network in the entire valley.
Not a single arrogant, highborn aristocrat would ever suspect that the simple maid changing their bedsheets was directly funneling highly classified reports straight to the heir.
An hour later, once Marielle had finished her ablutions, Seraphine finally sank with a heavy groan into a steaming wooden tub laced with chamomile and wild herbs.
She soaked the agonizing tension from her muscles, scrubbed away the thick layer of sweat and field grime, and aggressively dug the mud out from beneath her nails using a block of hard, lye-based soap.
Afterward, she carried the heavy jar of lard into her bedchamber. Working by the flickering light of a small oil lamp, she began her very first experiments: meticulously blending the raw animal fat with essential oils, beeswax, and crushed lavender, slowly whipping the mixture until she achieved a perfectly smooth, glossy pomade with a velvety texture - the absolute perfect concoction for slicking her golden hair back with a heavy, polished horn comb.
Before finally collapsing into bed, she slipped quietly down the hall to check on Marielle. The little girl, now smelling fiercely of clean soap and fresh linen, was tucked safely beneath her heavy duvet.
Seraphine pressed a soft kiss to her forehead, wove another gripping legend of ancient warrior queens until the girl drifted off, and quietly slipped back to her own quarters.
She threw the heavy deadbolt on her door and secured the wooden shutters with solid iron clasps, but deliberately left the heavy velvet drapes drawn open. The cold, silvery light of the full moon spilled across the floorboards, illuminating her slender, sleeping form like a silent, ever-vigilant sentinel.