Do you remember when I mentioned that association of young business owners I used to attend because professional obligations more or less forced me to?
The one where everyone immediately headed off to a hostess club afterward.
Looking back on it now, it really was a strange little world.
People openly flaunted their money, connections, and desires, while pleasant-sounding morality somehow coexisted with all of it without the slightest friction.
“Everything I have is thanks to my employees.”
“The president should be the company’s greatest servant.”
“Never forget to be grateful each and every day.”
How should I put it?
Taken individually, I think they are all admirable principles.
And yet some instinctive part of me always found them phony.
That feeling.
Where did it come from?
Through some twist of fate, I am now the king of Santeneri. As king, I respect the people who serve beneath me, and I want them to be able to use their abilities to the fullest.
But how far does the “everyone” I can truly comprehend extend?
This is only intuition, but probably as far as wealthy commoners.
That is likely my limit.
When Blague came recently so I could commission a watch, the daughters of some of the kingdom’s most famous great noble houses treated him more or less the same way I did. They acknowledged him as a person, showed him proper respect, and spoke to him courteously.
At first I wondered whether they were merely following my example because I, the king, treated him that way. But from what I have observed, they also show an appropriate degree of respect toward their own ladies-in-waiting and servants.
Of course, an absolute difference in social status remains.
But they still treat them as fellow human beings.
I am much the same.
So are they.
So are my subordinates.
Most of us seem to share broadly similar instincts.
You rarely encounter those impossibly arrogant “villains” you see in novels.
Everyone thinks roughly the same thing.
We must care for the people.
It is the duty of those who rule to protect them.
Pleasant-sounding morality.
But the “people” imagined by the ruling class of this country—beginning with me, though I doubt other countries are any different—are merely an abstraction.
At this very moment, there are probably people dying anonymously in alleys somewhere in the old city.
We think that is tragic.
We want to help them.
No.
I should be more precise.
What we want to save is the idea of “the poor.”
We cannot understand the actual people themselves.
Suppose I suddenly awakened to some overwhelming sense of morality one day and impulsively ventured into those alleys.
Suppose I was fortunate enough to encounter one of those “pitiful poor people.”
And suppose we spoke.
Would I truly be able to connect with them?
Probably not.
To understand them, I would have to enter their world.
That is impossible.
And yet we wave around this abstraction while acting as though we know the people themselves.
That is where the phoniness comes from.
Does the man currently delivering an impassioned speech in front of me understand that?
Pierre Ene en Aquiane.
He is the head of the Duchy of Aquiane, a cadet branch of House Leroy whose vast lands and wealth rival Gaillure.
If House Leroy were to die out, House Aquiane would hold the first claim to the throne under Santeneri’s laws of succession.
This man is praised as a progressive thinker.
A protector of the common people.
Does he understand his own “phoniness”?
If he understands it and chooses to behave this way anyway, then I have no objection.
But if he does not—
Then perhaps that is a kind of tragedy.
◆
“Does Your Majesty know? Do you know of those who suffer in poverty each day here in Strois and die unseen by the roadside? Are they not entitled to live as human beings?! Think of the despair of a mother with an infant at her breast and nowhere to turn. The young man who lost his leg in war and was reduced to begging. All of it is the failure of government!”
The reason he can speak to me, the king, like this is because we are relatives.
And the reason he is being supplied with as much wine as he can happily pour down his throat is because he is the Duke of Aquiane.
This wine is good.
Did they spend a little more on dinner today because we have a guest?
“The nobles of this kingdom have lost sight of their true path! We are supposed to be the protectors of the people. Without the people, there can be no king. We should be servants of the state, yet somehow we have mistaken ourselves for its masters!”
“I see. What you say is entirely reasonable. Just as one would expect of the Duke of Aquiane. You truly are one of the pillars of the state.”
I gave him a response harmless enough to be neither medicine nor poison while sipping my wine.
You know those people who start making speeches once they get drunk?
Of course, some people do it sober too.
“You are still young, Grois. There is much you have yet to learn. Yet you spend all your time shut away in Palais Lumiere. You should go into the city at least once. You should see it. See the misery of the people.”
Pierre is in his late thirties.
Perhaps he used to have a muscular build, but he is now reaching the age when middle-aged weight gain starts becoming serious, and the little bulge of his stomach can no longer quite be concealed.
I understand.
What causes that, anyway?
Too much alcohol?
You definitely eat less than you did when you were young.
“Speaking of the city, Pierre, I heard you acquired a large tract of land in the old quarter. What do you intend to do with it?”
“Oh! I am glad you asked! The old quarter is full of abandoned mansions, is it not? I intend to consolidate them and redevelop the entire area. Commoners have money these days, you see, but they have no idea how to enjoy themselves with the refinement of nobles such as ourselves. So I intend to create places where they can spend that money.”
“Excellent. A project on that scale would be impossible without financial resources like yours. I imagine it will be extremely profitable.”
I was getting tired of listening to the speech, so I changed the subject.
The effortless transition from lofty moral posturing to vulgar profit-seeking.
You have to admire how quickly he switches gears.
Perhaps it is a talent in its own right.
“You understand, Grois. Oh, it will make money. Land is meaningless unless you consolidate it into large blocks. Large-scale operations increase efficiency. That is the secret.”
True enough.
The Duchy of Aquiane was the pioneer of large-scale agricultural management in Santeneri.
After seeing Aquiane succeed, many landholding nobles followed the trend to varying degrees.
Well, I am grateful for that much.
Being able to produce enormous quantities of grain cheaply has been a great help to the military.
And they supplied the military with enormous numbers of people too.
Former independent farmers who lost their land.
“When you say it, Pierre, it carries a different weight. You have results to prove it.”
Oh, and the army was not the only place they supplied with people.
They sent plenty into the cities too.
Those people had been farmers.
They possessed none of the skills needed to survive in an urban environment.
So now they live by the roadside and in abandoned houses.
“By the way, what happened to the people living in those old mansions?”
“People? No one lived there. We evicted the squatters who had illegally occupied them.”
About what I expected.
In other words, small farmers operating the old-fashioned, high-cost model were crushed by large capital.
Those who lost their livelihoods flowed into the army and the cities.
The former were ground down by war.
The latter became propertyless urban residents forced to scrape by from day to day.
And now I have to support an enormous bloated military while somehow dealing with masses of people who have no roots in the land and nothing they feel they must protect.
Reduce the size of the army, and discharged soldiers lose their livelihoods.
Before long, they will blend into the urban propertyless population.
A battered military.
Deteriorating public order.
And enormous numbers of people with nothing left to lose.
It feels like flicking a lighter beside the fuse of a stick of dynamite.
I keep catching myself thinking critically about it, but this is not exactly the Duke of Aquiane’s fault.
Neither he nor his ancestors could have foreseen this outcome.
They did what they did because circumstances required it.
It is difficult to say anything except that events could hardly have unfolded any other way.
It is not really anyone’s fault.
No.
I hate thinking about it, but there actually is someone at fault.
The poor people Pierre just evicted will probably die by the roadside.
When death approaches, who will they blame?
Pierre?
Of course not.
They were criminals illegally occupying abandoned buildings, while Pierre was the public-spirited noble who led his private troops in cleansing the streets.
And the depressing part is that Pierre himself believes this.
So do the poor people he evicted.
Then who do they blame?
The king.
Obviously.
Just as I can understand people living from day to day in poverty only as an abstraction, they too can understand me only as an abstraction.
The king.
The person who governs the country.
And therefore, if the country is not properly governed, it is the king’s fault.
Competent rulers—competent company presidents—understand this perfectly well.
So they create an outlet for anger between themselves and their subordinate commoners.
The nobility.
You simply offer them up as sacrifices.
For example, a man like the one happily getting drunk in front of me.
Go one step further and create divisions among the commoners themselves, and even better.
Wealthy citizens versus the propertyless poor.
Divide and rule.
You learned that in your high school textbook, right?
Thinking of it is easy.
Actually doing it requires extremely delicate handling.
The people being sacrificed will not simply sit quietly and accept it.
You have to arrange things so they never realize what you are doing.
And if they do realize it, you have to silence them by force.
I possess neither the ability nor the desire to do that.
Giving up the Royal Guard—my coercive apparatus—means exactly that.
Pierre understands that he could someday be offered up on the altar.
That is why he calls himself the “protector of the common people.”
No.
He is probably sincere.
Business owners like this are formidable.
A mental structure in which exploitation and benevolence coexist without contradiction.
That.
Pierre would probably become a fine ruler if he took the throne.
He could keep “that issue” and “this issue” neatly separate and carry out “bold reforms.”
But I cannot.
All I can do is keep applying temporary fixes while holding my breath and waiting for the storm to pass.
Isn’t there something?
Some idea that could overturn this deadlock?
We absorbed huge numbers of unemployed commoners into the military, and the result was crushing pressure on the treasury.
Then we tried sending them to the New Continent, which developed into conflict with Angran and crushed the treasury.
We could try creating new industries, but no enormous labor-intensive industry is simply going to spring into existence.
And even if we mass-produced something, there is no market capable of absorbing all of it.
Seek markets outside the Central Continent?
We are doing that.
And once again we run into Angran and crush the treasury.
With the exception of a few houses blessed with outstanding commercial talent, the nobility is in steady decline.
So they aim for government employment.
The military.
The bureaucracy.
The state absorbed them into all kinds of positions.
And the result?
Pressure on the treasury.
The wealthy citizens involved in commerce are doing fairly well individually.
Some nobles are doing well too.
So I would like them to spend more and more money and spread the benefits outward.
Then the economy of the country as a whole might improve, and the government would gain more tax revenue.
It still would not be enough.
So how do we make them spend?
One reform currently fashionable in Santeneri is to open a path into national politics for wealthy commoners.
In exchange, they provide money.
For them to conduct business with confidence, however, they need a guarantee that their activities are “protected.”
Protected from whom?
From me and the nobles.
And that means creating not the National Assembly in its current chamber-of-commerce-young-members-division form, but an actual parliament.
A parliament is a legislative body.
That means written law.
And if you make laws individually in response to every separate case, they will end up riddled with contradictions.
So you need laws establishing the standards by which other laws are made.
Within those laws, kings and nobles would have their existence defined and their powers limited.
I only hope it stops at limited.
Because in principle, that means destroying the status-based society Santeneri has been building since its foundation.
In reality, it is already collapsing.
After all, the Central Continent’s social hierarchy draws its legitimacy from the teachings of the Orthodox Faith.
The idea that “those with greater magic power rule those with less.”
And it is increasingly becoming common knowledge that magic power does not exist.
Which means that, apart from fanatical Orthodox believers who still believe in magic power, nobody can explain why kings and nobles are superior.
At present, society is held together by a vague atmosphere of:
I do not really know why, but I have to obey kings and nobles because that is how things have always been.
And violence.
That too.
But the military—the apparatus of violence—is itself part of “everyone.”
There is every possibility that its members will eventually ask:
Why do we have to obey these people?
Seen that way, clearly defining everyone’s position through law is not necessarily a bad thing.
But when those laws are written, will someone not notice?
People say:
“The king is sacred and inviolable.”
But on what basis?
Once someone notices that, the realization will surely spread.
Once it begins, there is a real possibility that it will continue all the way to its logical conclusion.
I studied vaguely similar cases in high school and university.
The details were completely different, of course.
History is fascinating.
In elementary and middle school, you learn about lots of “great figures in history,” right?
Starting with people like Himiko, then Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and so on.
In high school, the character of the subject changes a little.
You begin learning about things from farther away—“the flow of history,” so to speak.
Then university becomes even harder to make sense of.
You might read extremely specific sources from one very particular period.
Or you might go in a conceptual direction and start asking what “history” itself even is.
It becomes an enormous and diverse field that cannot be summed up in a single sentence.
When I lived in Japan, all I had to do was survive within the social framework I had been given.
But now, here in Santeneri, I have to look at a much larger world.
Unfortunately, I was never educated for that.
Nor do I possess some heaven-given talent.
New technologies.
New institutions.
They are not going to spring from my random ideas.
And even if one did, there would be no guarantee that the result would be good.
It would probably take off in some completely unexpected direction and leave me staring after it thinking:
Wait, that’s where this went?
◆
In the end, I suppose this sense of futility is everything.
Maybe I should just hand the throne to the Duke of Aquiane standing in front of me and set off on an adventure.
There must be some old swords in the treasury of the old castle.
I could take one of those.
Maybe I simply have not realized it yet, but perhaps I am the only person in this world who can use “magic.”
Or perhaps I have some hidden talent with the sword.
Along the way, I could help villagers in trouble and rescue some noble princess being attacked by bandits.
I could slay dragons too.
I would gather companions who admired me.
The princess would start gazing at me with unmistakable affection.
Eventually, we would defeat some evil enemy.
Some evil enemy.
A Demon King, maybe?
Then at the end, I would marry the noble princess and become king.
Oh, and the princess would have a cross-dressing knight lady protecting her who would also fall in love with me, so naturally we would end up romantically involved too.
Then there would be the daughter of some great lord who governed the region where the dragon had been rampaging—she would have a younger-sister sort of feel—and she would admire me too.
And once I became king, I would develop a relationship of mutual trust with a chancellor who recognized my abilities, and naturally his daughter would end up falling for me as well.
...That is my life right now.
This is literally me.
There is a noble princess—the sacrifice of sorts being sent to symbolize peace with a formerly hostile country.
There is a knightly lady who practically dresses like a man.
There is the chancellor’s daughter.
And there is a great noble’s daughter who feels like a little sister.
Unfortunately, the only thing missing is the Demon King.
I want a Demon King.
Not something invincible like a budget drowning in red ink, the propertyless urban poor, or the conflict in the New Continent.
I want something I can actually defeat properly with a sword and magic.