Because such an enormous incident had occurred, there was a girl whom everyone had forgotten.
It was an exceedingly fortunate thing.
Because that day, she had nearly died.
The Deberian maid who had been able to keep her life from Marquis Gebel thanks to the trash prince's rampage. Her name was Daien.
"We have confirmed that Zion Riobelt arrived in Deber, Madam."
Daien leaned against the door and listened closely.
The voice of Marquis Gebel's wife coming from inside the drawing room.
Deep emotion was steeped in it.
"Haa. So the Third Prince's proposal was true. To truly impose such a punishment on a direct-line member of the Divine Race......"
"And on top of that he added stripping him of his princely rank and confiscating all his assets. Everlasting glory to His Highness Prince Garon Riobelt."
The Third Prince had driven the Ninth Prince out to the outer territory beyond sacred soil.
A member of the Divine Race, no less, and the son of one who sits upon the divine seat, and a younger brother who inherited the same blood at that.
As punishments handed down to a member of the Divine Race went, it was a measure so cold and cruel as to be hard to find anywhere in the Empire's entire history.
Of course, Daien could not sympathize.
'Praising the Third Prince, who "merely" drove out to a foreign land the younger brother who put your husband into a coma. Isn't something odd about that, my lady?'
And yet the marquess, engulfed in overwhelming emotion, was expressing deep gratitude.
Because turning a "merely" into a "no less" was the standing the Divine Race occupied in the Empire.
"What do you think will become of that piece of trash, the Ninth Prince?"
"Having been dropped alone into outer territory without a single person to wait on him, he will surely endure hardship of the bitterest sort."
If he went about behaving like trash as he had in the capital, he could go beyond suffering distress to having his life endangered.
Because unlike the Empire's capital, a utopia for the Divine Race, Deber is arduous in the extreme.
And on top of that it is the domain of the First Prince, the opposing faction, so the Third Prince's influence is absent as well.
"If it is the Ninth Prince, he will assuredly clash with those bourgeois bastards. The timing is fortunate. If a prince is insulted by commoners putting on airs because they have earned a bit of money, would that not also be good grounds for us?"
"Ah...! So the Third Prince's wisdom was seeing even beyond that."
"Hoo hoo hoo hoo, indeed."
"That piece of trash will assuredly become good grounds. Because he knows nothing of his own place."
Unlike the certain marquess, Daien tilted her head.
'I don't think Prince Zion is like that......'
It had been only for a very brief moment, but she had seen it clearly.
The prince's face as he smiled at her that day.
"If it is that anger-management-disorder delinquent. What happened a year ago could happen once more, could it not?"
It was a reference to the Raven of Deber, Zion Bliese's attempt to assassinate the Ninth Prince.
"I think the possibility is very high. Because they... are frightening people."
The Deber Liberation Army... and among them, the Order.
If the Ninth Prince, on the grounds of having nothing in hand, should try to plunder Deber's citizens.
They would step forward once again.
"Well, for the immediate future the Ninth Prince will have to come up with money to cover his meals first. Worrying about assassination comes after surviving the crisis of starving to death, does it not, hahaha!"
Daien felt pity.
Prince Zion, driven out to a distant foreign land... just as they said, he was bound to endure bitter hardship.
'They said he hasn't a single maid to wait on him....'
Even if everyone cackled that it was a state befitting a piece of trash, Daien alone could not.
She was a Deberian, and Deberians do not forget a kindness.
Piece of trash though he might be, that day the Ninth Prince had gifted Daien salvation.
'Should I just up and go serve him myself?'
In fact Daien had been feeling an urgent sense that she had to escape the marquis's house as soon as possible.
The longer the marquis went without waking, the thinner the thread of her own life grew, one might say.
Literally a life it would not be strange to lose at any moment.
"Ohohoho! In about three months I shall have to send someone to photograph the prince subsisting on commoners' food because he has no money."
Daien pulled away from the door and began walking with short, hurried steps.
Even as she headed not for her own room but toward the depths of the mansion, the sound of the conversation carried.
"Is that not a bit unsatisfying? Try demanding a humiliating apology with money as the bait, Madam. The Ninth Prince might just comply? Hahahaha!"
"Shall I? Ohohohohoho!"
The two nobles, whose seats had by now drawn rather close together, cackled for a long while as they foretold the Ninth Prince's arduous life in Deber.
...But.
At that same hour, something astonishing was happening in Deber.
***
"Your Highness! I shall serve Your Highness!"
"No, this Gaigen is the right man for it! Would you grant me the honor of sponsoring a member of the Divine Race?"
Zion gazed at the scene before him with a slightly dazed face.
"You stay out of it! Can a dirt-grubber who sells rice possibly serve His Highness properly!"
"And you, a drifter who has barely been in Seiel any time at all, I cannot fathom what you think you know that you should step forward to serve His Highness!"
A fat middle-aged fellow and a scrawny middle-aged fellow.
Lunging at each other and competing to offer up money... no, to sponsor him.
'Are they that eager to offer up money?'
A sponsorship competition so fervent it prompted such a thought.
To explain the reason this unbelievable situation had been staged, the clock hands must be turned back about an hour.
To the very moment Winter told him the strategy for turning the two businessmen into wallets.
"Your Highness. Telling you everything would spoil the fun, so I shall explain only briefly how to hook the two businessmen. I intend to use a business-administration strategy based on Divine Race branding as the bait."
For a moment he wondered whether he was hearing a foreign language.
"Branding? Business administration? You said that last time too; what is that?"
"Ah, business administration is, as the name says, a methodology for managing a business. It is a new discipline rising among the bourgeois class. Branding refers to intangible value that is precious and dear enough that one wants to possess it... putting it that way may be difficult for you. By way of comparison, it means earning money by Your Highness's existence value alone, the way one raises the pot with a bluff while gambling."
Trust a gambler to reach for that comparison.
For some reason Winter looked enormously excited.
How to put it, he looked like his heart was pounding at getting to actually do something he had only imagined in his head.
"How much do you suppose the intangible value of Divine Race station comes to when converted into money? Aren't you curious? Hahaha."
'I am curious. That aside, this bastard knows all sorts of things.'
"You throw around some big words for a bastard who was knocking around the back alleys?"
"I did make it as far as university, you know. Though I was made to withdraw."
Made to withdraw, was he.
Got caught gambling after gathering his fellow students?
"Ah, Your Highness. During the conversation, might I ask you to occasionally speak in a manner befitting the Divine Race?"
"That's all it takes?"
"Of course. It is sufficient. Because Your Highness is, quite literally, of the Divine Race."
Winter wearing an expression that said it was more than enough. Watching him, the power the Divine Race bloodline held became viscerally clear.
To get a reaction like this even after being stripped of his princely rank.
"Shall we rise, then? I shall attend you."
The drawing room of a top-class hotel. It was a place Winter had reserved in advance.
"I spent a full two hundred thousand Luon on this room alone. It will be a small sum to Your Highness, but I mention it in hopes that you will recognize my loyalty."
For Riobelt it might be otherwise, but for Bliese it was absolutely not a small sum; still, he sat on the sofa as though it were nothing.
When roughly thirty minutes had been killed, a knock came along with an attendant announcing the guests' arrival.
Before long a scrawny middle-aged man and a potbellied middle-aged man entered the drawing room.
They were Reijo the rice merchant and Gaigen the department store manager.
"A subject of the Empire greets a member of the great Divine Race."
"A subject of the Empire greets a member of the great Divine Race."
The salutation. A rite and a law that any member of the Empire ought properly to perform upon presenting themselves before the Divine Race.
But the two businessmen did not conceal the aversion settled on their faces.
"Your Highness. May we stand now?"
Ever since coming to dwell in Zion Riobelt's body, this was the first time he had met anyone showing such an attitude.
He had understood the Divine Race's standing in the Empire to be sky-high... surely that wasn't wrong?
However great the bourgeois class's aversion to high station, they might well still fear the consequences.
'Hm, I see. So a former prince called the Empire's worst piece of trash who ended up deposed doesn't get treated as anything, is that it.'
Judging by the reaction, he figured it was already a bust.
They were the two men at the very top among the Imperials residing in Deber, that is, the inner-territory-born, so perhaps he'd thought too lightly of them.
'And I forgot that being Imperials in particular would make them all the less pliable.'
The Litania Empire is precisely a nation that places enormous weight on station and rank and where, accordingly, the desire to rise has settled in as a national character.
And the inner-territory-born were precisely those who had chosen life in a colony where resistance forces still remained, solely for the sake of advancing their station.
And when a man belongs to the very highest venue of socializing even among such people, each one of them cannot help being a heavyweight.
"May the two proprietors open their ears and listen. His Highness the Prince has come to reside in a foreign land for the first time. Those who serve him ought properly to accompany him, yet in their absence his inconveniences are not few, which is a lamentable thing. If at such a time he were to experience the goodwill of a person of purpose and smile even once, would that not be the honor of presenting happiness to a member of the Divine Race?"
Despite Winter's eloquence, smooth as silk, the two businessmen substituted a clearing of the throat for an answer.
"Ahem."
"A-ahem."
It was full of reluctance and aversion.
Then again, however well Winter had packaged it, the essence was a demand to hand over money.
'I'd have started by firing off a spell too. But seeing expressions like that so openly makes something rise in me.'
Since Winter had also asked it of him, a word or two laced with irritation ought to be fine.
"Foolish. Tsk. One of you. You have injured this prince's mood, so I shall bestow my grace on only one of you two."
"......?"
"......?"
At the out-of-nowhere remark, the two businessmen looked into each other's faces.
What grace could a penniless prince, deposed and banished, possibly bestow?
'Proprietor Reijo, do you know something?'
'I do not. From the look of it, it seems to be bluster.'
At that moment, Winter opened his mouth.
It was an explanation of the grace the trash prince could bestow.
"His Highness will be making periodic investments in ration certificates on the grain distribution market. Contrary to the wider world's concerns, which reckon the possibility of war given the current political situation, it means the grain market is safe enough for a member of the Divine Race with a thorough grasp of high-level information to invest in it."
The war-related news arriving daily of late from the inner territory, that is, the Empire's capital. Reijo the rice merchant, who had been racking his brains over the grain prices fluctuating accordingly, snapped his eyes open.
"His Highness came in haste, so there are many items he must purchase. He is fond of shopping to begin with. And yet a personage of the Divine Race, no less, said he would go to the VIP hall in person. If a rumor spread that a member of the Divine Race had graced a department store and enjoyed shopping, there would be an uproar, would there not."
Gaigen was the founding manager of the Seiel branch, the first established in Deber by the Empire's number-one department store trading house.
Meaning he absolutely had to make the department store a success, and that if he failed his career would evaporate.
Which is to say, Gaigen the department store manager's eyes rolled.
"Now. Manager Gaigen. Proprietor Reijo. You heard His Highness's command a moment ago. Which of you will do it?"
Furthermore, Winter whispered a final blow into Proprietor Reijo's and Manager Gaigen's ears.
"Ah. You know His Highness's temperament well, I trust? Let me mention it for your reference."
The high-grade wristwatch fastened to the wrist he smoothly extended.
Far too expensive for an ash-haired Deberian bastard to wear.
"He is a person who spends five million Luon in a single night. He is also a person who bestows generously."
Only then did the two businessmen realize.
That even one in the position of being penniless and deposed, with all four limbs cut off, could in himself be money.
Zion Riobelt, the Empire's worst piece of trash and the bearer of the Empire's finest bloodline, was precisely such a being.
'Five million Luon of luxury in a single night. So his having no money was a false rumor from the start.'
'Of course it was. Being a prince, no less, however much he received a punishment of total asset confiscation, he would have quietly secured his own.'
Which meant that his remark about desiring this meeting and their goodwill might possibly be a mere diversion for a delinquent prince!
"If you wish to obtain the chance to seize the honor of presenting goodwill to His Highness. Proprietor Reijo. Manager Gaigen. Make your plea, earnestly."
The chance to seize the honor of presenting goodwill to a prince.
It was a phrase that made one wonder what absurdity this was.
And yet, the two businessmen began to shout fervently, leaning their upper bodies forward.
"Your Highness, I shall attend upon Your Highness!"
"No, this Gaigen is the right man for it! Would you grant me the honor of sponsoring a member of the Divine Race!"
"You stay out of it! You who haven't the means! To dare extend a dirt-grubber's hand to His Highness is an impertinence in itself!"
"You who have barely been in Seiel any time at all are the one who should know your place and withdraw at once! You who know nothing, how do you propose to serve His Highness!"
Their voices were so loud and high and forceful and noisy that his ears hurt.
This much was the whole account of how Winter, with a few words, reversed the posture of two businessmen who had shown hostility and subtly picked at him the moment they came face to face.
"Your Highness. Please choose one. Which do you prefer?"
Listening to Winter's whisper, he was impressed.
'To think the power of Divine Race station was this great.'
Even a trash prince stripped of all his assets and his princely rank got treatment on this level for the sole reason of being direct-line Divine Race.
Presumably it was the power of the Divine Race branding Winter spoke of.
"Winter. You seem to be even more useful than my original right arm."
"It is an honor."
Now it was time to choose.
Which one would be better?
It was a process for squeezing money out of them, but since he would have to pay a price either way, it was proper to see it as a transaction.
Therefore he ought to choose carefully.
"Your Highness, that fellow Gaigen is inferior to me in both the assets he holds and the means to serve Your Highness. Please trust this Reijo."
"Reijo, do not speak as you please just because you have a mouth!"
"Have I said anything wrong, then? Let me give an example. Can you present several dozen Deberian women of outstanding beauty and let him pick as he pleases?"
Manager Gaigen faltered.
"O-of course I can. Beauties are strewn about at any pleasure house, so what is special about that!"
"By that reckoning, on top of taking him to a pleasure house I can also provide special pleasures. You know of it, do you not?"
"Enough."
It no longer mattered what else the two of them said.
Because he had already made up his mind.
"Proprietor Reijo. Speak in detail. Your words have touched this prince's interest."
Reijo wore an expression saying that was more like it.
'Trash after all. Look at him responding immediately when women are used as bait. Well, trash or not, if it's trash that turns into money I can carry him on my back and serve him all he likes.'
"The jobs generated on the farms I run number a good ten thousand and more. And a great many of them are Deberians."
Meaning he would threaten them with their farm jobs to make them offer up the women in their families.
"That is not all. This Reijo provides his farms as sites of penal labor for reforming Deberian reactionaries who riot at the slightest provocation, thereby soothing their patriotism."
"Aha."
Meaning he pulls out through back-channel dealings those who rose up for their nation and were caught by the Police Bureau, and works them like slaves.
"Reijo. This prince feels that you and I shall get on very well indeed."
Zion Bliese smiled.
Zion Riobelt's mouth twisted.
He had resolved.
That he would wring out every bit of the wealth the bastard had piled up by exploiting Deberians, no, more than double it.
"I shall grant you the honor of offering goodwill to this prince."
'I'll devour every last bit of you. Until nothing but bone is left.'
"Thank you! I shall serve you so that you have no regrets!"
Watching the delighted Reijo, he continued.
'First I'll have to rescue the ones being exploited.'
"For the first goodwill you offer this prince, I should like it to be one of your farms. Of course, I shall also pay recompense for the goodwill in no stingy measure."
"When you say a farm...? What sort of crops would you like cultivated?"
"I have nothing particular in mind, so hand over any farm at all. Ah, if possible I should like a quiet place somewhat removed from Seiel. I intend to build a villa as well."
He would build it gaudily. Because he had to increase the work available.
"Then how about the farm here in Teraguard?"
Reijo held out a map, his eyes glinting like a businessman who had spotted a chance to make money, and immediately Winter whispered quietly.
"Your Highness, Teraguard is a place with nothing but wasteland. The farm's yield is obvious without looking, so please choose elsewhere."
Zion thought the same.
Would a crown prince, no less, not even know the regional characteristics of his own nation.
"Reijo. Do you presume to make sport of this prince? Teraguard is a full week's distance from Seiel......"
He stopped speaking and clenched his fist.
Not out of anger, but because he did not want the vibration noticed.
Wooooooong...!
The Ring of the Guide. The royal house's legacy was trembling finely in response.
To no one else but a lump of greed of an Imperial.
"Y-Your Highness. My apologies. I thought the scenery of Teraguard was fine and that you would like it... then let us make it this farm here......"
"I'll buy it."
"Your Highness...?"
Perhaps because he had abruptly changed his mind. Reijo revealed bewilderment even though he was being given what he wanted.
He said it once more.
"I'll buy it. The Teraguard farm."
Zion's gaze was fixed on the farm's location marked on the map.
He realized.
It had not responded to Proprietor Reijo.
It had responded to the farm located in Teraguard that Proprietor Reijo owned.
"How much will it take? I'll pay whatever price you name."
A strange premonition he could feel. It was a farm he had to buy no matter the cost.
And as cleanly as possible, at that.