Chapter 20 - Carrot and Stick

"Is this a monster?"

Zed looked down at something with a disgusted expression.

It was the monster Count Concillus's soldiers had dragged in.

A bear monster, shoved inside a hard, thick stone container.

It had been bound tight in chains, its joints broken and sealed, leaving it completely powerless so that even if it recovered, it could not exert its strength.

"Yes."

"This is my first time seeing a monster in my life. I never had any reason to come across one, so I did not know they were this revolting."

"You sound like some noble young lady."

"I may not look it, but I was raised precious. Among the Red-Eye Clan..."

Zed's face turned bitter as he let the words Red-Eye Clan slip out.

Zed's eyes turned toward Ferda.

"So why did you call me?"

"I called you to do your work as my attendant."

"Does it have to do with this bear bastard?"

Ferda gave a small nod and looked down at the monster.

"... What are you going to do with this thing?"

"Even tied up like this, it keeps increasing in size. We have put a stop to it, so it looks harmless for now, but in about an hour, its heart will start beating again."

"Well, damn..."

"And in a situation like this, where it feels its life is in danger, it will grow several times faster than usual."

"So?"

Ferda sharply sliced the air with his index finger.

"Every three hours, its flesh must be cut away. All the tendons and nerves as well."

Ferda patted Zed on the shoulder and said,

"And you will be the one doing it."

"... You are saying I have to keep cutting it every three hours? How am I supposed to sleep?"

To that question, Ferda answered like this.

"They say the faithful in the southern regions pray every three hours. Without missing a single day."

"No, I am not even from there, am I? Humanly speaking, how am I supposed to do this every three hours?"

"If they can pray every three hours, you can do it too."

"That... Could I not take shifts with that little maid young lady?"

"As I said, she is not my loyal servant. If you can persuade her, I will not stop you."

"..."

Zed clamped his mouth shut.

Even Zed, who thought he could seduce women as easily as eating cake, found a dragon spawn difficult to deal with.

"No need to worry. I am not telling you to do it for the rest of your life. You only have to do it until Burnel produces research results."

"Until he produces research results... Will that happen in a few days?"

"It might take a few months."

"A few months..."

A hollow laugh came out on its own.

He had to keep cutting up a monster every three hours?

GURGLE, GURGLE.

The bear monster heaved out revolting breaths.

He had not even cut its flesh yet, had not done anything yet, but it already felt as if a nauseating stench were rising from it.

"... Did you recruit me to make me do this?"

"When else would I put you to use if not for something like this?"

"Hoo... Understood. I just have to do it somehow until the research is finished, correct?"

He asked in a meaningful voice.

"Of course."

"Haha, thank you for that."

He said he was grateful, but rage was blazing in his eyes.

His eyes were dyed red and giving off a gleam.

Even Ferda could not know what sort of future would befall Burnel.

Nor did he care.

He would manage somehow.

* * *

Two days later, a single horse returned to Valdrova Castle carrying a man.

It was Burnel, who had been recuperating under Count Concillus.

He had returned after feeling as if he had nearly died from mana burnout.

'The me of today is different from the me of yesterday.'

Burnel was in a state full of elation.

He believed that a new experience had led him one step higher.

'From now on, I will conduct research while putting my life on the line.'

If he wanted power that could change the world, then he would put in effort equal to that.

He would cast aside the complacent self he had been and steel himself to burn up his own body.

That was how he would look to an even higher place.

After leaving his horse at the stable, Burnel discovered someone standing in front of the castle gate.

Aside from Luri and Ferda, it was the first other person he had seen at Valdrova Castle.

'He is handsome...'

A brown ponytail and a tall height.

He was such a fine-looking man that even another man could not help admiring him.

Burnel realized the man was smiling at him and approached him.

There was one thing he could see that he had not noticed from a distance.

'He looks somewhat tired...'

There were faint dark circles beneath his eyes.

There was no doubt he had been tormented by something until recently.

"This is our first time meeting. My name is Zed."

The man introduced himself with a refreshing smile.

"Ah, hello. I am Burnel."

"Yes, I heard. May I ask how old you are?"

"Uh, well, t-twenty-seven... sir."

"Ah, you are older than me. Then I will call you hyung."

"Ah, yes."

"Let us go to the laboratory, hyung."

Zed guided him.

'I-I never thought such a cool person would call me hyung!'

But was this what they meant by good fortune coming after hardship?

Now that he had suffered a little because of the bear monster and survived a brush with death, he was being proudly called hyung.

The slight resentment he had felt when he came here seemed to vanish completely.

"This is the bear monster we captured alive."

"Ah, yes. It is alive, and it has been managed well..."

"Of course. Who do you think managed it?"

"Mr. Zed, you managed it? Thank you."

"Haha, there is no need to thank me."

Zed smiled as he dragged over a nearby chair.

SCRAAAAPE.

For some reason, that sound was as chilling as an executioner rising from hell.

Burnel wondered where he was dragging it, and then Zed set it in front of the entrance.

He sat down heavily, crossed his arms, and crossed his legs.

As if blocking the entrance.

"Now, begin."

No, he really was blocking it.

"Pardon?"

"Your research. Time is precious, so begin at once."

His figure was faintly illuminated by candlelight.

Burnel had not noticed when they were under the sunlight, but those dark circles stretched long beneath his eyes.

"Thanks to your research, hyung, this little brother has to wake up every three hours and use this dagger!"

BANG!

"Eek!"

"To slice up that monster bastard, apparently?"

"Uh, well... I am sorry...!"

"Oh, there is no need to be sorry. If there is anything this little brother can do for you, just say the word. I will bring you 'anything.' So, hyung, do not worry and devote yourself to your research."

A blazing hell burned in Zed's eyes, and the dagger stuck in the table emitted the frost of a freezing hell.

"And you can sleep once you are dead, yes?"

One phrase echoed through Burnel's mind.

No takebacks!

* * *

An army was moving along the main road.

At the front, two knights rode on horseback, and immediately behind them, a standard-bearer fluttered a banner marked with the symbol of their house.

In the middle, surrounded by the army, one splendid carriage moved slowly.

Baron Giyot was on the move for public business.

The place he was headed was Valdrova Castle.

Its form, halfway up the lonely mountain in the east, could be seen even from far away.

"Urghhh..."

Baron Giyot felt his stomach twist.

The closer he drew to the castle, the worse it became.

"Damn it. My father said there would never be any reason to go there, but he was lying through his teeth..."

"Master, take a deep breath."

"Yes, deep breaths, hoo... As the third son of House Giyot, I cannot be frightened by something like this."

"That is right. Absolutely right!"

Baron Giyot took a deep breath.

Though he was now fat and unbearably sluggish, he had once been a knight.

However, he was only a knight in name, one who had never once roamed a battlefield.

He had no tales of valor and no medals, so it was only natural that he had been pushed off to the position of a baron on the frontier.

"Do not be too frightened just because he is that red lizard bastard's fiancé. House Giyot has solid connections, does it not? Blood is thicker than water!"

"B-But that bastard even killed a man of House Vulture, did he not?"

"House Vulture has no one to make trouble afterward, does it? It would not have been strange if they had been wiped out in the first place. He will not be able to touch House Giyot recklessly."

"Right? Yes, that must be it."

Baron Giyot tried hard to hypnotize himself with his servant's words.

In the meantime, the carriage had already entered the castle.

The carriage door opened, and a red carpet spread out before Baron Giyot.

At its center stood a little silver-haired maid.

It was Valdrova's dragon spawn.

"You have arrived?"

"Y-Yes, I have."

"This way."

Luri walked ahead.

Baron Giyot walked over the red carpet with his close knights accompanying him.

The place was well maintained, so it did not give off a gloomy air.

However, the castle interior, which should have been full of caretakers and soldiers, was so empty that it tormented Baron Giyot all the more.

It felt as if he were crawling into the belly of Leviathan.

'Do not think about it. Do not think about it...'

Then a door blocked his path.

A grand door carved with tales of a dragon's valor.

At human eye level, these words were carved clearly.

-Stand in awe before the primordial flame and master of power.

The door opened.

Inside, a man greeted Baron Giyot while standing from his seat.

He flinched and trembled.

"You have come a long way."

Gray hair and blue eyes.

Those eyes were like looking into a deep, deep lake, making it hard to breathe.

It was Ferda Valdrova.

"You are sweating quite a lot. Was the journey here difficult?"

"N-No. Haha..."

"I see. Then it seems you lack exercise, so see to it that you lose some weight. Obesity makes one prone to an early death."

"Thank you for taking an interest in my health."

"Come this way."

Ferda gestured to the seat across the table and had Baron Giyot sit.

The sweat flowing from Baron Giyot's body showed no sign of stopping.

"You must be working truly hard out in the far east."

"It is nothing worth calling hardship! Compared to the weight borne by Her Highness the Grand Duchess, it is as shallow as the blood from a bird's foot."

"Indeed. Your work is just like the blood from a bird's foot."

Ferda's words, which had flowed naturally, grew indistinct for the first time.

The atmosphere changed.

Baron Giyot could tell well enough.

He had fallen for Ferda's words.

"I did not particularly want to check, but after rising to the position of Regent, I became rather interested. So I took just a brief look at your documents."

THUD!

He held out the documents he had taken just a brief look at in front of him.

"There were very many signs of forgery."

Giyot's Adam's apple bobbed.

It would have been natural for him to get angry and ask why Ferda was mentioning such a thing now, but Giyot could not do that.

He let Ferda speak.

"There are more than one or two things that do not add up. Do you know how much disappeared that way in total?"

Ferda pointed to the number where he had organized it.

"3,000 goldens."

Golden was the unit used to count gold coins.

"It says here that you swallowed as many as three thousand gold coins, coins that the people of your territory would struggle to touch even once in their entire lives."

"W-Well, that was not entered by me..."

"Of course you did not do it yourself. How could someone like you manage handwriting like this?"

The elegant script seemed to say at a glance, "Someone wrote this for me."

Ferda already knew that part as well.

"You must have taken a little for yourself, then given some to the ones below you and made them accomplices. The ones below them would have shared some with the ones below them too, so what you actually pocketed is naturally less than 3,000 goldens. But what are nobles? The more luxury they enjoy, the heavier their necks must be."

Ferda immediately moved on to the next document and began reciting each item.

"The charges are embezzlement, forgery of official documents, breach of dignity..."

Each time he recited a word, Baron Giyot's face seemed to age by a year.

"... According to imperial criminal law, depending on the severity of the offense, a fine of at least 10,000 goldens can be collected..."

Ferda's blue eyes stared at him.

"And at most, you may be beheaded and displayed at the castle gate."

Suddenly, Thessalos Vulture's end flashed through his mind.

Baron Giyot fell to his knees with a deathly pale face.

"Oh, please let me off just once! Never again! I will never let such a thing happen again, Regent!"

"Hmm."

Ferda rose from his seat and patted his shoulder.

"Listen carefully. I am not telling you not to do this kind of thing."

"Y-Yes?"

"I told you I do not care at all if you fill your own belly. In truth, no matter how much you filled your belly, I have no interest."

"T-Then why did you bring that up..."

"What I consider important is ability."

"A-Ability... you say?"

"I think being a little dirty but competent is better than being clean but incompetent. For the sake of the whole, a slight deviation is none of my concern. I do not care in the slightest whether you eat delicious food or roll around with a whore named Rosemary."

Ferda whispered into his ear.

"Prove your competence. Resolve the food problem and the matters concerning monsters as soon as possible, and contribute to stabilizing the lives of the people. Otherwise..."

Ferda lightly waved the papers.

"These official documents may accidentally fly all the way to the imperial capital. The emperor, of course, and your parents and siblings as well, will learn of your corruption. If that happens, a fierce race will unfold over who comes to take your head first, the imperial executioner or the knights of your house. Do you understand?"

"I-I understand! I will prove it without fail!"

"Good. Our conversation ends here. You may go."

Baron Giyot scurried away from the spot like a man who had put his head into a guillotine and then pulled it back out.

Ferda checked Baron Giyot's name on the interview list with a satisfied expression.

'As expected, it is convenient to have someone think in my stead.'

No matter that Ferda had risen to the ranks of a Great Mage, he was not well versed in bothersome paperwork like this.

To point out what had been used where and how, one needed related knowledge and experience, and Ferda had neither of those two things.

The one who had become Ferda's head was none other than Mori.

She looked like a dazed girl, but inside her head was The Library of All Things.

Ferda had instructed Mori like this.

["From now on, review everything written in the ledgers and reports, and if there are any inconsistencies, summarize them all. Also, how much of a sentence would come out according to imperial criminal law."]

Mori nodded and quickly skimmed through the contents of the ledger.

FLIP, FLIP!

Her speed-reading was so absurd that one could say she was only pretending to read.

Work that would have taken several people a full week together, she was rapidly resolving on her own.

Thus, she turned the corruption of the fourteen lords into documents one by one, and Ferda held meetings with each of them based on that.

'Corruption itself does not matter one way or another.'

Just as there were no fish without a fishy smell, there were no nobles without corruption.

If they were not competent, Ferda simply intended to cut them away.

All they had to do was prove that they had occupied their positions all this time not because their asses were heavy.

"With this, you have made Baron Giyot leave wailing like a child as well."

Luri, who had been watching quietly, said.

"There are still about five more left."

"You are only frightening them like that. Do you intend to become a tyrant?"

"Only frightening them? This was merely the first time I swung the stick."

"The stick...?"

"Carrot and stick. The core of the strategy is giving those two alternately."

Luri recalled the series of events she had experienced with Ferda, then tilted her head.

"Up until now, you have only been harshly whipping them, though?"

"Have I?"

"Yes. It looks as if you intend to crush them completely with fear. Or has pain become so familiar to you that your threshold has grown higher?"

"Hmm..."

Ferda had not been aware at all of the fact that he truly had only been applying the stick.

"Well, it does not matter."

Even if, as Luri said, he had only been swinging the stick, he had no intention of offering a carrot right away.

"They have been useless donkeys who have done nothing but eat through the carrot stores until now, so should they not be made to work?"

"That is also true."

Luri acknowledged those words and nodded.

Ferda Valdrova.

For the development of the Grand Duchess's domain, he diligently swings the stick again today.