Chapter 6: The Devil Has Always Been There
‘Revenge, against whom?’
‘Who would they hate? The answer is self-evident.’
Eliza’s body softened a little.
She propped herself against the edge of the table to steady her posture: “Mitia... what do you want to do?”
“If I said... I don’t want to be a marquis, I want to be an empress—would that work?”
“Huh? What?!!”
Eliza shook her head with a laugh: “Why are you always talking nonsense?”
Mitia turned her head, staring straight at her, and still said: “I want to be an empress!”
She had decided.
To transmigrate and not rebel? Then one might as well stick an electric drill up a chrysanthemum!
Forcing down the thought that this daughter was simply hopeless, Eliza asked hoarsely: “Why would you come up with such an idea? Have you thought about how insane this is?”
“There are nearly twenty great lords of our rank in the whole kingdom, tens of thousands of manor lords, hundreds of thousands of troops, and a holy-ranked archmage in the capital!”
“What right do you have to be an empress? Just because you’re a woman? If you said you wanted to be a queen consort, I might believe it...”
Picking up the pastry Eliza had brought over from the table, Mitia examined it carefully, broke off a small piece, rubbed it between her fingertips.
It was pure white, delicate, without the slightest impurity.
“This pastry…about ten percent of the grain is lost during harvest, another twenty percent during hulling and filtering, another ten percent during transport, then thirty percent again when ground into flour. What remains ends up here, on this plate, in this form.”
“This isn’t waste. This is what I’m entitled to enjoy. Because I am a noble. I have plenty of food. I can’t possibly eat much in a day, so I must eat well—the more elaborate the better, the harder to make the better.”
“Commoners don’t cook like this. But even if they don’t pick at all, and cook their rice mixed with husks, in a harvest year they can barely manage to fill their bellies.”
“If the weather turns bad and yields drop, then there’s nothing to be done. If the goddess doesn’t bless them, if they starve and sell their children, it can only be called fate. After all, I am a noble. I don’t need to worry about such things.
“I already guarantee them a stable environment for farming. Collecting tax grain is only right. If they cannot pay, then they should sell themselves into slavery to repay their debts. That is natural law.”
“Yet we look the same. None of us has more or fewer limbs than the other. But the gap between our lives is greater than that between man and beast—because I am a noble.”
“All of this might just go on like this forever. Nobles will remain nobles. Commoners will remain commoners. And slaves will always be nothing but slaves.”
Mitia set down the pastry and looked at her:
“But now, I want to make a deal with them.”
“I can free all the slaves—as long as they are willing to do some dangerous work for me. For example, a year in the mines would earn them freedom and equality.”
“I can also allocate state-owned land to every commoner family within Astal territory—no taxes, no levies, complete freedom over their harvest.”
“And their price would be to enthrone me as empress. Would this deal work?”
Eliza shook her head: “No, impossible. The yield of the land can’t feed that many. Even if you free the slaves, there’s not enough land to distribute. They’ll still be vagrants. You’re just daydreaming.”
Shouting slogans was one thing, but actually doing this was utterly unfeasible.
After all, there was another solution on the continent—war.
War had never ceased on this continent.
Even now, battles were still being fought in different regions.
Whenever food shortages appeared, a great war could consume a huge number of slaves to maintain basic stability.
If the nobles won, they even profited.
And when slaves died, they simply died.
New slaves would keep appearing endlessly.
Mitia shook her head: “No, you forgot what I said before—what if I could give them the means to rival magicians and knights?”
She picked up a blueprint from the table and handed it to Eliza.
Under her puzzled gaze, she said:
“The Watt improved steam engine. With twenty low-grade water-and-fire magic crystals, it can run nonstop for three hours—equal to a waterwheel’s entire day’s work.”
“And it never needs rest, never depends on water flow. As long as there are crystals, it keeps running. As long as the levers are connected right, it can do anything.”
Before the shocked Eliza could digest this, Mitia pulled a long tubular object from her ring and handed it over, then took a knight’s plate armor from her space ring and tossed it onto the ground.
Thinking for a moment, Mitia pulled the object back from Eliza’s hands, then mixed powders from two different low-grade magical crystals, common among alchemists.
She loaded them into the tube’s chamber, pushed in a small ball, and finally used spiritual force to raise it into the air, aiming at the plate armor.
Around the armor, she cast colorful shields of various magical elements.
Finally, the crystal embedded atop the black tube flashed under Mitia’s urging.
“Bang!”
The sudden blast startled Eliza, making her jump.
The tubular object exploded into fragments, scattering across the room.
Eliza’s phoenix eyes widened: “Were you just trying to make me hold that thing?!”
Mitia gave a sheepish smile: “How could I, mother? Forget it—look at the armor!”
Eliza pressed her chest, then instinctively followed Mitia’s gesture with her eyes—and her lips parted slightly.
At the center of the plate armor was a hole, a fist-sized crack blown wide open.
“Well? Impressive, isn’t it? An ordinary person could use it to kill a fully armored knight head-on! Even a low-level magician couldn’t block it directly.”
“Mm...”
After her shock, Eliza nodded, but her eyes drifted to the scattered fragments on the ground: “It’s just… a bit crippling.”
Sure, it was terrifying that commoners could kill knights and magicians—but if one used this weapon, their own death would look worse than the enemy’s.
Mitia: “...Please don’t mind those details. It’s just a prototype, only meant to prove whether my idea works.”
“The materials aren’t good enough. I couldn’t help it. That’s why I need to promote that machine. I need it to forge better materials for gun barrels, such as ores with magic-resistant properties.”
This world couldn’t synthesize gunpowder—or rather, the effect was too weak.
In Mitia’s view, the reason lay in the omnipresent magical elements in the air.
But powders ground from magical crystals, when mixed, produced incompatible elemental explosions far stronger than gunpowder.
The power was great, the kinetic force enough to pierce a knight’s heavy plate armor—but the recoil was too strong.
Ordinary wrought iron barrels could never withstand it.
“Mother, you saw it just now. With just a light press to activate the crystal, such power could be released. An ordinary person could do it completely.”
Eliza, finally coming back from the visual shock, swallowed involuntarily: “Mitia... do you realize you’ve created a devil? Countless, countless people will die!”
In the past, wars were organized by nobles and magicians.
Peace or war was decided solely by the nobility on both sides.
But if Mitia’s weapon spread among commoners, magicians and knights would face the deadliest threats to their lives.
They would completely lose control over war—no one could control it!
How many would have to die before such a chaotic world found peace again? She dared not even imagine it.
Mitia, having thought it through, appeared calm: “Perhaps. But sooner or later, it will appear. Mother, don’t forget—the magical powders, I bought them from alchemists. I didn’t invent them.”
“Maybe they won’t discover it for ten years, maybe a hundred, maybe tomorrow. The devil has always been there, hasn’t it?”
“Rather than fear so much, it’s better to take control from the start. At least... we cannot stand in opposition to the greatest beneficiaries—the people.”
“And besides, this isn’t the key point. This is...”
Mitia stroked the blueprint, feeling impatience rising in her heart.
“I want to use this opportunity to eliminate all the manor lords at once, and complete the unification of the entire territory.”
Only with all lands under her complete control could she begin converting the system’s technologies into reality.
Otherwise, with the current situation, whatever she created would only end up strengthening the enemy.