How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: Volume 4

by Dojyomaru

  Chapter 5: Weighing Nostalgia Against the Future

  —The middle of the 12th month, 1,546th year, Continental Calendar

  The royal capital was thoroughly wrapped in a wintery atmosphere, and there had been enough cold days in a row that it felt like the snow might start to fall soon. It was a morning where I didn’t really want to get out from under a warm blanket.

  “I have some important business to attend to in the castle town today...” I said, bringing up the topic while eating breakfast with my four fiancées, as usual. “It’d help to have a woman come along. Would one of you mind?”

  “Is that for work? It doesn’t sound like you’re heading out to play.” Liscia asked as a representative of the group, to which I nodded with a wry smile.

  “Sadly, it is. It’s an important matter this time, so I have to head out personally.”

  “I see... I can go. How about everyone else?” Liscia asked, turning the topic to the other three. It felt like she already had the dignity of the first queen, bringing all of the others together under her.

  Roroa was the first to raise her arms above her head in an X. “I’m afraid you’re gonna have to count me out, sadly. Darlin’s already asked me to negotiate with the merchant’s guild.”

  “About making the slave traders public servants, you mean?” Liscia asked.

  “That’s right. Darlin’s already made the used metal dealers into public servants and has them workin’ in the recyclin’ industry, or somethin’ like that, but this time it’s not gonna go so easily. The used metal dealers were like trash pickers, so they weren’t part of a guild. Slave traders, on the other hand, while they may be looked down on, they’re proper, registered members of a guild. If we’re takin’ them away from the guild and puttin’ them under the control of the state, that’s effectively creatin’ a monopoly on slaves.”

  Roroa picked up the salt shaker as she said this, then continued.

  “If it were metal or salt, there’d be some precedent, but I ain’t never heard of anyone creatin’ a monopoly on slaves before. Slaves aren’t somethin’ you produce locally for local consumption. Naturally, they come in from other countries, too. If we’re nationalizin’ the slave trade, we’ll also need to stop those flows from other countries. As public servants, their wages’ll be stable, but they’ll never make money hand over fist. That’s why the slave traders who want to make the big bucks will go to other countries. There’ll be some pushback, too.”

  “I’m ready to accept some pushback on this,” I said.

  I was fine with convict slaves being sentenced to hard labor, but I wanted to put an end to the era where women and children were sold off so there would be fewer mouths to feed, and where it was taken as a given that the child of a slave was also a slave. That wasn’t only from a humanitarian point of view, it was also to make this country more prosperous as a whole.

  However, Roroa, who had been tasked with the negotiations, had a grim look on her face. “I’m sure your aim is to downsize the system of slavery, Darlin’... but I’m not sure there’re enough convict slaves and economic slaves in this country alone to meet demand. It’s a real problem.”

  “Is it going to be too difficult?” I asked.

  Roroa shook her head. “I’ll do it. I want to see this world after slavery that you’ve been tellin’ me about, after all. One where everyone earns money, everyone uses money, and everyone makes the economy turn... That’s the world I want to see.”

  I had told the clever Roroa a bit about the economic history of my world. I had told her about that era of technological revolution where goods had begun to be mass-produced. There had been a demand for markets to sell those goods to, and so there had been a movement toward freeing the slaves who’d held no assets in order to create that market.

  Naturally, I knew there were people who had fought under the ideology that all people should have equal rights. I couldn’t deny the hard work of the slaves who’d fought to win their own freedom, or the efforts of those who’d wished for them to be free. However, with any system, it always came down to whether or not that system was suitable for the time it existed in.

  The war between the North and South United States had been called a war of emancipation, but it was more that the North had held up the ideal of freeing the slaves in order to gather support against the forces of the South, which had included many plantation owners. What had once been considered an impractical ideal was accomplished the moment it aligned with the facts of the situation.

  Conversely, no matter how wonderful an ideal is, if it’s not in line with the times, it will be trampled underfoot.

  In the end, it’s a matter of the times in which we live. I mean, even when slavery ended, we would have conflict between the capitalist class and the laborers waiting for us in the next era. However, in the story I told her, Roroa seemed to see a new frontier.

  “It may take bein’ a little heavy handed, but if we move together with the Empire, it can be done,” she said. “If half of the territory ruled by mankind on this continent is movin’ to reduce slavery, it’ll be hard to push back against us. Then, when there’s a shortage of labor, though this is reversin’ the cause and effect from your story, Darlin’, technology’ll have to advance to fill the gap.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got a path toward that. You can leave it to me.”

  “I’m countin’ on that. Because I’ll be doin’ what I can myself.”

  I nodded. “I’m relying on you.”

  “Mwahaha. Say it again.”

  Roroa and I locked arms firmly. I really was counting on Roroa to handle the economic front.

  Now, if Roroa couldn’t make it today, what about Aisha or Juna?

  “I am sorry to have to say this, but I have a meeting for our next music program, so I won’t be able to accompany you,” said Juna.

  “I-I was asked to join the new recruits for training...” said Aisha. “Of course, if you insist on it, sire, I will cast aside my prior engagement to be with you.”

  “No, I’m not going to insist,” I said. “Hm... But, well...”

  I don’t really want to bring that large of an entourage this time. If I had a lot of people with me, I would put the other party on guard. Though, that said, I didn’t feel entirely safe going without bodyguards. I mean, Liscia was going to be with me, too, after all.

  Although Liscia does have more combat prowess than the average guard.

  The Black Cats were currently dealing with clandestine operations in many other countries, so they likely couldn’t spare the people to serve as guards. If possible, I had wanted either Aisha, who had the greatest individual combat strength, or Juna, who could also gather intelligence, to accompany us. As I was thinking about that...

  “Your Majesty, might I offer a suggestion?” The head maid Serina, who was standing ready by the wall, gave an elegant bow.

  “Serina? Did you have an opinion on this?” I asked.

  “Yes. If you are looking for a guard, there is an individual I might like to recommend.”

  “Who might that be?” I asked.

  “Your Majesty’s personal trainer, Sir Owen.”

  “Urgh... Old Man Owen, huh...”

  She was referring to the old general and head of the House of Jabana, Owen Jabana. He was a hearty old man whose personality was serious and honest to the point of being excessively passionate. I had liked his willingness to express an opinion and had taken him on as my sounding board and educator.

  True, he’s a capable warrior, and given his post, he wouldn’t have much to do while I’m gone. He’s always noisy, and I don’t think he’s suited for going out discreetly, though.

  While I was considering the idea, Serina continued. “You should also take Carla from the Maid Corps with you.”

  “Huh?! Me?!” Carla, who was standing beside Serina, cried out in surprise.

  “Carla is enlisted with the Maid Corps, but she is Your Majesty’s slave,” said Serina. “At times lik
e this, you really must use her as your meat— work her like a horse.”

  “Were you about to say meat shield?!” Carla protested. “Wait, even now that you’ve corrected it to horse, that’s still pretty bad!”

  Serina whipped out her maid training crop.

  “Ah! Yes, ma’am! I will serve with sincerity and devotion!” Carla hurriedly saluted.

  She’s been completely broken in, huh...

  “Anyway, Carla, I’ll be counting on you,” I said.

  “U-Understood, master,” she said.

  So for now, it was decided that four people of Liscia, Owen, Carla, and I would be going to the castle town together.

  I already felt exhausted just from having come to that decision.

  And so, we came to the castle town of Parnam.

  Liscia, Owen, Carla, and I were walking down the shopping street in the middle of the day. Because we were here in secret, we were traveling on foot and not by carriage.

  “Gahaha!” Owen laughed. “I am pleased that you would choose me as your bodyguard, Your—”

  “Shh! Owen... How many times do I have to tell you not to call me Your Majesty in the middle of town like this?” I hissed.

  “Oh, my apologies.”

  The way Owen laughed it off without looking the least bit guilty made my head hurt. Owen seemed to be in a good mood over being chosen as my bodyguard, so he was even more high-strung than usual.

  “We’re here in secret this time... so, please, I’m begging you,” I said.

  “But of course, I am aware of that,” boomed Owen.

  Was he really? For a group that was trying to be discreet, we stood out to a strange degree.

  There was me wearing the Kitakaze Kozou-esque traveler’s clothes that had become my go-to outfit when undercover; Liscia wearing the same student’s uniform she’d worn when we’d first gone into the castle town together; Carla the dragonewt in a maid uniform; and an old, macho man in light adventurers’ armor. All of us were walking together. What was with this completely mismatched ensemble? I couldn’t blame passersby for turning their heads to take a second look at us.

  “Even a hastily assembled adventuring party would look more like a unified group than we do...” I murmured.

  “If you had just worn a student uniform like last time, wouldn’t that have been fine?” asked Liscia. “It’s not like Sir Owen couldn’t pass for a teacher in his outfit.”

  “By the same token, if you had dressed like an adventurer, we might have looked like an adventuring party,” I said.

  While we argued back and forth, we both looked back at the dragon maid behind us.

  “Wh-What?! Why are you both looking at me?” Carla cried.

  “Either way, Carla was going to stand out, huh,” Liscia nodded.

  “I mean, yeah, she’s wearing that highly revealing maid dress, after all,” I said. “She’d be out of place no matter how we dressed.”

  “Aren’t you being awfully mean when I don’t even wear this by choice?!” Carla protested loudly, but... I mean, it was a maid dress.

  Of course, we had proposed that she change into something else, but Serina hadn’t been willing to hear of it. Carla’s maid uniform wasn’t the classic type with a long skirt; it was a frilly dress type (or, to take it a bit further, a maid cafe type). Serina was a total sadist to make her walk around town in it. Carla had been bright red with shame for a while now...

  “By the way, Your... Sir Kazuya, is this really the road you want to take?” Owen asked somewhat confusedly.

  “Hm? Yeah, it is... Why?” I asked.

  “No, it is just that, if I recall, this way leads to...”

  “Ah! ...That’s right.” Liscia seemed to have realized something, too, but didn’t seem to want to say it. “If we continue down this road...”

  ...Oh, so that’s what it is, I realized. “If we keep going, we’ll hit the old slums, huh?”

  “Indeed,” said Owen. “It is not a place I would want to take the two of you.”

  Even in the royal capital Parnam, there was a dark side. Because of the large population, there were those who succeeded in business, those who earned a middling profit, and those who failed outright. The slums were a place where those who had failed, but who hadn’t fallen far enough to become slaves, would drift to and work for their daily wages.

  Many of the homes were shanties. It was unsanitary, and prone to outbreaks of disease. The people who gathered here were of questionable origin, and the crime rate was high.

  That was the sort of place it had been, anyway.

  “That’s all in the past now,” I said.

  “It’s changed?” Liscia asked.

  “It’d be faster to just show you. I mean, when I was considering what to do about the future of the slum town...” I made a gesture like I had something like a hose in my hands as I spoke. “...I met someone who was strangely enthusiastic, going around saying, ‘Filth will be sterilized!’”

  As we arrived in the former slum town...

  “Huh?” Liscia tilted her head to the side in confusion.

  “Hm?” Owen did the same.

  When she saw their reaction, Carla did, too. “Is there something strange here, Liscia?”

  Even after she had fallen to become a slave, Liscia had forced Carla to keep talking to her the way she had before. They were still good friends. It would be an issue if it happened in public, but I wasn’t about to tell Liscia how to behave herself in private.

  Still with a blank look on her face, Liscia responded to Carla, “Huh? ...Oh, yeah. I’ve never been to the slums before, but I’m surprised at how different it is from everything I’d heard.”

  “What had you heard?” asked Carla.

  “That it’s a dark, dank, moldy place with poor public order. I’ve heard the same,” Owen explained.

  He was right. The slums had been like that before.

  “It’s true that they look sparse, but the place looks pretty clean to me, you know?” said Carla.

  What we saw before us now was a scene of houses that just looked like white blocks of tofu lined up. To put it in terms that a modern audience will understand, imagine the sort of temporary houses that are set up in the affected area after an earthquake. While they were spartan, they got a lot of sun and were bright. They also were well ventilated, so they weren’t dank. Admittedly, they could get a bit too dry in winter. Even so, when we saw children drawing on the ground and playing, it was hard to imagine that public order was bad here.

  “Is this really the slums?” Liscia asked.

  “Yeah. It’s gotten a lot better, hasn’t it?” I responded, puffing up my chest proudly. “When I was addressing the sanitation problem in the city, I worked hard to get everything in shape here.”

  “The sanitation problem?” asked Liscia. “If I recall, you mentioned that when you were banning carriages from going down all but the largest roads, and when you set up the water and sewer system, right? Was reworking these slums a part of that, too?”

  “I’m glad to see you remember,” I said. “Yeah. It’s easy for pathogenic bacteria to grow in dark, dank, places that are poorly ventilated. On top of that, this being a slum town, the residents don’t get proper nutrition, so it’s easier for them to get sick. If an epidemic had gotten started, this would have been fertile ground for it to spread rapidly.”

  “Pathogenic bacteria... I feel like I may have heard that word before,” said Liscia.

  She and the others were looking at me with faces that seemed to say “What are those? Are they tasty?”

  “Huh? Didn’t I explain last time?” I asked.

  Ah, come to think of it, I used the word when talking about the sedimentation ponds, but I didn’t explain it in detail, I thought. In that case... I guess I have to start by explaining how people get sick.

  “Well... In this world, there are little creatures too small for the eye to see, and they exist in numbers far too great to count in the air, the ground, in our bodies— ev
erywhere you can imagine. These tiny creatures make things rot and cause illnesses. On the other hand, they also cause foods to ferment, and there are some with positive effects, too.”

  Using my meager knowledge of science (I was a humanities student, remember), I explained to Liscia and the others about bacteria and microorganisms. I didn’t feel like they were getting it all that well, but for Liscia, who knew that my knowledge could be far ahead of this country’s academia in some places, she seemed satisfied that “If Souma says they exist, they probably do.”

  The study of medicine and hygiene wasn’t particularly well developed in this world. One large factor in that was probably the existence of light magic. Light magic heightened the body’s ability to heal, even allowing it to recover from serious wounds. It could even reattach severed limbs if administered quickly.

  It seemed that, because of that, the study of medicine and hygiene hadn’t developed. That was why, in this world, there were very few who knew of the existence of bacteria and microorganisms.

  Light magic only activated the natural ability of the body to heal, so it had the shortcoming of not being able to heal infectious diseases or the wounds of elderly people whose natural ability to heal had declined. Because of that, until just recently, the use of shady drugs and dodgy folk remedies had been rampant when it had come to the treatment of infectious diseases. When I’d addressed the issue of hygiene, I’d thought something needed to be done about this situation posthaste.

  But before I could do that, I had first needed people to become aware of the existence of bacteria and microorganisms they couldn’t see.

  “But how can people be aware of something they can’t see?” Liscia asked.

  “In this world, there are people who know about bacteria and microorganisms... or rather, a race that does,” I said. “When that race focuses with their ‘third eye,’ they can see microorganisms that you wouldn’t normally be able to see. I enlisted their help.”