Medieval Kapoor
“So this is… the paperwork that needs handling?”
“Yes, my lord.”
Having finished their conversation in the study, the members of the Evergarden family immediately mobilized as one and headed for the office where the head of the house always held court.
The moment they opened the door and stepped inside, Darian was confronted with a sight that made it impossible to tell whether the mountain on his desk was a pile of papers or some ancient tomb unearthed by archaeologists.
“Then shall we handle it as usual?”
“As usual…? So you’re saying that normally I don’t do any of this, and you—you all just take care of the whole lot yourselves?”
“Pardon? Did you not entrust us with the family seal and delegate the work to us, my lord?”
Standing beside a thoroughly bewildered Darian, the administrative officer looked at him as if wondering why he was making such a fuss over something so ordinary.
In other words, the head of the family—the one who was supposed to review every matter, issue every directive, and stamp every approval—had dumped the entire workload onto mere employees who were neither of the main house nor even of a branch line.
“Uh… well… today, you see…”
“Today our children will be receiving the heir education essential for leading this family, so would you mind giving us the room?”
“Ah, yes. Of course. Understood, Countess.”
As Darian stood there gaping, utterly floored, Freya stepped forward, took charge of the situation, and dismissed the finance officer from the office.
“Oh, and would you return the family seal my husband transferred to you?”
“…The family seal, my lady?”
Just as the finance officer was turning to leave, Freya called him back as if she’d nearly forgotten, requesting the return of the seal Darian had previously handed over. She caught the way the finance officer’s genially smiling eyes twitched—just slightly.
“Yes, that’s right. And while we’re on the subject—it seems there will no longer be any need for you to act as proxy.”
“Ah… ha. I see. Understood.”
With Freya firmly nailing down that there would be no more standing in for them, the finance officer obediently produced the Evergarden family seal he’d been carefully keeping in his breast pocket and handed it over.
“Then, if you’ll excuse me.”
With that, he fully left the office, bowed his head, and closed the door behind him.
“…Haaah. This bastard is completely out of his mind. He just dumped his own work on someone else? Then what the hell has this guy been doing this whole time?”
Darian, who until now had been playing the dignified family head, let out a long, frustrated breath and muttered as he approached the pile of documents that now looked like one solid mass.
“Let’s see… Whoa. Am I seriously dreaming right now? This clearly isn’t Korean, but I can just read it straight through?”
He pulled a single sheet from the nearest stack, skimmed it, and let out a sound of wonder.
The document in Darian’s hand was covered in squirming characters that were definitely not Korean—the kind you’d never expect to decipher—and yet he could read them without the slightest trouble.
“It’s probably a transmigrator perk? Or maybe the original body’s knowledge? Something along those lines, based on the setting.”
Felix stepped up beside the marveling Darian and offered a comment.
“Alright then… First half of Imperial Year 1024, overall revenue and expenditures of the Evergarden Territory…. Ugh, I have no idea!”
Darian roughly nodded along to Felix’s explanation and tried focusing on the documents again, but it wasn’t long before hot steam seemed to pour from his head.
“I hate paperwork! Except for writing incident reports, I was always out in the field!”
“But Mom, you’re a civil servant. Don’t you do paperwork?”
“It’s a pain. I’d rather be out on my feet saving people than sitting in front of a computer.”
“That’s the side of you that made this dad fall for you, isn’t it?”
“Anyway, paperwork means incident reports—that bastard Supervisor Kim… people’s lives were on the line and he threw a fit just because I shoved a car that was in the way…!”
As Darian looked at the documents, past grievances seemed to surface; he crumpled the paper in his hand and muttered rough curses.
Even before Rosaria and Felix were born, she had been a veteran among veterans—a firefighter who charged in and out of life-threatening fire scenes and saved countless lives. The reason she’d remained a mere sergeant forever was right here.
“Pardon me for a moment—hmm… dear? There’s a term that keeps appearing here—‘Dinar.’ Is that this empire’s unit of currency?”
“Ah, yes! Roughly speaking, one Dinar is worth about one dollar, according to the novel’s setting.”
While Darian was taking out his past frustrations on some random document, Freya strode over and, with elegant motions, picked up papers and began scanning them.
“I see. Then first we should sort everything so it’s easy to understand at a glance.”
After briefly confirming the empire’s currency unit with Felix, Freya threw herself straight into that towering mountain of documents and began organizing the stacked papers at remarkable speed.
“This is funding needed for wall-repair work within the territory, personnel records of the residents go here, and taxes over this way…”
“Wait, Dad…? You can understand all of this?”
“Hmm? The documents themselves are loaded with a lot of unnecessary flowery language, but ultimately the format is similar to a report, so it’s easy enough.”
Watching the papers that had been piled in heaps find their proper places in an instant, Rosaria asked Freya in shock—but Freya simply answered without taking her eyes off the documents, as if it were nothing special.
“I guess experience as a Hansung Group heir never really goes away…”
“The more I think about it, the weirder it is that Dad married Mom.”
“Right?”
“Hey, you little punk! What’s wrong with me?!”
Looking back and forth between Freya, who was organizing documents at lightning speed, and Darian, who stood at a distance fussing with the ornaments on his clothes as if they were a nuisance, the siblings muttered to each other—and Darian bellowed at them.
Hansung Group.
A massive Korean conglomerate with its hands in semiconductors and every other industry imaginable, a name recognized even overseas. And before her transmigration, Freya had been one of the heirs to that Hansung Group.
She had literally belonged to a royal family of industry, yet she’d walked away from the Hansung Group of her own free will, married Darian, and settled into life as a full-time housewife. Still, growing up watching her occasionally work the stock charts and make money, the siblings had never quite understood why Dad had married Mom.
“Don’t say that. Our darling is such a wonderful, splendid person.”
“Honey…!”
“Ugh… so cringy.”
“I’m still single at this age and I have to watch couple flirting even at home…”
When Freya countered the siblings’ rude remarks by putting on a full lovey-dovey couple act with Darian, the siblings’ faces went completely blank with horror.
“Well, that should about do it for the sorting. I’ve also gotten a rough grasp of the territory’s situation.”
“Already?”
“I haven’t processed the documents—just organized them so they’re easy to read, so it went quickly. Still, I could have finished even faster originally, but even though I understand it with my head, it’s not a familiar language…”
By then Freya had already taken the tangled mess of document stacks and arranged them into neat piles. She rose from the office chair and spoke.
“By the way… this is a serious problem.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
But Freya’s face didn’t carry the refreshment of finished work—it showed worry, concern, and a look that said she’d expected as much. Darian asked.
And then—
“The Evergarden Territory is about to go under.”
"""…What?"""
At Freya’s answer, all three of them asked again with vacant expressions.
The Evergarden Territory.
The fief of Count Darian Evergarden, home to a total of five hundred forty-one souls living side by side—and, by any measure, an extremely small holding for a count’s domain.
It was neither a border march stationed on the empire’s outer frontier nor a court county of capital nobility. The Evergarden countship sat at a moderate distance from the capital.
The territory’s main products were primary goods—wheat, hides, and the like—with nothing distinctive among them. Judging by the reports that had come in, the wealth of the people living under the countship was nothing impressive either.
“The base tax rate alone exceeds fifty percent, and once you add in all the various temporary levies, the rate climbs past seventy-five. On top of that, most of the residents don’t even own land, so they’re treated practically as serfs.”
“There’s also a debt of eight million seven hundred twenty thousand Dinars, and this month alone they owe Viscount Bjorn…? I’ll need to check a map of the surrounding area. In any case, sixty-two thousand Dinars in interest is due to Viscount Bjorn this month…”
“What? Eight million seven hundred twenty thousand Dinars is… converted to our money, that’s about eleven billion won?! And this month’s interest alone is eight hundred million?! Hold on—isn’t this a count’s house? Why are they this poor and this deep in debt?!”
“Eleven billion?!”
“Eight hundred million?!”
As Freya, looking thoroughly troubled, reported the results of her review, Felix instantly converted the figures into Korean currency and shouted them out—and father and daughter both whipped their heads around in horror.
“Wait a second. They’re this broke and drowning in debt, so… why is the house this lavish?”
“When we woke up today, a maid brought over a hand mirror dripping with perfume oil and covered in jewels.”
Even in the middle of all that, they couldn’t help pointing out that the house they were living in was absurdly over-decorated.
If Freya’s assessment was correct, they ought to be pinching every coin and driving the territory’s recovery. And yet the tax rate was sky-high, the territory was poor and riddled with problems—and on top of all that, their own residence overflowed with luxury goods. The family was thoroughly confused.
“Even if he was just a throwaway villain, would a noble really do something this stupid?”
“…He might have done it precisely because he was a noble. Even in the modern world, there are people whose situations are terrible but who still pour everything into keeping up appearances, aren’t there? Especially if their pride in the noble class ran particularly high.”
“Ah, for fuck’s sake.”
“I should have realized it the moment he handed the approval seal over to the employees on a whim…”
In short, the Evergarden family had no talent for running a territory, yet their pride as nobles was sky-high, and they’d been pulling the medieval equivalent of a modern-day kapoor—living large while drowning in debt. Then the transmigration had happened, and Hyunsoo’s family had been left to clean up the entire mess.
“This no longer seems like the time to be worrying about a treason charge.”
And so the newly transformed Evergarden family found themselves facing a firestorm that had already reached their doorstep—one far more urgent than the problem they had discussed in the study.