Let's Live Kindly
Loan King Billy was a simple man, yet a cunning one.
He had been born a worthless commoner in the back alleys of Montpellier, a vagrant who drifted the streets with no fixed income, scraping by on odd jobs for food and shelter. In other words, a complete orphan with nothing to his name. He had not even been given a name, and had been forced to invent one for himself—that alone said enough.
An alley-born orphan had no guardian to care for him and no inheritance waiting. Even the Church, which ought to have taken in children like him, had long since failed in its duty amid the corruption and chaos of its final days. So from a very young age he had been forced to fight simply to survive. He hunted down the filthy, backbreaking work no one else wanted and clawed every coin he could from it, stuffing tasteless rye bread into his mouth and stubbornly clinging to life. It was not because he possessed some grand ambition. He had simply thrashed and struggled to fill an empty belly.
The sole wish of Billy the alley vagrant had been to wear fine clothes in a mansion like a palace and eat delicious food until he could eat no more.
And—his wish came true.
The Order, rotting from grotesque incompetence and corruption, finally lost the Goddess’s favor and collapsed. With its fall, even the hollow social safety net that had remained formally in place disintegrated, and wails rose from every direction. But for a man who had already lived at the bottom, it made little difference. On the contrary, the vast wealth the Order had hoarded and the investment funds for the reclamation of the Holy City were released all at once, becoming the chance of a lifetime for him.
Time passed, and the year became 1298.
Now the undisputed big player of the city, Loan King Billy understood the true nature of his power better than anyone.
Money.
The mere act of spending the gold coins in his grasp could kill or save countless people. It could raise armies and wage war, or buy another man’s rights outright—a magnificent authority. A power that arose naturally atop the artificial foundations of civilization, born from the ownership and consumption of every individual in society. That was the single pillar that sustained Loan King Billy’s life, the source of the force that gave his words authority.
"…Only then will this city survive the coming war."
Yet in a medieval monarchy where a moment’s carelessness could cost you your head, monetary power was a pitiful thing. In a utopia of lords and knights who could overcome differences in wealth through personal martial might, it was nearly impossible for a mere merchant to defeat them by force. And Montpellier’s Loan King was not so stupid as to forget that obvious truth.
The Count is plotting rebellion.
He had grasped Asty’s implication without difficulty. That Count Montpellier had designs on the city was already common knowledge among those who mattered, and the fact that the genius inventor girl Asty had secured the Count’s patronage was even more widely known. In that situation, if Asty—who had been giving off the air of someone at odds with the Count—suddenly started talking about war, there could be only one meaning.
It’s certain. Count Montpellier means to squeeze the city dry and start a war…!
It was an entirely natural conclusion. Montpellier’s population was fifty thousand. That was not the number of free citizens who had formally acquired citizenship; it was the total including every wretched orphan crawling through the back alleys. Of course, for the era that was still a great many, but once you filtered out those with no combat experience, all that remained was a handful of city guards and the ragtag assortment who called themselves mercenaries. Naturally they could never stand against a count’s house that maintained a standing army of several thousand, and not every citizen would support confrontation with the Count in the first place. In short, the city of Montpellier was no match for the Count.
Therefore the only place the Count’s sword could point was Orléans, where the royal family resided. And for Billy, that was a catastrophe. Not because he so deeply respected and admired His Majesty the King in Orléans, but because it was painfully obvious whose pockets the Count would squeeze to fund the war.
The value of Montpellier came from the various facilities and artisans concentrated in the city. So the artisan guilds that propped the city up might be subject to conscription, but they need not fear their livelihoods being cut off, and the trading houses that let the city breathe need not fear for their lives either. But a moneylender with nothing but excess cash could have his head taken at any moment without it seeming strange. Especially when one considered the true nature of the “leisure facilities” he ran in the basement of his establishment. Who would bother keeping alive a usurer who possessed no special skills and had only piled up grudges wherever he went? The pitiful barrier built from his accumulated bonds could never stop a feudal lord’s army. The moment the Count’s crest was hung on the city hall, the sinful moneylender Billy would be reduced to nothing more than a piggy bank.
"How much will it take?"
"Pardon?"
"How much must I contribute to Miss Asty in order to prevent that dreadful future?"
This was no longer business; it was a matter of survival. Billy threw aside even the cane he had been holding and began to burn with the will to live. The option of refusing Asty’s demand did not exist. Even if he ran to the Count and informed on her, no one would believe the word of a mere usurer, and a genius inventor basking in the Count’s favor had no reason to fabricate charges of treason. He was not so stupid that he would ignore approaching death while fretting over such illogical possibilities.
"Here. This is nothing more than a contribution, so use it however you wish."
"No, this is far too much for a mere contribution…"
And so he cheerfully paid the price of his own life. If a mere pile of gold and jewels could buy his survival, it was a perfectly rational transaction. Never once imagining that he had become the one being deceived, the heinous moneylender donated an absurd fortune with his own hands.
"My purse is fat again. Now I fear nothing!"
Of course, the size of a donation does not guarantee salvation. He was far too filthy an adult to be redeemed by a single act of charity.
"Whoa. The money-duplication bug is completely broken."
Our dear Billy had more money than I had expected. Specifically, about ten Rebeccas’ worth. One round of scamming and a full hundred thousand florins had landed in my hands. A hundred thousand florins was, in modern terms, something like tens of billions of won—enough to keep an army of several thousand in the field for months. At the Loan King’s extravagant spending, which a beggar like me could never hope to approach, my hands and feet started trembling and cold sweat threatened to break out even while I stood still. Good heavens. Just how much blood had he sucked from his debtors? I’m no red, but I suddenly feel the urge to stab him with a bamboo spear.
"What do you two think of this?"
"To extract so great a contribution with nothing more than a brief conversation… Truly, one who has descended to this earth bearing the mission of restoring the Order carries divinity in every word and deed—"
"It is unclean money seized from the vault of a sinner who has piled up countless evil deeds. Use it for relief as quickly as possible and forget it ever existed."
I pointed with a sour expression at the heavy money pouch sitting in the corner of the room. The two reactions were completely opposite. Grandfather Pates nodded with the pleased look of a man watching his granddaughter’s business boom, while Rebecca—who hated that very business—seemed wary of me getting drunk on the taste of money.
Unfortunately, both of them were wrong. I had no intention of dumping this money into rebuilding the Order, and I had no intention of letting greed make me forget my proper role either. And I hadn’t asked how I planned to spend the money in the first place. I had asked how I was supposed to be able to spend it at all.
"I think both of you are under some kind of misunderstanding. Does this look like an amount we can actually digest right now?"
Thanks to the Loan King’s absurd generosity, things had become a nuisance. Having squeezed a massive investment out of the city’s big player by even bringing up treason, I now had to show that I was actually doing something. Even if I wasted the money on completely unrelated things, I had to dress it up so that, outwardly, the project looked like it was progressing well. But a hundred thousand florins was not an amount I could burn through in a short time, and it was also impossible to set up a front business that would make a hundred-thousand-florin investment look justified. To be precise, it wasn’t that there were no methods, but if I launched a project of that scale right in the Count’s front yard, it would of course draw his attention. Even a twenty-first-century bank gets suspicious the moment hundreds of billions with no paper trail suddenly appear. The Count would definitely trace the source of the funds, and if he discovered that I had been spouting talk of treason, it would all be over. On the other hand, if I simply took the money pouch and vanished, an enraged investor would come after my head.
I still could not afford to stab the Loan King in the back. If I wanted to slit open his belly and swim in a sea of gold and jewels, I first needed to pull far more people onto my side. The day would come when I betrayed his trust and drove a knife into his heart, but at least that day was not today.
So, to summarize my situation: I had promised Dad I would absolutely never eat junk food and gotten permission to go out, only for the uncle I ran into at the supermarket to suddenly go insane and buy me an entire box of candy. Then he threatened me that if I didn’t want to die I had better eat it all today—except if I got a cavity while eating it, Dad would kill me. What kind of otherworldly dilemma is this? The most upsetting part is that I was the one who asked for the candy, so I can’t even complain.
But I couldn’t just plop down like a child and bawl either. I furrowed my brow and racked my brains for a solution to this mess,
"What do we do?"
and failed.
What do I do about this. Do I actually have to buy relief grain and hand it out?