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"Send everything north."
"Understood."
Having neatly disposed of her fiancé and his family, she threw herself back into preparations for the coming food crisis.
According to the network of the urban poor she had secured through her earlier charity work, roughly three thousand people had poured into the city since the Asty-brand housing complexes went on sale. The vast majority were ordinary migrants from nearby towns and villages, chasing roofs and wages. Refugees from the unrest in Avignon were scattered among them at best — a thin, intermittent presence.
The real overcrowding had not even begun.
Soon enough, war refugees would come flooding in by the droves. Word of the high-quality housing would draw still more, one after another, toward Montpellier. And now that the Montpellier dynasty had opened and the city had been reborn as a kingdom's capital, every single incentive to migrate would double in force.
Yet with the laughably thin administrative capacity of this era, there was no way to control the surging influx — nor to root out and expel every outsider who slipped into the city. Montpellier was barely clinging to public order as it was; for all practical purposes, it was already anarchy.
The city had originally been run by a coalition of craft guilds, led by the spinners' guild. When the former Count of Montpellier — Thomas I — seized control, he had gutted half of them. Cases of outright physical annihilation were rare; more often he simply plucked out the leadership or stripped away monopoly rights and let the rest dissolve on their own. The result was the same: half the guilds that had kept the city running could no longer function.
Naturally, civic administration had seized up with them. Before anyone could even begin to put the pieces back together, war had broken out. The neglected wound had finally gone necrotic.
The count's retainers and the surviving guilds were still clinging to the corpse, performing frantic CPR — but what this city needed was not first aid. It needed necromancy. It was already dead. If Thomas I somehow gathered every scattered official from the four corners of the realm and rebuilt the collapsed administrative system from scratch, she would gladly acknowledge him as a necromancer and put him down accordingly.
Ugh.
To topple a spectacularly incompetent black-magic apprentice and then find the throne occupied by a spectacularly competent necromancy apprentice — just imagining it was enough to make her lose her mind.
In any case, controlling migration itself was impossible. That left only one option: grow the economy fast enough to absorb the exploding population. If she steadily created jobs and ramped up production from this moment on, they might just hold out even as more mouths arrived to feed. How far her knowledge would actually carry her, she had no idea — but she would push it as far as it would go. Better that than regret later.
"Saintess, as ordered — I've brought the pigs who sold their eyes for money."
Right on cue, Arturo marched in, the city's moneylenders strung together like a catch of dried fish. Every last one of them was pale-skinned and soft-bellied, the sort of specimen that looked ready to spill gold and jewels the moment you slit them open.
Perfect.
Shall we squeeze a nice round ten million florins out of them?
According to the memories of Cheon Si-jun — professional volunteer who had worked every godforsaken corner of the earth, from gunfire-riddled civil war zones to drug-rotted slums — charity was, at its core, a money-eating black hole.
Eradicating poverty and rebuilding collapsed infrastructure consumed astronomical sums. In places where bullets flew, those already inflated costs multiplied several times over. And the only funds available were donations from empathetic citizens of developed nations. If that kind of money could have solved the problem, the word poverty would not exist.
Budget limits turned asphalt roads into dirt tracks, water mains into wells, and aging secondhand tractors into goats. The golden rule of the twenty-first century was truly omnipotent: even goodwill toward the wretched came with a price tag. And those who could not pay that price fell into one of two camps.
They either accepted their limits and compromised with reality — or they slit open some soft target and funded the work that way.
"Everyone, let's make this a voluntary contribution while I'm still asking nicely. If I have to dig it out of you, it's one strike per ten florins."
In those days, they had chosen the latter.
A region broken economically was invariably broken politically, and political chaos led straight to the collapse of public order. The men who thrived in that environment almost always had ties to warlords or gangs. Looting their vaults was not a crime — it was the ultimate form of community service, securing operating funds while improving security in the same stroke.
"No — I already said I would give you every coin I have! How long must I remain locked in this place, enduring this humiliation?!"
"S-Saintess! I have committed unforgivable sins! I will never sin again — please, just once, show me mercy…!"
"N-no — please, not the feathers—!"
…Thanks to a senior who had practiced the outlaw-hero meta for reasons this extraordinary, the previous life of Cheon Si-jun had also acquired a few minor techniques.
Tying someone to a chair and dripping water on their brow. Sprinkling salt on the soles of their feet and letting a goat lick it off. Keeping them awake all day while singing the same song over and over…
They looked ridiculous. They could also induce anything from panic attacks to, in the worst cases, death. Psychological torment through repetitive, amplified noise was cutting-edge interrogation technique — used even by the United States.
"Heavens. To open the mouths of those scum without shedding a single drop of blood…!"
"Truly, the Saintess must be blessed by the One Above!"
Compared to the torturers of this era, who started by pulling teeth, it was practically humanitarian. Did anyone have any idea how hard she had worked to rein these lunatics in?
They had tried to brand foreheads with hot irons from the first second. They had performed acrobatics with whips, determined to etch patterns into a sinner's back. They had gone straight for driving spikes through arms and legs… They competed to display sadism as if extracting a confession were the only thing that mattered and whether the prisoner lived or died was irrelevant. It had taken her a considerable while just to grasp the situation.
Even Rebecca had frozen in horror, speechless for a stretch. It was only the weight of the Saintess's name and the force of advanced techniques imported from the future that had allowed her to talk them down. Without that, this dungeon would already have been a hell of screams and bloodstains.
…Screams still erupted without pause, of course — but at least the physical maiming had gone down. That counted for something.
Until the sinners spat out every last hiding place of their own free will and prepared themselves for a new life, the Order's mercy would remain at their side, diligently assisting their atonement.
"I've sorted the seized assets into cash, goods, real estate, and bonds for now. Even by the most pessimistic estimate, it should come to around eight million florins…"
But the reformation of sinners and the charity work that saved the flock were two different things, and they had to be kept strictly separate. Matilda, who had been in charge of recording and appraising the confiscated property, entered the interrogation chamber with a long strip of parchment in hand — then took one look at the sinners under questioning and went blank with confusion.
"What exactly is going on here?"
Right. Advanced technology does tend to look bizarre at first glance. Even she, the one who had introduced it, kept wondering what on earth she was doing. How much stranger must it look to people of this age?
Explaining how those grim-faced professional torturers had somehow befriended a goat and reinvented themselves as specialists in loud singing would take an entire day and still fall short — but it was not important enough to waste the time. She moved on.
"Please requisition fishing boats of a suitable size from the nearest ports and fishing villages — as many as you can get your hands on. Contact the shipyards and the net-weavers as well."
"…Pardon? Not purchasing grain from the farmers to stockpile?"
"No. I already spoke with the lords I met at the armistice talks and asked them to release their remaining stores at a low price. Those men have no reason to hoard military grain at the cost of picking a fight with our Order, and every last one of the people who would play games with the price of bread is locked up in here. The market will stabilize soon enough."
And the first step in preparing for a food crisis was not rural modernization or a bulk buy of flour. It was the promotion of the fishing industry.
Getting through a food shortage on grain alone was impossible anyway. The bread prices that had skyrocketed after the Avignon revolt and the war that followed would take considerable time to settle. Trying to boost production through rural modernization when they could not even mix cement properly was nothing but baseless arrogance.
Laying roads to secure public order and cut distribution fees would take far too long. And forcing bread prices down without improving rural productivity would only shove the city's poverty onto the countryside. Besides, unless urban industry grew enough to create decent jobs, the poverty of the unemployed would never be solved.
Every necessary measure had already been set in motion. The rest could only be left to the invisible hand.
"People say a person can't last even a few days without bread — but that doesn't mean people live on bread alone, does it?"
"Ah, so that's why—"
"Yes. Our goal is large-scale urban industrial development and the diversification of consumer goods. The more alternatives there are to bread, the more people will be able to eat bread."
In that sense, the fishing industry was the ideal choice. Montpellier was a port city on the Mediterranean. Having a harbor already made accessibility and investment efficiency excellent, and the usual problems of freshness with seafood were relatively manageable.
If Montpellier's own shipwrights could not build enough fishing boats, they could simply place bulk orders with the city-states of the Italian peninsula — fellow Mediterranean powers. Once the fishing industry was properly cultivated on that scale, it would go a long way toward reducing poverty rates and improving nutrition in the city's vicinity, if not across all of France.
And if oversupply somehow became a problem? Just salt the catch and sell it inland.
Where am I supposed to get that much salt for curing fish in this era?
Right there.
Those ones currently playing with the goat in the interrogation chamber.
She had not minimized physical torture for nothing. Their bodies were intact — so throw them into a rock-salt mine or a salt flat, and something useful was bound to come out.