Demanding the Truth
The Imperial Palace. Within the Court Department, the administrative body that assisted the Emperor's rule, the atmosphere had been suffocating since early morning.
‘Good grief. We have to reach some kind of conclusion today.’
The elderly Court Minister clutched what little hair remained on his scalp, heaving one deep sigh after another.
The Court Department was the Empire's executive heart, led by the Court Minister and divided among seven portfolio ministers who oversaw their respective domains. Typically, only these cabinet ministers attended council sessions, but commanding officers like the Royal Guard Commander or the Commander of the Imperial Guard Knights were summoned whenever necessity demanded it. Today was one such day. Nearly every major power broker who steered the Empire sat gathered around the table, their expressions uniformly bleak.
The culprit, of course, was the catastrophic aftermath of the Kodana crash sweeping the Imperial Capital. The council had convened several times to address the crisis, yet each assembly had dissolved into endless bickering without a single resolution, bringing all other pressing state business to a grinding halt.
“Is everyone in atten—wait, where is the Minister of Justice?”
Just as he was about to gavel the meeting open, the Court Minister frowned, his eyes drifting toward the justice ministry's bench. The Vice-Minister sat there alone, wearing an agonizingly sheepish grimace.
“Well, His Excellency the Minister was detained by unavoidable circumstances...”
“He pleaded illness last time as well, did he not? Is he truly so unwell?”
“It is not that his body is sick, per se. If anything, it is an illness of the heart... Truth be told, we do not even know his current whereabouts.”
It was a ridiculous excuse, yet the Court Minister refrained from reproaching him. Scolding a subordinate would hardly produce answers anyway. Besides, everyone present in the chamber knew precisely what this "illness of the heart" really was. Count Necker, the Empire’s Minister of Justice, had been a Kodana evangelist celebrated by every noble across the capital.
“Pfft, haha! I tell you, it was only after I bought Kodana that I could finally hold my head high before my children.”
“Let us be honest with ourselves. Do fixtures of the capital like us possess landed estates, or retinues of retainers to pass down to our heirs? Certainly, we live in lavish comfort by the imperial grace, but there is always that lingering emptiness, isn't there?”
“Buying more at two hundred and fifty million was a stroke of absolute genius. Look how it skyrocketed right after!”
“I even made my in-laws a small fortune.”
To an outsider, the Minister of Justice had flaunted his coin stash and profit margins with insufferable smugness. Yet his peers could not entirely blame him. While provincial lords far from the capital envied the glamorous lives of court nobles, the peculiar insecurity of owning neither land nor subjects was an ache that never quite faded.
Now, however, the Minister of Justice had plummeted straight into the abyss. Ever since he collapsed on the trading floor the day of the Great Crash, he had shut himself away, never once stepping outside.
“Still, shouldn't his position be relatively sound? He was an early entrant, so even with the crash—”
“Haah, what does that matter now? Word is he never cashed out a single lira. If anything, he bought more at three hundred and seventy million. When that bas—er, when Baron Wellesley dumped a hundred and eight coins onto the market, Necker scraped together every last scrap of credit he could find just to buy one more.”
“...Good heavens.”
“Come now, gentlemen. Let us begin the council.”
The Court Minister clapped his hands, trying to corral the assembly's attention. It was futile. Nearly every official in the room had their own fortunes entangled in Kodana. While some nobles had merely tossed a few million liras toward the initial offering to secure three or four coins as mementos, others had plunged into the speculative mania with ruinous zeal.
“...To be frank, my own son spent all of yesterday glued to the exchange floor. Even now, he's holed up in his quarters, weeping his eyes out.”
“Now, now, you mustn't scold him at a time like this. Even if your blood boils, soothe him first... Come to think of it, they say the Imperial Academy has turned into a living hell as well.”
“The students are hardly the issue. It's their parents. It's enough to drive a man insane.”
Listening to the ministers trade laments, the Court Minister felt his stomach burn with acid. In truth, he was far from untouched by the madness himself. His younger brother, who operated a modest merchant troupe specializing in antiquities, and his eldest son, an associate professor at the Academy, had each poured money into Kodana and lost hundreds of millions. Yet losses of that scale barely registered compared to the wider devastation. Dozens of noble houses teetered on the verge of outright bankruptcy.
Nor was money their only concern. A catastrophic diplomatic crisis stared them in the face. Due to the astronomical over-the-counter deal the Second Prince had struck just before the gates of hell swung wide, the Holy State’s liquid assets were on the brink of complete annihilation. For reasons unknown, the Holy State had not yet adopted an overtly hostile stance, but there was no telling how long their restraint would endure.
‘We must bring order to this disaster, no matter what it takes.’
The Court Minister felt years sloughing off his life with every passing second.
Just then, an unexpected savior cut through the mire.
“The state of affairs is grave. Let us begin the council.”
It was Rufus Wainwright, Commander of the Imperial Guard Knights and the undisputed strongest knight in the Empire. Under normal circumstances, he showed zero interest in state governance. He was a peculiar man whose life revolved entirely around drilling his knights, riding out to relieve distressed territories, and perfecting his own swordsmanship. When such a man raised his voice, the ministers fell silent in stunned surprise.
Nor did Wainwright merely settle the room; he laid the very question everyone had been terrified to touch directly upon the table.
“As things stand, we have no choice but to demand an accounting of the truth from His Highness the Second Prince.”
Interrogate an imperial prince of exalted blood?
Yet considering the magnitude of the crisis, it was the only reasonable course. Right before the nobility began wailing in ruin, the Second Prince had recouped a staggering forty-six point five billion liras. Though rumors claimed he still held about seventy coins, popular consensus held that he had pocketed a net profit exceeding twenty billion over his principal—even if the prince himself bitterly insisted he had barely broken even.
Escaping the market before a crash was not a crime in itself, but the timing was damning beyond belief. It was impossible not to suspect...
No, it was not mere suspicion. Everyone in the chamber was already convinced: the Second Prince had known everything.
Even so, demanding an explanation from an imperial prince was a forbidden threshold no one dared cross. Yet Wainwright had drawn his blade without hesitation.
‘Ha, so even that man can step forward when the moment calls for it...!’
The Court Minister looked at him with profound relief, hoping he would press the offensive. Unfortunately, Wainwright's salvo ended there. As the commander sworn to protect the imperial household, propriety forbade him from uttering anything more incisive.
In the end, the ministers lapsed back into uneasy silence.
They were not hesitating out of simple cowardice. If an inquiry into the Second Prince was launched at this juncture, it would hardly conclude with polite questioning and deferential bows. Once explanations were demanded, accountability would inevitably follow.
And at the end of that road lay only one conceivable outcome.
Deposition.
It would mean stripping him of his succession rights to the throne and immediately casting him out of the imperial palace. If the Second Prince surrendered his entire fortune, matters might soften slightly, but he would still be knocked out of the royal succession regardless. None of the ministers could lightly resolve upon a measure that could be interpreted as an assault on imperial sovereignty itself.
In fact, this very hesitation had been the Second Prince’s shield as he malingered in his bedchambers. It was an unspoken dare: “Keep pushing me, and I might just die. Can you handle the fallout if you do?”—weaponizing the ministers' own dread against them.
‘Phew. But we cannot simply turn a deaf ear to the nobility's cries either.’
The Emperor and his direct lineage were the most exalted beings in the Empire, but that did not mean the realm was their private playground. Over a hundred nobles and quasi-nobles faced catastrophic ruin, with several times that number suffering severe financial wounds. And those were merely the casualties confirmed so far. Though a lucky few had managed to realize profits, they had no intention of sticking their necks out to shield the prince.
As the ministers traded helpless glances amidst the deadlock, the chamber doors creaked open.
The Minister of Justice, who had begged off on account of his "illness of the heart," stepped into the hall.
His cheeks were gaunt and his eyes terribly hollow, but he was undeniably breathing.
“Ah, Count Necker.”
“We must demand the truth from the Second Prince.”
The words fell from his lips completely flat, spoken with an empty, dead-eyed stare. Several ministers nodded absently before freezing as they realized he had dropped every trace of an honorific.
...Not 'His Highness,' but simply 'the Second Prince'?
Indifferent to their shock, the Minister of Justice continued speaking like an automaton.
“There is not a soul alive who does not know how close the Second Prince and the Hero were. Granted, the Hero is a man who airs his exploits directly in the Imperial Capital Gazette, but there is every likelihood he reported the subjugation of the Beast King privately to the Second Prince via communication scrying orb before anyone else.”
“Now, wait just a moment. Minister Necker?”
“With the Hero’s whereabouts currently unknown, if we do not interrogate the Second Prince, then whom are we supposed to question? We must determine precisely when the Second Prince learned that the Hero had submitted a fraudulent report. This is no challenge to imperial authority.”
“That much is true, of course. First, the timing of the over-the-counter transaction—”
“I am still speaking.”
“Urgh... Ahem.”
“A student at the Imperial Academy has already taken his own life.”
The weight in the Minister of Justice’s voice was suffocating. Gone was the frivolous buffoon who used to trade shoulder-bumps with the Vice-Commander of the Royal Guard at the Kodana Exchange in displays of chummy camaraderie.
“...Is that all? The commander of the 5th Royal Guard Regiment vanished, leaving behind nothing but a letter lamenting his ruined investments. And a distant kinsman of the imperial family, who purchased ten Kodana right before the collapse, finds himself in dire straits... Ah, you will all discover who he is soon enough anyway. If I must name him, he is the nephew of the late Emperor before last.”
“Good gods. A man of his advanced years...”
“Countless others are groaning in agony. And that is merely from the plummeting price of the coins in their hands, before their losses have even been formally realized.”
The other ministers, and even the Commander of the Imperial Guard, watched him with breath caught in their throats. He looked ready to detonate at the slightest touch.
A heavy silence hung over the chamber in the wake of his words.
In the end, the council formally resolved to demand an accounting from the Second Prince, and the Emperor granted his sanction without delay—spurred by the Lord Chamberlain, who had witnessed the grim confrontation and reported its suffocating gravity. By imperial decree, the Second Prince, who had been cowering in hiding, was dragged out into the light.
At that very hour.
Across the Imperial Capital, on the trading floor of the newly opened Kodana Exchange, a faint buying momentum flickered back to life. It was born of sheer, baseless delusion—the desperate hope that once the Second Prince opened his mouth, all the misfortunes crushing the market might somehow vanish into thin air.