SPECIAL CHAPTER 11
Part 133
She covered her head, which was aching, and asked the Viscount.
“The reason you lent that money to Achen was because Philia asked you to?”
Although she hadn’t seen him since that day, Philia’s extreme attitude and her incomprehensible words continued to bother her. Was it because she was involved in something like this, she asked, and Viscount Blancza’s answer was unexpected.
“No, she didn’t know. Not long ago, I told her about Achen, who kept making excuses and avoiding her, and she got angry. Philia got angry because she didn’t get her money.”
“Don’t whine and just answer what’s asked. I don’t want to hear it.”
When she snapped in annoyance, the Viscount’s mouth dropped. Adrian instructed Franz to do something, and Franz went out and returned with iced tea. She felt better after drinking some cool iced tea. She winked at Adrian to thank him, and he opened his mouth with a serious look on his face.
“Don’t worry about it, I think you can just kill it.”
At Adrian’s words, our knights once again raised their sword scabbards. After watching Viscount Blanca twitch her neck, she asked Adrian with a smile:
“What should be the charge, Commander-in-Chief?”
“Isn’t it enough to annoy Damian?”
When the Commander-in-Chief speaks, even a joke won’t sound like a joke, so please refrain from doing so. While she was patting the back of Adrian’s hand as he said something she couldn’t tell if he was joking or being serious, she heard a knock on the door and George came in holding a rope in one hand. The Galleon Aachen was tied to the end of the rope. For some reason, your face looks better than when she saw you in the capital. Aachen’s eyes widened when she saw me and Adrian, but George’s manic hand made him fall to his knees. George handed me a ledger, and as she was about to open it, Viscount Blancha urgently grabbed Aachen by the collar.
“Hey, what’s going on? Iron, 4 million gold!”
“Noisy.”
Thanks to the wonderful Commander-in-Chief who spoke to me at exactly the right moments, she was able to quietly review the ledgers. She assumed it would be 4 million gold at the lowest price, but it appears that fairly high quality iron was made. Even if you deduct all transportation and labor costs, it will be well over 5 million. Your liver is so big, you mean you swallowed 5 million gold in one gulp? She clicked her tongue and looked down at Aachen, and he opened his mouth to say something.
“I do this”
“Fuck the sinner’s mouth.”
She didn’t want to hear what kind of nonsense they were going to say, so she hung up. George quickly put a gag on Aachen’s mouth. I’m trying to say something, but you can’t talk even if you have a mouth.
“It is absurd to say that someone who was monopolizing the kingdom’s assets as a shepherd who was saved by the King’s grace is making an excuse. According to this ledger and Viscount Blancha’s claim, he received 500,000 gold from the Viscount last year for mine development expenses. If you get it right, nod your head.”
She asked, but Aachen turned his head away with George’s gag forced on him. Huh, you want to come out like that? In my third year as head of the inspection department, she realized something while seeing a lot of things she didn’t see happening. Peace is precious, but there are bad people in the world who only listen to what they say.
“Nelia, cover your ears and close your eyes.”
She spoke sweetly to Nelia, and Nelia, seeing for the first time her status as a sinner, opened her eyes and looked up at her. She immediately did as she was told, cupping her ears with both hands and closing her eyes tightly. At the same time, a scream escaped from Ahern’s throat. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to hear, but she also learned that in times like this, she had to act bolder. When she raised her eyes and asked again, Aachen nodded with an exasperated look. She didn’t know what George did or how he did it because he was turning his head away. But Aachen’s attitude became obedient, so she decided not to know.
“You swallowed up 5 million gold by selling the iron mined and smelted in the mine to the Kingdom of Sorrento. Do you admit it?”
When Aachen nodded again, Viscount Blanca grabbed the back of his neck and shouted.
“You bastard! I trusted you and invested in you, but how could you do this to me!”
“If you interfere one more time, I will gag your mouth too.”
Franz, who was standing behind me, rolled up the cloth on the table and prepared a gag, and Viscount Blanca was crushed again. He received a confession and there was evidence, so he had enough reason to take Aachen away. So let’s get the big commoners out of the way first.
“Aachen, you are being confiscated to the capital for extorting money from nobles, taking iron abroad without permission, and embezzling the profits. You cannot enter Midok, so you will await disposition outside the outer castle. Take it with you.”
Aachen was dragged out, struggling, and Viscount Blanca was watching, his forehead dripping with sweat. She looked through the ledgers again to see what had happened to Aachen’s stolen money, and noticed something strange, so she asked George about it.
“Sir George, is this the only ledger you have? The only records in this ledger are iron transactions. According to the documents Sir George brought you earlier, it seems like there was definitely a cloth transaction until recently?”
“I searched the entire mansion, but that was the only ledger, ma’am.”
“Is it so?”
There didn’t seem to be any particular problem with the cloth and silk trade, but isn’t it strange that she didn’t have any records at all? Did you write separate ledgers for each item? As she was tilting her head, the receptionist opened. Philia, her red hair tied up in a bun, appeared wearing a neat wedding dress. Philia walked in front of us with her signature graceful gait, bowed her head and spoke politely.
“Your Excellency Duke Bigor, my wife, this is Philia, the daughter of the sinner Aachen.”
Although she is impeccably polite, she had been unable to determine Philia’s intentions ever since that night. She dressed up as much as she could and became a mistress who harassed my wife and pointed a finger at me, but then she suddenly shook her head and said something strange. Why did she show up here at this time?
“What’s going on?”
“I brought her some gold coins that her father had hidden.”
You brought back the 5 million gold stolen from Aachen? Bourbon glanced at Bourbon, and Bourbon, who had gone outside, came back after checking the gold coins that were loaded on the carriage that Philia was riding. Philia was watching Bourbon report to her and then she held out one of her ledgers.
“And this is another ledger on top of Bittrain.”
When she took it and looked at it, she found that the transaction details of the fabrics and accessories that had been left out in the ledger earlier were neatly organized. As expected, there didn’t seem to be any problems.
“Are you trying to abandon your father, Aachen, and find a way to survive?”
When she asked, Philia smiled bitterly and shook her head. Before she could open her mouth to say anything, Viscount Blanca rushed in, stood next to her Philia, and raised her voice.
“Philia is not guilty. How could this delicate woman do something evil?!”
The end was brought to an end by the viscount’s mournful shouting. Before she could even talk to Franz, Adrian frowned and gestured to Franz. Franz stuffed the bundle of cloth he was holding into the Viscount’s mouth. He was trying to pull the cloth out with a squeak, but when Franz rolled his eyes, he calmly sat down. She thought she was caught up in something complicated, but when things turned out like this, she felt exhausted. Viscount Blancha, who was crumpled in Aachen after she was dragged away, the Viscountess, whose face was turning gray as she kept looking at her, and even Philia, who suddenly appeared and stood there with her sad face, how on earth were they all intertwined?. As she sighed, Adrian came holding her hand with a worried look on his face.
“Would you like to rest for a moment?”
George, Franz, and several of the Bigor knights who followed them into the living room all had worried faces on their faces, so they smiled.
‘It’s fine. This is my job, and I’m pretty good at it. Receiving support definitely gives me strength.’
She answered while holding her man’s hand, which was like a tonic for fatigue.
“It’s okay, Ad.”
Then he spoke to Philia with a stern expression on his face as the head of the inspection department.
“I brought the money to get it back, so I’ll give you a chance. If you have something to say, say it.”
Philia looked around at me, Adrian, and my knights, and then made a sad face again. She was worried that she would be prickly again, as she had shouted that she should have been made duchess, but Philia calmly told her own story, moving her red lips with difficulty even without her makeup. She started betting.
“After I was kicked out of Midoc, my father handed me over to that idiot who had fantasies about being a nobleman in the capital. Viscount Blancha bought me a mansion and gave me a dress and jewels. I sold the jewels to the top. I started a business. I planned to make money somehow and escape my father with my younger brother. The ledger I gave you is the details of how I ran the business.”
She saw that the fashionable fabrics which were in vogue in the capital were her chief trade, and she had the idea that the upper class might be a woman, but she had no idea that Philia was herself, and she had prepared to speak that night. Was this what it meant?
“My father used me as an excuse to obtain development rights and development costs from the Viscount. The reason he did the transaction using the name of my merchant was probably because he thought the Viscount would not touch my merchant. You may not believe it, but I kept everything for a long time. I found out later.”
“It is a plausible story, but there is no evidence for what you say. You may have helped or led the iron trafficking. How can you prove it?”
At my words, Philia took out a document from her arms. She took it and saw that it was a contract with a baron of the Kingdom of Sorrento. The stipulation was that she would accept Philia as her baroness if she brought him 400,000 tons of iron as her dowry. Aachen, who could no longer exercise any political power in Laurentyne, must have been unable to be satisfied with living as an affluent commoner. Even if she went to the Kingdom of Sorrento, did she want to become a member of a noble family? She was astounded by this incredible thirst for power that made her sigh. However, based on this alone, it was not possible to determine whether or not her philia was involved.
“I can’t prove that you weren’t involved in this either. Isn’t it possible that the baroness position was more desirable than the viscount’s mistress?”
Viscount Blancha moaned through the gag at my words, and Philia seemed to be biting her lip and suppressing the emotions that were trying to appear on her face. She was “sold to a viscount, and now sold to a baron older than her father, becoming a baroness in name only.”
“I haven’t let go of myself yet to covet a life where I don’t know where I will be sold next. ma’am.”
His daughter to a guy older than him… Ah, Blood Pressure, he’s the guy who tried to sell his daughter not once, but twice, so he can do it again. Just how far did that person waste his dollars? Does this make any sense, given that he was already enjoying a life beyond his means thanks to his daughter? Philia seems to have hated this whole situation. Even if it weren’t because she was a duke’s daughter whose pride was sky-high, this situation would have been terrible for the country as well. She could understand how she felt as she tried to save her money and run away from her father, Aachen. She understood Philia’s feelings that night when she attacked me when she showed up and tried to turn everything upside down while she was holding on to the idea that she would soon escape. She knew the situation, she understood it, and I felt sorry for it, but nothing was clear yet. Since there is still no evidence that she is not lying, she needs to take a closer look at Aachen as well, and more testimony is needed. As an administrative officer of the Inspection Department who was supposed to be cool-headed, she was holding her own, but Filia’s next words shook her again.
“Should me and my younger brother be taken away and punished with our father again?”
Although she was a grumpy, mean-spirited woman who lived in luxury, the culprit of all this was not her, but Galleon Aachen. She has enjoyed many things thanks to her father and her family, so it was inevitable that she would be punished for her involvement in the rebellion. However, she thought it was too harsh for a woman whose life had already been messed up enough to have to be punished again for the crime her father committed in the car she was trying to escape from. She heard that, of course, what Aachen was smuggling out was iron. If it’s just tax evasion or illegal trading, She won’t punish the child by association just because the father committed a crime, but the iron is a bit delicate. It’s not a matter she could judge rashly, so she would have to send him to Midoc. She thought about it for a while. So, Adrian held her hand again. He had hard eyes and was smiling sweetly.
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Translator Note:
Hello there! This is RJR. I hope you liked it <3
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