The Scoundrel Prince Sold Out the Empire - Chapter 49

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 49: No Touch! No Touch! (2)
After the commotion over the gold ore had subsided, late into the night.
Three lamps burned in the most intact room of the Administrative Building.
“Your Highness. I dare speak candidly.”
Marquis Lemiconing lowered his voice.
“The Deverians who witnessed it—all of them must be silenced. Security is everything.”
All of them.
The man possessed quite a talent for condensing over a hundred lives into two characters.
‘Do you grasp, Marquis, that if you count all the Deverians who witnessed this, you’re included among them?’
“Hmm.”
Zion propped his chin on his hand and narrowed his eyes.
He feigned contemplation, feigned interest, while his true thoughts ran elsewhere.
‘Should I kill him first?’
He felt sorry toward Winter, but Lemiconing was thoroughly repellent.
Then again, perhaps Winter harbored the same thought at this very moment.
“But before that, I’d prefer we settle the matter at hand. Winter.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Tell the Marquis how I came to possess this farm.”
Winter’s expression flickered with confusion, though his voice remained steady as he began to recount.
“Originally, this farm belonged to a grain merchant named Reizo. He was a man who bribed Deverian prisoners from the authorities and worked them without a single coin of wages. Your Highness acquired this wasteland through a moment’s whim, contracting it for twelve million Ruon. Subsequently, grain futures collapsed, Reizo went bankrupt, and as penalty for breaching the contract deadline, the entire farm—mortgaged as collateral—passed wholly into Your Highness’s hands.”
Winter fell silent, then sent his gaze toward Zion.
“Your Highness. Surely not.”
His ash-gray eyes wavered.
“You knew there was a gold vein here from the beginning, didn’t you?”
“Obviously.”
He answered with deliberate indifference.
“Then tell me—you’re not truly suggesting I bought this rocky wasteland out of pure caprice?”
“Forgive me, but yes.”
“…….”
“I genuinely believed so.”
“Mm.”
Zion watched the Marquis’s eyes dart about, then produced a piece of gold ore.
“Marquis. Surely you don’t truly believe I’ve come to Oeto in exile?”
But he did believe it. He genuinely did.
Naturally—wasn’t it obvious after he’d killed a deputy governor?
“That couldn’t possibly be, haha.”
“Then I shall grant you the honor of becoming my partner in venture. I intend to develop the mines. You’ll bear all the development costs.”
For a so-called partnership, the terms were absurd.
“Your Highness, the expense of developing even one mine would rival the price of a hundred villas. How could I possibly—”
His true thoughts were transparent.
“Don’t talk nonsense. Is there another man in Seyel as flush with coin as you?”
Winter interjected smoothly.
“Indeed. The usurer king of Seyel—that is none other than the Marquis himself, is it not?”
His second epithet, following “the greatest wing of Dever.”
Alejon Lemiconing was precisely the loan shark most notorious in Seyel for his usury.
In lean years, he loosened grain to Deverian villages; come autumn, he swept away half their harvest.
Interest compounded at forty percent annually. Even children were sold off.
How many families had fled in the dead of night, hounded by debt?
How many rumors circulated of daughters from grain-borrowing households entering his mansion as maids the following year?
“Regardless of the scale of your enterprises, in raw liquid capital you hold more than Eitar, don’t you?”
“That’s, an unthinkable suggestion. Haha……”
“Unthinkable, is it? And yet true.”
He planned to wring every last coin from him and hand it to Winter.
Zion unfolded a map across the table.
“Well then. Make your choice. In exchange for bearing all development costs, I’ll allocate a portion of the mine site as your share. The extent falls within a limit I shall set. As for location—you may choose where you wish.”
Should fortune favor him, he might claim the heart of the gold vein itself.
The Marquis’s pupils danced silently across the map.
“……Might I answer after conducting an investigation?”
Zion smiled wickedly.
“Then there’s no sport in it. Choose now, right here—stake everything on your luck.”
The Duke bit his lip.
‘That damned gambling-addicted prince…….’
The man sat there wagering a business of this magnitude on pure luck.
A creature who’d spent even his execution day holed up in a casino, and who’d stumbled into glory by assassinating the Crown Prince almost by accident.
Yet for all that, he couldn’t deny one thing: the prince’s luck was genuine.
‘They say the Divine Race carries the blessing of fortune. Perhaps it was true, after all.’
The Duke’s gaze wandered across the map.
Which location should he choose?
The ground where gold had just burst forth seemed too obvious.
The prince might have known of the gold vein’s existence beforehand—might have even buried gold in advance and detonated it for a convincing show.
The real treasure could lie elsewhere, with yesterday’s blast site serving as mere bait, its deposits meager.
Yet he lacked the nerve to abandon a place where ore this substantial had surfaced so shallowly in favor of unseen land.
“Duke? Deliberating won’t change anything. Just pick one.”
A reversal of reversals.
The Duke’s finger descended upon the map.
“This location, then.”
His finger had settled on the blast site itself.
After suspecting and suspecting again, he’d circled back to his original choice.
Gold had surfaced all the way to the earth’s crust—the vein it contained could hardly be shallow.
“Good. I consent. So we’re partners?”
“It would be the greatest honor.”
The Duke continued at once.
“Now then, Your Highness. Speaking to you now as my partner, you must silence them.”
Greed flickered in the Duke’s eyes as he spoke.
‘Already acting as though the gold is his own. Too bad for him—he’s fated never to hold even a single nugget.’
“Of course, I’ll see to all the arrangements. So let’s call it a night.”
After the Duke bowed and took his leave.
“Your Highness.”
Winter opened his mouth with a grave expression.
“Though it sickens me to share my father’s thinking, Your Highness, we must seal the Deverians’ lips.”
He studied Winter in silence for a moment.
Ah, that was right.
This Winter was the sort who grew ruthless before money.
A phantom gunshot, never fired, flashed through his mind.
This was precisely the kind of man who would turn his pistol on Reyanna in that other future.
“Your Highness?”
He shook his head once and replied.
“You’re right—we’ll have to silence them. Handle it as you see fit, Winter.”
As you see fit.
He found himself curious how Winter would interpret those three words.
And so he’d watch.
* * *
At that same moment, the workers’ barracks burned with lamplight through the night.
“You saw it, didn’t you? That golden glint. Everyone saw it?”
“We saw it—that’s the problem.”
The voices were low and urgent.
“It was gold.”
“A gold vein. This is bad.”
“Is there some difficulty?”
“Our mouths are the difficulty.”
Sighs rippled through the gathering, concentrated among the older men.
“Stay calm. If they’d meant to kill us, they’d have done it right after the blast. There’d be no reason to feed and shelter us first.”
A young man smoking a pipe spoke quietly from the corner.
A man who’d scavenged impossible things since their internment days, who’d survived on nothing but instinct.
“That may be, but…….”
“Why don’t we strike first? Our numbers are far greater!”
The Duke had four soldiers, one aide, and one female guard. That was all.
The workers, by contrast, numbered in the hundreds.
Magic artifacts protected them, yes, but a coordinated rush could succeed.
“We all saw it. They know we saw it. There’s no reason for them to let us live. Either we run or we strike first—one or the other, we have to act!”
“Please, calm yourself. This isn’t a decision to be made in haste.”
“He’s right. And look—the prince fed us well and gave us warm beds, whatever his reasons. We don’t repay kindness with betrayal. That’s not the Dever way.”
“Kindness? A prince from the enemy nation that destroyed our country, throwing scraps of what he stole and calling it generosity?”
The heated words were building to a crescendo when the barracks door swung open.
“Enough.”
Creak.
The one who emerged was the prince’s ash-haired aide.
“Congratulations.”
Winter continued with a bright smile, noting the tools several of them had already gripped in their hands.
“As of this moment, you are all employees of Geonia Mining.”
…….
…….
…….
“I see those faces. Yes, it’s forced employment, but you won’t regret it. Base salary doubled. An additional performance bonus of 0.1% of all gold extracted.”
……!
……!
……!
A murmur ran through the room.
The wages on this farm were already four or five times what they’d earned outside.
To earn four or five times a Deverian laborer’s wage was a dream in itself, and now it would be doubled again.
That was nearly equal to an Imperial worker’s salary, wasn’t it?
No—with the performance bonus added, even a seasoned Imperial miner would pick up a pickaxe for these terms.
“I have one question. You’re offering something completely opposite to what we expected. Why?”
“You say ‘opposite,’ which means you expected us to kill you and seal your lips, I imagine. I’m not fool enough for that. We need many miners anyway. Since you’ve already witnessed the secret, it’s far more efficient to convert you from farm laborers to miners. Wouldn’t you agree that’s a sound proposal?”
The young Deverian’s eyes narrowed, then slowly softened.
There are those who understand calculation through calculation alone.
But before calculating, there was one more thing to verify.
“I’ll grant that you’re ash-haired like him and worth trusting, but how do we trust the prince?”
“The prince will honor my judgment.”
“What if he changes his mind?”
Winter fell silent for a moment.
Then he said something peculiar.
“Do you know? There’s an atmosphere that only comes from the absence of darkness. If that man were truly the wastrel the rumors claim, he couldn’t carry such an air.”
…….
“He’s certainly unusual, but not a man to regret staking your life on. In short, fortune has smiled upon you. The same golden opportunity that fell to me months ago.”
Suddenly, a middle-aged man in the corner raised his hand.
“0.1% of the gold we extract. Is that really true?”
“Of course. We’ll even handle all the tax processing. The money can go anywhere, to anyone, with no questions asked.”
In that instant, the air in the barracks shifted.
Most of these people had been dragged here for shouting demands to free the crown prince or dreaming of Dever’s liberation—or they were the families of such people.
There wasn’t a soul in this room who didn’t understand where clean money could flow.
And, directly above the space where this conversation took place.
On the barracks roof.
There was one more who understood the hidden meaning.
‘Winter. You really are different from your father.’
Zion, lying belly-down on the roof, let out a soft laugh.
Silence the mouths. Up to this point, the same conclusion.
But the method differs.
The father sought to seal a hundred lips. The son had produced a hundred contracts instead.
‘No matter what salary he promises, it all comes from Marquis Lemiconing’s coffers anyway.’
This Winter.
He’s the type who’ll do anything for money.
‘Like, for instance, orchestrating a riot in the name of turning a profit.’
Even on reflection, he’s far from a good man.
But.
He doesn’t seem the type to sell what shouldn’t be sold for money.
Not like his father.
The voice drifting up from below was proof of it.
“I ask that you keep faith with us. Not faith to the prince—I mean the faith an employee keeps with a company. So let us make a contract. We won’t ask what you do with what you earn. In return, I ask that you guard the company’s secrets.”
…….
“…….”
“…….”
“Sir, if I may add just one condition to the contract. Allow me to establish a small shop.”
“A shop? Ah, tobacco. We can review the arrangement. I’ll offer you prices well below black-market rates.”
“……Ahem.”
With a faint smile, Zion rose silently to his feet.
‘The Marquis of Lemiconing’s seat would suit you far better than this aging man, Winter.’
With that in mind.
It was time to place the opening move.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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