“……Huh?”
The man’s eyes went wide.
Even the burly underlings who had followed him in couldn’t tear their gazes from the leather pouch tossed onto the table.
The golden gleam shining through the mouth of the pouch was unmistakably real gold coins.
With trembling hands, the man untied the pouch.
“W-what is all this, Lord Ian?”
A hint of respect entered the mouth of the man who, only moments ago, had been jabbing his finger at me.
What a slave to capitalism.
I leisurely crossed my legs and leaned deep into the sofa.
“What do you think? It’s the principal, prepared by the promised date. Count it if you want.”
The man opened the pouch with shaking hands and estimated the number of coins.
I could see his pupils quivering.
His face said he couldn’t begin to understand where the Viscount Ash family—who wouldn’t have looked out of place being tossed onto the streets tomorrow—had managed to scrape together this money.
It wasn’t exactly an astronomical sum... but it was certainly not a small amount for the Viscount Ash family to prepare.
But soon, the greedy nature unique to loan sharks settled back onto his face.
The man cleared his throat, pocketed the pouch, and deliberately put on a fierce expression.
“Ahem. Well, it seems you somehow managed to find the principal.”
He subtly pulled the pouch of gold coins toward himself and cleared his throat.
“But this is only the principal, isn’t it! What do you intend to do about all the overdue interest?”
The man once again looked down at me with a crooked posture and lifted his chin.
“This is nothing more than the principal. What are you planning to do about the interest you’ve failed to pay? I’m sure you, Lord Viscount, know better than anyone that the interest rate is rather high. As promised, put your thumbprint on the deed transferring the territory.”
Good grief.
It was so absurd that a hollow laugh escaped me.
The money I’d thrown onto the table was enough to pay both the principal and interest, with some left over. And yet he was still forcing the issue, demanding the deed to the territory?
The big data I’d accumulated from devouring territory-management novels began spinning furiously in my head.
‘Obvious.’
This was one hundred percent it.
Either an enormous mana stone mine was hidden beneath the viscountcy’s land, or there was some cliché favorable development like an imperial redevelopment project underway.
‘That’s right. There’s no way I’d transmigrate into a family that’s screwed over this badly for no reason.’
There was a way to survive. I just hadn’t noticed it yet.
Once I started running that hope circuit, my mood, which had sunk all the way to the floor, improved a little.
I leaned even deeper into the sofa and crossed my legs.
Then I crooked one corner of my mouth upward.
“Why don’t you stop acting like a rat and be honest?”
“W-what? A rat?”
“Yes, a rat. An animal that gulps down the grain someone else worked hard to harvest is called a rat. What else would I call it?”
“Y-you...! Do you know who I am?”
“Mm. Mm. Sure. I don’t know which noble nobody is backing you, but to think you’d try to lowball the value of ‘that’ buried beneath our family’s territory with a few pennies of interest. You’ve got some guts.”
At my words, the man’s face turned as pale as paper.
“H-how do you know about that……! No, I have no idea what nonsense you’re spouting! I am merely an honest merchant trying to accept some useless land in place of overdue interest!”
“An honest merchant?”
I bent over the table and lowered my voice.
“What do you think will happen if the imperial family finds out about this? That a mere loan shark tried to intercept resources that ought to belong to the imperial household.”
“Ghh……”
“And what’s more, every citizen of the empire knows how much His Highness Crown Prince Leonhart Bell, our great future emperor, despises corruption and fraud, don’t they?”
In truth, I didn’t know whether the crown prince despised corruption or not.
All I knew was that he was an insane tyrant whose mana went berserk when he got angry.
But his name value worked like a charm.
The moment the words “crown prince” came out, the legs of the man and the other debt collectors began trembling.
“N-now that I’ve recalculated, this seems to be enough!”
Like a guilty thief startling at his own footsteps, the man hurriedly clutched the pouch of gold coins to his chest and fled the mansion with his underlings.
Bang!
The front door closed, and silence settled over the drawing room.
“……Young Master.”
Estelle, who had been standing behind me, carefully opened her mouth.
A faint tremor clung to her usually calm voice.
“Mm. Yes, yes. Praise me a little more.”
“...What are you talking about?”
What?
Weren’t you about to compliment me?
When I turned my head, Estelle was looking down at me with the same expressionless, cold face as ever.
How boring.
Her mouth opened boringly.
“Has a mana stone mine truly been discovered in our territory? Or is there some imperial redevelopment plan?”
“Huh? Ah, no. I was just bluffing.”
“……Pardon?”
The eyes visible beneath Estelle’s dark blue hair trembled slightly.
On the face of the head maid, who had maintained a perfect poker face, an expression that plainly said, “I am at a loss for words,” appeared.
“It’s just something that comes up a lot in romance fantasy... no, novels. If someone covets wasteland, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s for a reason like that. I threw it out there, and he bit, so I drove him off.”
“……I do not know whether I should pay tribute to that needlessly exceptional cunning of yours, Young Master, or sigh over the bravado with which you wagered your life.”
Estelle let out a small sigh and pressed her gloved hand to her forehead.
But the look she gave me carried a strange light unlike before.
It was only natural. The second son, who had always caused trouble or shut himself away in his room, had suddenly paid off a massive debt and toyed with the debt collectors before chasing them out.
But the crisis wasn’t over.
‘I put out the urgent fire for now, but this isn’t enough.’
There was no way this was the only mess my immature father had caused.
On top of that, I needed far more money to cover the mansion’s everyday maintenance costs and pay the overdue wages of our clever Estelle.
‘In the end, the answer is erotic manga.’
The work modeled after Saintess Arina Saint had become a huge hit.
Then what was the next target? I needed a new cheat key that could explode the suppressed desires of these otherworldly nobles all at once.
I quietly stared at Estelle as she tidied the drawing room.
Her jet-black hair was neatly pinned up, and she wore a flawless maid uniform without a speck of dust.
Her posture was elegant enough to belong to a noblewoman, and her cold, professional attitude never faltered no matter the situation.
‘Perfect.’
A maid who always looks after her master and provides perfect service.
If such a maid were shown wavering and falling apart because of something her master did?
‘The Maid’s Fall.’
It was a storyline always considered a steady seller in adult works.
In this ascetic fantasy world, it was certain to have the destructive power of an atomic bomb.
I smacked my lips and headed straight to my room.
“Young Master, are you shutting yourself in your room again?”
“Yeah, I’m busy! Leave my food in front of the door!”
Once I began working, I moved my pen as though literally possessed.
“Damn, look at the way I rendered these clothing folds. At this level, it wouldn’t be out of place in the imperial art museum.”
But as I burned with artistic passion, one fatal mistake emerged.
One of the rough sketches I had drawn to establish the character’s body proportions had gone too far—and worse, it ended up being eerily similar to Estelle’s actual figure.
“Ah, this is way too blatant. Tch.”
On top of that, I’d pressed too hard and torn the paper.
There was no way this household had any decent paper lying around.
I crumpled up the scrap paper with the sketch on it and carelessly tossed it into the wastebasket under the desk.
Then I took out a new sheet and immersed myself in the work again.
After several days and nights of drawing like that...
Once the basic storyboard was complete, an unbearable thirst washed over me.
“Water. I need water.”
I stretched and briefly headed to the kitchen on the first floor.
◆
In the brief moment Ian left his room.
Creak—
The door opened, and Estelle quietly entered with cleaning tools in both hands.
Estelle’s brow was furrowed in a rare expression.
Her mind was filled entirely with suspicion toward Ian.
Lately, the young master seemed almost like a different person.
Even the bravado he had shown against the debt collectors was unlike the usual young master.
‘The money is one thing...’
Estelle quietly sighed as she tidied the area around the desk.
‘Surely he has not secretly begun some illegal trade... or truly started selling himself to wealthy noblewomen in high society?’
Within the bounds of her common sense, those were the only ways the second son—who was effectively an unemployed layabout—could suddenly earn a large sum of money.
With a bitter feeling in her heart, Estelle bent down to empty the wastebasket beneath the desk.
At that moment, one especially tightly crumpled ball of paper caught her eye.
“This is……”
It bore traces of having been hastily crumpled, as if someone had tried to hide it.
Before she knew it, Estelle picked up the paper with her gloved hand. Then, very carefully, she unfolded the wrinkled sheet.
Flutter—
The moment the paper opened, Estelle froze.
“……?”
Drawn on the paper was an incredibly precise, beautiful, and vivid sketch.
The elegant penwork seemed difficult even for the empire’s most renowned painters to reproduce.
But its contents were something shocking—something she had never once seen in her entire life.
The woman in the picture was wearing the same maid uniform as her.
The problem was that the maid uniform was terribly disheveled.
And the bigger problem was that the maid in the drawing had her legs twisted around in the hands of someone unseen, her face flushed with yearning.
“Eek!!!”
Estelle, who had screamed without realizing it and crumpled the paper, turned bright red.