Chapter 1977 - 536: See Whose Blood Dries First (Part 2)

In just two short minutes, the plate was cleaner than if a dog had licked it.

Probably because he was stuffed, Ryan finally slowed down.

He grabbed the last piece of roasted, charred bread in his hand, using it to wipe up the meat juice left at the bottom of the plate. His mouth was crammed full, and he mumbled indistinctly.

"Sir… mm… you're really a good man."

"Thanks… for the compliment?" Newcastle replied in an unsure tone while pouring him a cup of hot water.

After all, he didn't think of himself as a good man.

"I'm not flattering you, I mean it! Right now you can't buy bread this good anywhere in the city. Those bakers are rotten to the core—they're actually mixing wood shavings into the dough! Holy Saint Sis above, they're all going to Hell!"

Ryan angrily bit into the bread soaked through with meat juice, as if he were trying to bite some mortal enemy to pieces.

"And those Campbell people, too. The King's guards said in the streets that all our grain has been snatched away by those greedy Campbell profiteers! They used scrap paper to cheat our grain and meat out of us, and they even led our bakers astray… Of course, you're different, you're a truly good man! No one has ever treated me as politely as you."

How fresh—on one hand it's scrap paper, on the other they can cheat away grain and meat… it had a kind of left-hand-wrestling-right-hand sense of humor to it.

If Newcastle remembered correctly, the Kingdom's estates were all in the hands of the Nobles. He certainly didn't recall being so clever and brave as to steal that stuff off Miss Marie's back as well.

Newcastle set the cup of water down in front of Ryan.

"Drink some water, don't choke."

"Th-thank you…"

The young man held the cup in both hands, blowing on it in small puffs. Now that his belly was full, he finally remembered a bit of propriety.

Newcastle looked into those clear eyes, but inside he tasted all sorts of mixed feelings.

The Campbell Duchy had its bottom rung too: the Peasants of Glanton Castle had only just been fed, and in the remote Spinor Earl's Domain there might still be people going hungry. His compassion did not spill over so far that he raged on behalf of strangers from a neighboring country.

What truly stirred those mixed feelings was that the people right around him, whom he could see with his own eyes, had somehow lost their minds as well.

His assistant, for example, had clearly studied at a Church School. He had both knowledge and Holy Light in his heart, and was plainly a member of the Ryan Kingdom's middle class—yet he had sunk into ignorance like this.

Newcastle admitted his thoughts were a bit selfish, but he couldn't help thinking that Professor Ferguson's Encyclopedia would probably harm them.

After all, there was nothing wrong with hating Campbell people. That didn't stop him, a Campbell himself, from selling fire extinguishers—because Baron Wickton had shares in the fire extinguishers.

Yet once these people, wandering through the fog, got their hands on matches and realized where their suffering came from… before they set the King's robes on fire, they would inevitably burn themselves first.

"Actually, your King isn't entirely wrong either."

Newcastle let out a soft sigh, stuffed the firefighting procurement list into a drawer, then gently closed it.

With his back to Ryan's bewildered gaze, he still couldn't quite harden his heart. The conscience and ambition in his head started grappling with each other.

"But you're my assistant, so I still have to tell you: the problem doesn't lie with the Campbell people, nor with the Ryan people… The blood flowing in our bodies isn't all that different. We're all Knights from the Land of Knights, we all believe in Saint Sis, and even our sense of glory is the same."

"Then… where does the problem lie?" The young man stared at him in a daze and asked without thinking, his clear pupils full of confusion—but in that confusion there was also a trace of wakefulness that didn't want to open its eyes.

Looking at his young face, Newcastle thought of that stone mason named Bar, and his inner struggle between heaven and man fell into turmoil.

The real answer was too cruel, so cruel that he could only speak it in a joking tone—words he would never utter in normal times—

Because you're too cheap.

Just that simple.

The Ryan Kingdom wasn't lacking in grain, and its grain-producing region wasn't the Twilight Province, but the Golden Plain watered by the Rushing River.

Yet like those crudely minted copper coins, it was all firmly in the Nobles' hands.

These gentlemen had absolutely no reason to sell good stuff to bakers in exchange for those crudely minted copper coins. That would be both unprofitable and entirely unnecessary.

After all, they could just load the grain onto ships, send it downriver to Thunder City to trade for exquisite handicrafts, or let it drift upstream to the Luo De Kingdom in exchange for its abundant Magic Devices and mineral resources.

The Nobles were always complaining that the townsfolk were money-grubbing, the craftsmen lazy, and the peasants stupid, yet never once mentioned that they themselves, bathing in Holy Light, were the very embodiment of all these flaws combined.

Newcastle couldn't help thinking of Miss Marie. She was practically the spitting image of the "Miss Eloise" she worshiped.

His thoughts slid back to the previous night.

On that soft bed smelling faintly of lavender, the Marie Langbane who was in the heat of a love affair with him curled up in his arms like a clingy cat and told him everything she knew without holding anything back.

She hadn't gone to Thunder City to have fun, but to follow her father—the shrewd Baron Langbane—to sweep goods.

And what they swept up wasn't just novel toilets and spring mattresses, but also real estate in the most prosperous district of Thunder City.

Since Miss Marie loved watching plays, her father simply bought her a large plot of land and planned to invest in a theater even more magnificent than the Colin Grand Theater.