Chapter 57
Spring came to the Sneria Domain.
The flowers bloomed, the migratory birds that had left returned to chirp, and children shed their layered winter clothes and played, their laughter blossoming everywhere,
that sort of spring.
Spring came to the Sneria manor as well.
“My lord. The plum blossoms are lovely.”
“Mm.”
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, might you have some time this weekend?”
“Please, speak comfortably.”
“This was the proper way for a wife to behave in my country.”
“I thought I’d heard that even there, it was considered ideal for lovers to speak freely, without being bound by trivial etiquette. Am I mistaken?”
“···”
At Duke’s words, Hana’s cheeks turned rosy.
“If I don’t behave this way, I’ll be embarrassed.”
“···”
Looking at his lover, her cheeks faintly flushed, Duke was at a loss for words.
Duke barely held back a sigh and recalled the incident that had brought Hana to this state.
*
When Duke returned after letting off some gas in Ophir’s form for the first time in a while, Hana greeted him by shyly holding out a marriage vow.
‘Where on earth did things get so tangled?’
When she held out the vow, Duke was more flustered than he had ever been in his life.
It was no exaggeration to say he was more surprised than when he discovered this world was built around misunderstandings.
Fortunately—or perhaps he should say mercifully—before Duke could put his foot in his mouth, she gave him a clue that helped him understand the situation.
“I was surprised, too, when you sent me an engagement vow through contract magic.”
Only then did Duke open the interface granted by Rex’s power and begin reading it closely.
===========
<Temporary Hon Vow>
===========
Duke took a closer look at the word hon here.
‘Fuck.’
It was hon (婚), not hon (魂).
It meant marriage, not soul.
‘Ah, damn Hangul.’
People in the Empire, where English was the cultural norm, would never make such a mistake.
At the same time, it was a mistake only Duke, who saw the text in Korean, could make.
=============
- Congratulations! You have found someone whose feelings are mutual! The requirements have been met, and a new function has been unlocked!
=============
For some reason, the system seemed to be sneering at Duke, as if teasing him.
After confirming his mistake, Duke regained his composure and sorted out what he needed to do.
‘Clear up the misunderstanding?’
The thought briefly crossed his mind, but
‘No. That’d ruin my character.’
A second-in-command who got engaged by mistake?
What kind of lame setup was that?
Of course, that wasn’t the only reason.
‘Come to think of it, is there any need to clear up the misunderstanding?’
No matter how he looked at it, this was a chance to be with his favorite. There was no reason to turn it down.
Judging by her reaction, she seemed to feel the same way.
So Duke put on an iron mask and nodded.
“Understood.”
Duke signed the vow without hesitation.
When he added his artistic signature, honed over two hundred years, her expression brightened.
“Sir··· No, may I call you ‘my lord’ now?”
Duke hid his faintly flushed ears beneath his helmet and nodded with a solemn air.
And just like that, Duke became a married man in the blink of an eye.
Duke, along with Rex and Ari, who had been watching the pair’s relationship through the system, had no doubt that the two would enjoy a happy newlywed life.
But just as Duke was about to begin planning a grand wedding, Hana said something no one had anticipated.
“I’d like to hold the ceremony after the war is over.”
War?
What war?
Hadn’t the Sneria Domain joined Rex’s territory and signed an armistice?
Duke was puzzled, but Hana’s next words made him understand.
“I’d like to put off our marriage until His Highness Rex establishes a proper nation.”
The war in the Sneria Domain was only in a state of truce; there was no formal peace.
The invasion had merely paused because Hana was stronger than expected, Rex’s command was beyond imagination, and Duke was absurdly powerful.
The royal family still harbored a hatred of Marquis Providence for reasons no one could understand,
and the other lords were constantly preparing to resume the war because of their sunk costs.
To put it simply, the current relationship between the Kingdom of Esirik and the Marquisate was much like that between South and North Korea.
They thought continuing the war would mean facing an opponent too strong or suffering too many casualties, so for the time being, they had drawn a line and agreed to a truce.
In those circumstances, Hana couldn’t easily hold a wedding.
If she and Duke officially married and had a child, the Sneria Domain would lose one of its defenders for ten months.
Besides, it was a once-in-a-lifetime wedding, and she personally wanted to have it when the nation and her domain were as peaceful as possible, so she could enjoy a stable newlywed life.
So Duke and Hana remained in a de facto marriage.
Administratively, they were not officially husband and wife, but they had made a promise, and everyone who knew them knew about it.
That was the nature of Duke and Hana’s relationship: more than an engagement, but less than a marriage.
The problem was Hana’s behavior afterward.
“My lord. Have you been coughing?”
“Please, just speak normally.”
“I’m sorry. If I don’t act this way, I won’t be able to face you.”
If anything, her behavior had become even more awkward.
When they were courting, she had been desperate to see him, but now that they were together, she was so embarrassed that she deliberately put on the mask of a rational, cool-headed lady ruler.
The problem was that she came from a culture similar to Confucianism.
No wonder she was the kind of woman who wore mourning and observed a three-year mourning period after Duke died.
She was an even bigger Confucian girl than Duke could have imagined.
And this was already an improvement.
She had originally spoken like someone out of a historical drama, but after Duke kept correcting her, she had gotten this far.
“My lord.”
“I told you to call me by my name.”
“···Please give me some time.”
Duke quietly sighed inside his helmet.
In the end, it was something only time could resolve.
***
While spring came to Duke, it came to the Providence Marquisate as well.
However, none of the officials in the marquisate had the leisure to enjoy it.
“Any word from the intelligence bureau?”
“They say they captured spies at the border. They’re planning to send them to the interrogation bureau.”
“And public sentiment?”
“They say Company Commander Hedonius is managing things somehow.”
“Don’t make any mistakes.”
“Yes, sir!”
That was because the Esirik royal family had come with an official truce agreement, just as spring arrived.
The war entered a lull, and an indefinite truce was signed.
The problem was that the person who had gone to the negotiating table to sign the agreement was the Second Company commander of the royal guard.
Rex was shy around strangers and did not want to negotiate the agreement himself.
But if he sent the madman Duke, he thought Duke might suddenly grab a diplomat by the throat at the negotiating table,
and the dark elf deputy commander (formerly the First Company commander) had been looking rather wild-eyed lately, possessed by some strange lust for conquest.
The Third Company commander, Remesis, whose manners were nonexistent, was out of the question as well.
That left only the Second Company commander.
Fortunately, aside from occasionally muttering about ‘trials,’ the Second Company commander was a fairly normal person.
He was also reasonable in many ways and the most silver-tongued of the lot, so Rex trusted him and sent him as a diplomat.
And what came back was···
“My lord! I’ve officially secured recognition of the duchy’s status!”
A mountain of work—more of it, and bigger than ever.
At the sight of the Second Company commander excitedly reporting back like a retriever proudly carrying a mortar shell in its mouth, Rex collapsed with joy.
If there was one thing he had overlooked, it was that the Second Company commander’s tongue was far more agile than Rex had imagined.
He knew exactly what he had to use as bargaining chips, and used them to gain the upper hand in the negotiations.
- “Are you sure you can manage all those vacant territories?”
During the last war, Duke had cut down barons and counts on the fortress walls, leaving their lands without an owner.
Now that the war had entered a lull, the other lords wanted to seize those chaotic territories, but the Second Company commander had claimed them first.
- “Are you sure you can digest all those territories? If you can’t, we’ll swallow you up, too.”
- “Can Marquis Providence digest them, then?”
At the time, the Second Company commander leaned toward the diplomat who had said that and burst into maniacal laughter.
- “A trial that doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. We’ve already crossed the threshold of death. This much is more than manageable.”
And so, the vacant territories, too, were incorporated into the Providence Domain, thanks to the Second Company commander’s silver tongue.
As a result, Rex was no longer a marquis; he was now a duke.
Surprisingly, though, this wasn’t all that different from the original story.
In the original, Rex’s territory wasn’t overflowing with superhumans like it was now, but he had the advantage in the game of seizing land with ordinary soldiers and eventually won the title of duke.
Of course, unlike in the original story, Rex in this world had become far more heavy-handed.
Faced with the administration of a domain that had suddenly grown to the size of a duchy, Rex screamed the exact same words as his counterpart in the parallel world of the original story.
“I can’t believe I’m the Northern Pig-Duke···! I can’t believe I’m part of the Kim family!!”
In a way, he was right.
His duchy had united the northern part of the Kingdom of Esirik and drawn a ceasefire line with the royal family in the south.
What’s more, Rex had a nuclear weapon in his hands.
“Ha-ha-ha··· I’m the Pig-Duke···”
Rex could hardly believe it.
All he had done was struggle to survive. He had never dreamed of founding a new nation.
But, as always, his retainers read too much into Rex’s struggle to survive···
- ‘Aha! Our lord intends to overthrow the royal family and found a new kingdom!’
And so, the duchy was born.
In any world, someone who opposed the royal family had only two choices.
Fail and become a traitor, or succeed and become the founder of a dynasty.
In that sense, Rex’s dream of becoming a voter in some ‘decent’ city and living a carefree life—one he still couldn’t give up—had become an impossible fantasy.
In any case, that spring was nothing short of hell for the duchy’s officials.
Given Rex’s policy of placing great importance on farming, spring and fall—the busy farming seasons—always brought an insane amount of work.
But the damn Esirik royal family had declared a truce while continuing to send spies and even carry out sabotage, tripling the officials’ workload.
“You sons of bitches!! Leave the fertilizer warehouse alone! Once spring’s over, I’ll rain shit-water bombs down on those southern punks!”
There was an incident in which Duke and Rex flinched at the shout of an official with an especially thick dialect (?), but in any case, spring in the duchy was busy.
While Rex and the civil officials were worked to the bone,
Duke waited for someone on the walls of the duchy’s capital.
A few hours later,
the person Duke was waiting for trudged up to the walls.
It was the blind swordsman, returning to the capital after a long war.
Duke stopped the blind swordsman on the drawbridge.
“It’s been a while, Peter.”
“I’ve only been back from the front for a day, you old bastard. Let me in without giving me a hard time so I can get some rest.”
“All right. But first, let’s settle this properly.”
Shing.
Duke’s beloved sword, Durandal, cut through the air with a heavy sound.
The tip of the greatsword stopped right in front of the old man’s nose.
“End your wandering now and choose. The Empire of the past, or the Empire of the future.”
The old man’s eyes, clouded with cataracts, turned toward Duke.
"Do we really have to discuss this here?"
"I am now a knight of the newly founded House of Providence. This duchy has no place for the ghosts of the Empire."
"Sigh. I think this every time, but I envy you."
How could anyone be so steadfast?
He was so unlike a certain old man, still weighed down by regret over never having fully served the fallen Empire.
Of course, the country had deserved to fall. Even so, the old man could not easily abandon the Empire, burdened by the guilt of failing to fulfill his duty.
To Peter, Duke spoke a line that was almost like poetry.
"What does the name of a country matter, whether it is this or that? Look to its essence. Did you pledge your loyalty to a country called Hexion, or to the people living on this land?"
At those words, Peter’s lips moved several times before he answered in a trembling voice.
"What I pledged my loyalty to was..."
The old man barely managed to squeeze out his voice.
"What I wanted to protect, even if I became bones and turned to soil, was simply a land where even the blind like me could live without fear."
At those words, Duke’s sword tip lowered slightly.
"Understood. Keep that conviction with you to the very end, without wandering again."
"Even if I die a hundred times, I will protect it."
The old man smiled with relief.
Duke, too, felt relieved inside his helmet.
‘How was that? Sounded kind of poetic, right? The chronicler recorded it well, didn’t he?’
Duke was already excited at the thought of sneaking into the archives sometime this week to check the dialogue.