Where did you learn that kind of architectural knowledge? You can't pick up those details from books alone.

Chapter 45

Lily's gaze was fixed on Cassian's back as it grew smaller in the distance.

His steps showed not even the slightest hint of hesitation.

Without the slightest hesitation, he strode into that pitch-black street, reeking and strewn with filth, as if he were walking in and out of his own home.

...So that was it.

Why he had been so firm in his warning.

Why he'd gone out of his way to press motion sickness medicine into her hand.

The sight before her was very different from the world the cardinal had shown Lily before her regression.

Unlike the staged fake slum from back then, where children in slightly worn but still proper clothes handed her flowers and thanked her, this was the real thing.

This was the raw, unfiltered 'lowest of the low.'

Lily bit her lip hard.

'How shameful.'

She couldn't bear how pathetic she was for having thought she understood the suffering of the poor just because she had skipped a few meals and slept on a hard bed.

And at the same time, she thought it was fortunate that she had entered the Academy.

At first, after her regression, it had clearly been nothing more than an unavoidable choice she made simply to escape from the cardinal.

But by enrolling in the Academy, she had ended up meeting Cassian,

and that meeting was peeling away the thick veil that had blocked her view.

'I have to do something too...'

Lord Cassian is already on the move.

Lily clenched her fists.

"Please move aside!"

She pushed through the noble young ladies who were pinching their noses and gagging, then ran toward the wagon.

Her target was the thick green tarp covering the wagon bed.

"Oh my, Miss Lily? What are you doing?"

"Don't touch the dirty stuff!"

She couldn't hear any of the people trying to stop her.

Lily grabbed the edge of the tarp and pulled with all her might.

Grrr!

The tarp was much heavier than she'd expected, and it didn't want to budge.

But Lily gritted her teeth.

Flap!

"This needs to be laid on the ground."

She panted as she dragged the tarp along.

"You can't prepare food on bare ground... It'd kick up dust and splash mud everywhere."

"...Ah."

Several girls who had been staring blankly at her now looked sheepish.

But no one hurried to help.

They were all afraid of getting filth on their academy dress uniforms.

Lily didn't care.

She heaved and groaned as she spread the tarp by herself.

Once the tarp was laid over the mud, at least the bare minimum of clean space was secured.

"Phew..."

Beads of sweat had formed on her forehead.

There was still no time to rest.

Lily immediately ran back to the wagon and hugged a sack of grain with her thin arms.

"Hngh!"

She forced strength into her wobbling legs.

Her eyes were no longer those of a frightened puppy.

A place where starving poor people waited for help.

This was a cleric's battlefield.

* * *

I could feel prickling stares stabbing into my body.

They were the villagers.

From between the collapsing shacks, hollow eyes followed us.

Well, it made sense.

Two noble young masters in flashy clothes were wandering around this cesspit like it was their own backyard, not even bothering to cover their noses.

"Looks like they find this interesting."

Lucius said quietly from beside me.

"Of course they do. It probably feels like watching monkeys at the zoo."

"Monkeys? That's a bit too harsh."

"Not exactly wrong, though."

And now who started by calling them monkeys first?

If anything, we should be grateful they're only treating us like monkeys over there too.

I answered evenly as I made a full lap around the village.

It was a textbook illegal shantytown.

The houses were jammed together haphazardly, as if zoning didn't exist, and since there wasn't even any proper drainage, wastewater and filth were left lying in the streets.

I mean, in the dead of winter, with the cold biting through you, who's going to gather trash separately and take it outside to dump?

In a village like this, who would lead that effort, and how would you even get everyone to cooperate?

It was a hellscape, plain and simple.

But.

"Hmmm..."

I stopped walking and looked down at the dirt road that I could generously call the village's main street.

I found one silver lining.

"The road isn't narrow. That's good."

"The road?"

Lucius asked in surprise.

"Look. The houses are packed so tightly that it feels suffocating, but this one road that runs from the entrance of the village all the way to the end is wide enough for three carriages to pass, isn't it?"

"Now that you mention it, yes. Why would that be? If they had so much land to spare, there'd have been no need to cram the houses together like this."

"Well, probably to make sure they got enough sunlight. The houses being this small seems to be nothing but a desperate measure born of material shortages and the need not to freeze to death in winter."

I didn't say it, but there was one more reason.

It was probably because they wanted to dump their trash as far from their own homes as possible.

But just because you don't want to dump your own trash in front of your house doesn't mean you can dump it in front of someone else's.

In the end, they probably made the road so wide so they could dump it in this gray zone.

Whatever the reason, it didn't matter.

What mattered was that this wide road could serve as our work area.

If the road had been narrow too, even shoveling would have been impossible.

"Looks like we can make it work."

"Workable?"

"I mean the estimate."

I stroked my chin and narrowed my eyes like a veteran site manager with twenty years of experience.

In truth, I didn't know a damn thing.

"You've finished mapping everything out, right?"

"Yes. Would you like to take a look?"

Lucius handed me the notebook he'd been holding open the entire time we were walking around the village.

I accepted the notebook absentmindedly.

'...Oh.'

The map was drawn with blueprint-level detail.

The layout of the buildings, the width of the roads, even the differences in elevation of the terrain.

Rather than a simple sketch,

'Isn't this basically a site plan?'

Of course, I'd never actually seen a site plan.

He's a technician. A real technician.

He says he majored in alchemy, but he's definitely putting that major to good use.

"Excellent."

"Thank you. But Lord Cassian."

Lucius spoke carefully, watching my expression.

"You asked for such a detailed map and said the road was fortunate... so from the beginning, you weren't planning to include house repairs at all?"

"Correct. House repairs are not the urgent issue right now."

Winter was over, so there was no risk of freezing to death.

A few holes in the walls wouldn't kill anyone on the spot.

So that wasn't the real problem.

I closed the notebook and cursed inwardly.

'Damn it... When I was in the military, I should've read some alternate-history novels or books on civil engineering.'

The only knowledge in my head was how to go to another world and make a killing with modern conveniences, or how to flirt with elves or some other nonsense.

I'm the idiot who only ever read harem novels after filtering out anything that was all guys.

This is the price of being a pathetic 2D girl-chasing freak.

Of course, I don't regret it.

I don't know a thing about sewer construction or septic tank design.

How would I?

From now on, I was going to have to pay the price for my one-sided reading habits.

I decided to trust my instincts.

That stench right there.

"The smell's bad, isn't it?"

"...I can't deny it."

"Once the ground thaws and it gets hot, this place will open straight into hell. We're talking an outbreak of disease."

"But the terrain slopes, doesn't it? If it rains, wouldn't it drain naturally?"

Lucius pointed at the map and argued back.

"The poor aren't stupid, so they probably built their houses with runoff in mind."

That was a fair point.

Water flows from higher ground to lower ground.

But there's a limit to that.

This place doesn't border a mountain; it borders a forest.

Which means there is a slope, but it isn't steep.

And sludge mixed with filth and trash doesn't flow like water.

It just clumps together like a giant slime.

"If typhoons came through regularly, that'd solve it. Even a slope this gentle would get the whole village washed clean. But what if only a halfhearted rain fell and the water drained sluggishly over unlevel ground, leaving the earth damp and rotting?"

"Hmm."

"If they pack the soil down but don't open drainage channels, the whole town turns into one huge swamp of filth. And in midsummer heat, too."

I pressed my foot firmly into the soggy ground.

Black water seeped up over the sole of my shoe.

"Then the whole village becomes a cask for fermenting disease. An epidemic buffet, basically."

In the original story, too, an epidemic broke out the year Lily visited, almost undermining the saint's authority.

Lily, Hector's younger sister, and Baroness Müller investigated the cause together and saved the village from disaster.

I was trying to get ahead of that and prevent it now.

Regardless of the original plot and all that, I'm not a sociopath who can watch people endure this rotting shithole for months and die in droves from illness.

"Why on earth did they build a village here, taking on this kind of risk?"

That, I couldn't say.

I thought Lily was the one who should reveal why this village came to be.

"I don't really know. Truth is, there's no such thing as a perfect option for the poor. Even so, this is about as good as it gets. That's the key point."

"Ah. I was thinking too narrowly."

You're the smart one.

I may know because I read the original, but you're going toe-to-toe with me right now without any cheat codes.

The smart guy in front of me seemed to be mulling it over, then asked another question.

"I understand your reasoning completely, but wouldn't it be fine to carry out the drainage work and house repairs at the same time?"

"House repairs are strictly off-limits."

"Why? There are quite a few houses that look like they're about to collapse."

"Because they're built to share walls to save materials. Look over there."

I pointed at the tightly packed shacks.

"If you touch one, the whole line comes crashing down like dominoes. If we let the kids here handle it, this won't be volunteer work—it'll be a disaster movie. Do you really want to see a noble young master lose control and pull out one pillar, only to have the neighboring roof collapse with it?"

"...Ah."

Lucius's face went pale.

I supposed it was horrifying just to imagine.

"Certainly... the risk is too great for us non-experts to touch it."

He looked at me with an awestruck gaze.

"Where did you learn that kind of architectural knowledge? You can't pick up details like that from books alone."

'How did I learn it? I can't exactly say I picked it up in middle school while studying modern literature and then got a lecture about shantytowns from my history teacher, now can I? That's the truth.'

Explaining it would be a pain.

This is exactly where my farmer image comes in handy.

"I just... studied a few things while building farm huts back home, and happened to learn it along the way."

"A farm hut?"

"Yes. If it leaked, I patched it; if a post rotted, I replaced it. After doing that, I naturally started to understand."

"I see..."

Lucius nodded.

His eyes filled with a little more admiration.

"Wisdom born from experience. So the rumor that you're a practical genius was true after all."

"..."

No, seriously.

I'm saying it's just a hack job.

And why do rumors like that keep reaching me secondhand anyway?