Chapter 1
[ Everyone Loves Me ]
I possessed a trashy romance fantasy novel, just like the title says, where everyone falls for the heroine.
And of all times, it had to be at the worst possible moment.
"Lord Kyle Leopold, why..."
A girl lay pitifully on the ground, clutching her cheek, while eyes from all around turned toward me and the Crown Prince glared at me with open hostility.
It seemed I had possessed the extra who bullied the heroine when she was young.
Or rather, should I call him a scapegoat manipulated by the heroine to highlight how pitiful she was?
Anyway, I had just possessed this body and was still dazed when I was exiled to the south before I could do anything.
'Grand Duke of the South, Southern Naval Admiral, and Southern Supreme Commander'
with nothing but a string of empty titles hanging off me.
Kyle Leopold was fifteen at the time.
Considering he was of imperial blood, exile was all he got, but everyone knew it was effectively a political death sentence.
The South, dominated by emerging powers like merchants, factory owners, and capitalists, was a place where the central government’s control barely reached.
Besides, there were no notable mages in the South.
No matter what strange ideas Kyle Leopold entertained, the South lacked even the capacity to stage a rebellion.
Everyone thought a fifteen-year-old brat occupying the empty title of Southern Grand Duke wouldn’t be able to do anything.
That was only natural.
Even I thought so.
A life where retirement was guaranteed even if I just lounged around and lived off others.
When you think about how hard modern people work to achieve a life like that, the Southern Grand Duke position—free of responsibility and untangled from the original story—was truly comfortable.
In fact, this is great. I’ll do nothing but slack off and live easy.
That’s what I thought on the very first day I received the title of Southern Grand Duke.
...Or rather, I had thought that.
[ Das Kapital ]
[ Workers of the world, unite! ]
"These are subversive books and pamphlets confiscated from the factory workers, Your Grace."
One month after taking office as the Southern Grand Duke.
It was the time it took me to realize the place I was lying in was not a comfortable bed, but the guillotine of revolution.
Come to think of it, that was exactly how it was.
Kyle Leopold’s cause of death in Everyone Loves Me, commonly called Monajot, was rebellion.
I’d brushed it off with, He had such an awful personality, so he deserved to die~, but that scene had a background I could never have imagined.
The Empire, which had enjoyed peace for too long, did not welcome innovation. It looked down on industry and shoved it into the South, and from that moment on, the South began walking a slightly different path from the Empire.
And so, a city of capitalists beyond the reach of the central laws was born.
And history had already shown, in nineteenth-century England, just how brutally capitalists could squeeze workers in a world with weak labor laws.
Seven days a week, nineteen hours a day, then a lump of eel jelly handed out as if it were food—that was enough to unite the workers of the world.
At that point, I had only two choices left.
1. Run away to some unknown countryside before the revolution breaks out.
2. Normalize the South.
I chose option 2.
As a modern person, I had no confidence I could live in the countryside of this era.
So I pulled out the knowledge from my past life.
Thanks to Kyle Leopold’s absolute memory ability, retrieving that knowledge wasn’t very difficult.
"Ah, this is called the Labor Standards Act."
"It’s a law that defeats wicked capitalists and lets workers live like human beings."
While the original protagonists spent their youth laughing and having fun at the academy, I had to fight wicked capitalists in the South.
The empty legitimacy of the Southern Grand Duke was filled by the workers who supported me.
The Southern Grand Duke’s army, which had been little more than a formality, had before I knew it become a righteous force overthrowing wicked capitalists.
And so seven years passed, until the year I turned twenty-two.
"On charges of violating the Labor Standards Act and withholding wages, I sentence Count Allen Bernhardt to twenty years in prison."
Only after driving the last wicked capitalist out of the South was I finally able to normalize it.
By then, the South was no longer an exile ground.
Over those seven years spent with the South, I think I had unknowingly grown attached to it.
Every time the reformed South grew, I felt absurdly proud, and pushing modernization projects was fun. I felt like I finally understood why people came to love work.
Maybe that was why.
"...I hear things aren’t going well in the Empire these days."
"The East, West, North, and the center don’t get along like they used to, do they?"
"And that’s not all. I hear the neighboring republic is seizing the chance to expand its colonies at an alarming rate. At this pace, the Empire might get shoved out of first place."
"Hah, and monsters and black mages are running wild in the chaos too. What on earth is His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince thinking..."
"It’s such a blessing that the wise Kyle Leopold is governing this South."
It was because the bad news constantly coming from the imperial mainland made me uneasy without my realizing it.
"They say it’s all because of ‘that woman’ who appeared in high society seven years ago."
Before I knew it, as I’d been growing so frantically, the South had become the only place still growing in an Empire that had fallen into complete chaos.
A wavering Empire. Collapsing public order. And a South that was wealthy but weak.
Pirates were the first to take interest in this moneybag.
"Why the hell is this ship yours?"
Pirates began to run rampant in the South. The profits were so high that even bandits were taking to ships and heading out to sea.
It was the opening act of an unexpected age of great piracy.
Next to show interest were the monsters.
The high-quality mana stone products produced by the South were excellent prey for the underwater monsters.
On top of that, as the South grew rapidly, the interference coming from all directions started getting worse.
"Pardon? You want this much tribute? That’s twice as much as five years ago!"
"Hasn’t your production increased threefold since then?"
"That’s because Lord Kyle and our workers..."
"Tsk tsk. Without the Empire’s mighty military power, would you have been able to develop peacefully without being invaded?"
"Then at least our local pirates..."
"Ahem, I don’t know about that. Anyway, this year you’ll pay this much tribute. Otherwise the center may stop protecting you."
Unfortunately, the South had no military power to solve this.
Naval warfare in this age was basically a magical duel, with both sides firing spells from their ships.
'If magic is stronger, do we really need cannons?'
'If one spell can blow you away anyway, do we really need to make ships sturdier?'
Because of that mindset, even in the era of the Industrial Revolution, when large steamships occasionally appeared, navies still had nothing but sailing ships, ironclads, and early armored vessels.
Unfortunately, the commerce-focused South had very few outstanding mages.
Kyle Leopold, who was still an imperial bloodline descendant, was certainly a great mage, but as the Southern Grand Duke I couldn’t spend all day running around suppressing pirates.
And so I arrived at one conclusion.
"We need an extremely powerful weapon we can use in emergencies."
One that didn’t need a mage’s help, too.
So I called for my adjutant right then and there.
"Lucilla."
"Yes, Your Grace."
The one who entered through the door was a silver-haired girl.
She was the only servant who had followed me when I was exiled, and also a revolutionary comrade who fought alongside me against the South’s capitalists.
"I won’t be appearing for a while. Until then, I’ll leave the acting role to you."
Lucilla’s signature emotionless blue eyes stared straight at me.
"What are you making now..."
"The strongest weapon."
After saying only that, I immediately shut myself in my room.
***
Lucilla accepted the temporary acting position Kyle had entrusted to her as if she were used to it now.
She had already refused many times, saying, 'How could I possibly take on such an important position?'
She knew full well by now that those words would never reach Kyle.
And more than anything...
"If it is that man, he surely has a plan."
I remember the day he first barricaded himself in that little room.
After agonizing for days, he came out holding a book called the Labor Standards Act.
The changes after that were truly enormous.
At first, nobody in the Empire thought the position of 'Southern Grand Duke,' which nobles, merchants, and capitalists all ignored, could ever hold real power.
But Lord Kyle brought a new force—the workers—into politics.
Factories don’t run without workers. The same goes for commerce and transportation.
Kyle seized hold of the workers, the very foundation of society, in an instant, and instead of wasting that power, he used it to improve the South.
Thus, he wrote with his own hand the myth of the South, the only growing region in a crumbling Empire.
He proudly proved himself to the center, which had failed to recognize Lord Kyle’s greatness.
So I could wait in peace.
That is, until the international situation surrounding the South began to move with alarming speed.
"Temporary Acting Lady Lucilla, urgent news!"
"What is it?"
"The County of Sarsen is violating the Sarsen-Lutetia Treaty and building a fortress in the Sarsen region! Estimated completion time is about three years from now!"
The Sarsen-Lutetia Treaty was one of the clauses in the free trade agreement between the South and the West.
Its contents were simple.
In the Sarsen-Lutetia region, the only land route between the West and the South, no obstacle that could block free trade could be built.
If they were breaking that treaty... there could only be one purpose.
"...Those damn Western bastards. They turned their backs on us when things were hard, and now they want to stick a straw into the South’s prosperity."
Fortresses cost a huge amount to build.
So the side that builds one collects money from those passing through in order to recoup that enormous expense.
And the Sarsen-Lutetia region was the only overland route from the South to the West.
In other words, they meant to extort money from every merchant using the South’s land route.
"Protest immediately! This is a violation of the Sarsen-Lutetia Treaty!"
"We already did. But... the County of Sarsen says this is a measure to protect the South from outside invaders, and they show no sign of backing down even a step."
Lucilla ground her teeth.
Even an eight-year-old could tell that was a lie, but the South still had nothing it could do.
The central government did not like Lord Kyle.
The West wouldn’t intervene, since money was going into its own pocket, and the other regions would surely step back, saying it wasn’t their problem.
Armed conflict... as humiliating as it was, was difficult.
Because in the South, an exile land, there were no proper mages besides Lord Kyle.
"Those thieves think we’re a colony."
They were cutting our nose off right in front of us, and there was nothing we could do.
Lucilla’s hands trembled with anger.
That was precisely when Kyle Leopold’s office door opened.
"Hoo... with this, the basic design is complete."
Kyle Leopold immediately called a meeting and spread the blueprint out in the center of the round table in the meeting room.
For something made by an ordinary person, it was an excessively intricate blueprint.
That was thanks to Kyle Leopold’s ability to automatically bring a blueprint to mind in front of him whenever he had enough understanding of the target.
Seeing the blueprint of the giant steel warship, one councilor asked cautiously.
"This... what is this a blueprint for?"
Kyle Leopold answered without the slightest hesitation.
"Dreadnought."
It was the name of the greatest weapon of war humanity had ever created, an invincible battleship that could smash any fortress to pieces like a bundle of straw.