Eradicating Corruption

The beginning of April flew by in a blur.

The corrupt Empire had far more that needed fixing than I had expected. First, we had to fill the vacancies created when the nobles were swept away.

The highly skilled personnel brought over from the South also needed time to learn the ropes.

Unlike the South, whose population had now reached twenty-five million, the Central region boasted a staggering fifty million people. Even a simple comparison of the population showed a difference of nearly two to one.

Moreover, while I had personally laid the foundations and modernized the South, the Central region was in a truly miserable state compared to the South, whose administration was more modernized than that of any other existing nation.

"No, does this place really have a population of fifty million?"

The land had been surveyed haphazardly, leaving many empty areas, and the population census was questionable enough to make me wonder whether it had been conducted properly at all. The Empire's poor administrative capabilities meant that it could not even properly grasp the situation in the Central region.

On top of that, a considerable portion of the figures had been deliberately falsified because of corruption.

That was why I had to offer unusually generous terms in order to implement swift administrative measures.

Report the harvest yields and population of your domains by the second week of April without concealing anything. Even if what you report differs from past records, the generous Kyle Leopold will overlook it this once.

It was a little regrettable to let bureaucrats who had been corrupt up to now off the hook with this, but in the long run, it could not be helped.

The reason was simple: administrative personnel were limited.

Even in twenty-first-century South Korea, a developed country where the illiteracy rate approached zero percent, administrative personnel were highly skilled workers. Our South was no different.

With administrative personnel already assigned to the East and West, completely replacing all the bureaucrats and additionally conscripting enough administrators to manage a population of fifty million was... practically impossible.

Like them or not, we could not replace every Imperial bureaucrat.

Instead, we decided to resolve the matter by severely punishing those who resisted to the very end and making examples of them.

"Hold on, wasn't this area's harvest yield supposed to be this high? The accounts don't add up."

"I-I... It's..."

"I'm fairly certain I ordered you to submit accurate new figures for production and population by the second week of April."

"Well, you see..."

"Arrest him. This one goes before the anti-aircraft guns."

Those who had failed to come to their senses even after watching nobles being torn apart before their eyes were all executed as examples.

The method of execution was also unimaginably cruel.

Execution by anti-aircraft cannon. Humans were blown apart by anti-aircraft guns that fired four large rounds, each over twelve millimeters in caliber.

When a 12.7mm round struck a human being, the affected area literally disappeared. A huge hole was blown clean through them, as though it had been erased with an eraser.

The bodies of the bureaucrats executed by those anti-aircraft guns were so mangled that their identities could not be determined.

That was why, from time to time, there were people who, after being caught for their crimes, struggled to survive by offering bribes.

"P-Please spare me, my lords! If there's anything you need, I'll give you whatever you want! Y-Yes, I can give you money!"

"Don't you know that bribing the Imperial Guard is an aggravating offense? Execute this one, and confiscate every last bit of property belonging to his entire extended family."

"M-My lords!"

...Of course, that plea had no effect whatsoever on the Imperial Guard.

It had been said since ancient times that when the water upstream was clean, the water downstream would be clean as well. With me watching the high-ranking bureaucrats' acceptance of bribes with a sharp eye, no one was foolish enough to accept one.

Since the high-ranking bureaucrats were not accepting bribes, the people beneath them naturally became cautious as well.

They had seen powerful figures who appeared untouchable to them lose their heads the moment they accepted a bribe, so they could not imagine that they would be any different.

...Of course, monitoring and punishing them was also my responsibility, and the fact that it caused my workload to keep growing was a serious drawback.

"Lord Kyle, you've been pushing yourself too hard lately. Even a ninth-circle mage needs to rest."

If even the normally brusque Lucilla was worried enough to say that, it really said something.

"No, but it can't be helped."

Even so, this was something I could not compromise on.

The greatest enemy of our Empire was neither the republic across the sea nor the International League, which was larger than us in sheer size... it was corruption.

I had already seen all too clearly what happened when dictatorship was combined with corruption and greed.

The country immediately to the north was starving under a three-generation dictatorship, while the country farther north had its young men being ground down in a war that had lasted four years because of a dictator's foolish decision.

Next to them was a country that had challenged the United States far too early without adequate preparation, been battered by all sorts of sanctions from around the world, and was slowly sinking.

"If we begin to rot, the Empire is finished. The future of one hundred and fifty million Imperial citizens is at stake here."

Then why not just establish democracy?

At present, the only people in the Empire who had grown up receiving modern education were the twenty-five million citizens of the South.

And I was supposed to give those Southerners the same single vote as the fifty million people of the Central region who had not received a proper education?

If I did that, this Empire, which I had worked so hard to save for eighteen years, would collapse at once.

Look at twenty-first-century France.

The country was on the verge of sinking beneath its debt if it could not reduce its welfare policies, yet its citizens kept opposing every cut because they believed their own interests were being infringed upon.

Democracy was something people could practice only once their bellies were full. If everyone chased only the benefits that landed right before their eyes, democracy would merely sink little by little.

What the Empire needed right now was a leader capable of guiding it down the right path.

So, was I the leader who could guide the Empire down the right path?

Who knows. It would be naive to give a definite answer there.

Quite a few dictators had been convinced that they were superhumans on white horses who would save their countries.

Hitler of Germany, Mussolini of Italy, and countless dictators throughout Asia and Africa had all been that way.

That was why I did not consider myself a superhuman. Such certainty was precisely the dangerous ideology a dictator needed to avoid most of all.

Instead, I had the knowledge of the twenty-first century.

I knew what ends countless dictators had met and how a small number of dictators had succeeded. In other words, I had a general idea of what I needed to do and what I needed to avoid.

"Whew, I suppose that's about the end of today's work."

But the price was that my workload was always piled up like a mountain. After all, maintaining a structure like this depended entirely on the personal capabilities of the leader.

That was why ninth-circle magic was such a tremendous help.

Work at a level no ordinary person could endure, mentally or physically, became fairly manageable with the aid of magic.

"What is the North's reaction?"

"Nothing noteworthy externally yet."

"Externally?"

Come to think of it, the North had been fairly quiet. It seemed that the North was moving according to plans of its own, but the Central region had collapsed far too quickly for them to do anything.

The war began on January 31, 1033.

And the capital fell on March 14, 1033.

It had taken only six weeks from the start of the war for the capital to be destroyed. From the North's perspective, it was certainly bewildering.

At first, they seemed to be holding out well, but after Forza Forest was breached, they were driven back nonstop until the capital fell. They probably had not even had time to do anything.

"What about internally?"

"Internally... they're calling for a last stand in which all forty million will die. It seems they think our strength will be exhausted if they hold out along the defensive line."

"So they're going to hold out along the defensive line..."

In truth, the walls built between the North and Central regions could be overrun with ease. Walls hastily built over the course of just a few years could not stop our artillery.

The problem was the defensive line.

The phrase 'defensive line' might make it sound like an ordinary wall, but the North's defensive line was far more than that.

It was the front line where they had fought monsters for hundreds of years. There was no way the defensive line had never been breached during those centuries of struggle.

But even if the defensive line were breached, we could not simply hand over the entire North.

It was not only the North's warriors who had been tempered by the passage of time. Each time a monster wave occurred, the defensive line grew thicker, and the number of lines increased as well.

Thus, the defensive line that had originally been built as a single layer in the distant past had now become a gigantic fortress built in at least three layers, with gaps of dozens of kilometers between them.

They had been built along the North's sheer mountain ranges. In places, they were enormous natural trenches more than twenty meters deep.

The monster wave was over anyway, so they were planning to hole up in there and carry out a forty-million-man last stand?

Honestly... should I call it stubbornness or sheer obstinacy?

I understood that it was a decision they could make only because they did not know a monster wave was coming, but if we cut off their food supplies in the first place, they would start starving.

I'll deal with that side soon enough. Once the situation inside the Empire is stabilized.

Soon, I'll hold the coronation, proclaim myself the legitimate emperor, strip the Northern Grand Duke of his authority, and begin building the justification for it.

The problem was that this, too, would become my new responsibility.

As long as I remained in the dictator's seat, this work would never end.

It couldn't be helped. I was essentially rebuilding an utterly ruined Empire almost from its foundations.

Fortunately, a ray of light arrived for me, who had been crushed beneath work all day, every day.

One of the chief sources of all this evil had fled.

It was news of the former Crown Prince Theodore's whereabouts.

"Your Grace, we've identified the location of former Crown Prince Theodore. He appears to have joined up with the nobles who fled and is preparing to escape aboard a ship along with their faction."

"And?"

"Our fleet should be able to catch them within three days at the latest!"