Chapter 42
Empress Dowager.
The biological mother of the current Emperor, Theodore Pendragon.
Aurelia Pendragon was a venerable elder of the imperial family.
“What a bountiful place.”
She was also the Empire’s great elder who had served as regent until the young emperor was ready, after the previous emperor passed away early.
For such a great person,
“I am at a loss for how to repay Your Highness for thinking so highly of me.”
why was she saying she would stay at the House of Enersis for a while?
Delphord wanted to cry over the snowball Akion had set rolling.
*
It all began with Akion’s suggestion.
“Your back aches and your lower back pain makes it difficult to walk, so you receive massages and frequent treatment from clerics, correct?”
“Yes, and she is also sensitive to the cold. That is why Her Highness the Empress Dowager keeps herself warm even in summer.”
“Then a jjimjilbang would be perfect, wouldn’t it?”
Talk of Enersis’s public bathhouse and jjimjilbang, which everyone in the Empire knew about.
That one remark happened to reach the Empress Dowager’s ears,
“Your Majesty, this old woman would like to make one request.”
“Please, speak freely, Mother.”
“Then I shall go down to Enersis and recuperate for a while. Ho ho. That should be all right, shouldn’t it, Young Master Akion?”
“Beg your pardon…?”
Apparently, something along those lines passed between the Emperor and the Empress Dowager.
Thanks to that, a procession for the Empress Dowager was suddenly assembled,
and from Enersis’s perspective, the sudden news that a great imperial elder was coming down meant—
“Emergency!!!!”
“Another imperial person is coming down!!!”
The Enersis estate, which had already been turned upside down once during the Seventh Princess’s chief lady-in-waiting’s visit, was thrown into an uproar yet again.
Some of the servants reportedly foamed at the mouth at the thought of the grueling protocol awaiting them.
“Hehe, please speak freely. We’ll be spending quite some time together, and I would rather not have us become awkward. Besides, isn’t the count practically my own child’s age?”
“I am deeply honored that Your Highness thinks of me that way….”
Of course, Delphord was a perceptive man.
Once they arrived in Enersis and he had escorted the Empress Dowager to the family head’s office, he guessed what had passed between her and the Emperor.
“Given the circumstances, I had no choice but to grant Volkov the title of Master… but what shall we do about our youngest, Mother?”
“Ho ho, don’t worry. I’ll go there for recuperation and put the matter beyond doubt!”
More or less, that was probably what had been said behind the scenes.
The reason the Empress Dowager had come all the way to Enersis instead of staying in the far more comfortable imperial palace was that she had come in person to seal the Seventh Princess’s engagement!
Still, making everyone in Enersis live on edge for several months just for that… wasn’t it a bit much?
At least they had one overwhelmingly powerful asset on their side.
“Hehehe, Lilia. You’re as kind as ever.”
One of the Empire’s pillars, and the master of Ridasid’s Magi Tower!!
“And you’re still so lovely. Even with wrinkles, your beauty hasn’t gone anywhere. You’re enough to make me jealous.”
“Ho ho ho, Great-grandmother, you still flatter me excessively.”
“Oh my, there’s no need to be modest, dear.”
Even if the Empress Dowager was over eighty, the Magi Tower Master was a venerable elder two thousand years old.
To the Empress Dowager, she was the great-grandmother of her husband.
Naturally, even the Empress Dowager became cautious around her.
“Come to think of it, you’ve grown old too. To think you’re already old enough to suffer from back pain….”
“Hehe, my husband and His Majesty the Emperor may be different, but I am merely human… so I am simply following the natural order.”
The Magi Tower Master looked over the Empress Dowager with wistful eyes.
To her, a few decades were barely anything….
Yet in that time, the fresh and spirited young lady had suddenly grown old.
“Please don’t be too sad.”
“Yes… then come here and let me hug you after all this time.”
“Ho ho ho, you’re still so affectionate.”
Having experienced the pain of parting countless times herself, the Magi Tower Master held the Empress Dowager tightly in her arms.
Then,
《I’ll personally keep an eye on this child, so don’t worry.》
“……….”
With the face of a girl made vicious by romantic jealousy fully exposed, she whispered to Delphord with magic.
Delphord also knew what sort of feelings the Magi Tower Master harbored for Akion.
And he knew just how complicated the tangle of women around Akion was.
“I’ll show you around my domain. Count, you won’t mind if I take this child with me, will you?”
“Thank you for accommodating me. I’m in your care, Magi Tower Master.”
But that had nothing to do with Delphord’s circumstances, did it?
‘Son, hang in there. Your father is too scared to get tangled up in this any further…!’
He prayed for his son’s safe passage through it all.
He only prayed.
*
“Emergency!!!”
Of course, Akion Enersis was not happy.
His life would be ruined for as long as the Empress Dowager remained at the estate.
So he….
“How far along are we?!”
“The concrete curing for both buildings is complete, and we’ve more or less finished the remaining auxiliary work as well!!”
“Oh, thank goodness.”
They decided to build a new residence for the Empress Dowager to stay in.
Of course, they weren’t making it terribly complicated; they planned to put up two buildings.
One would be a spacious, single-story sauna wing containing both a jjimjilbang and a bathhouse.
The other would be a two-story residential wing.
“What about the heating pipes and boiler?”
“As you instructed, the pipes have already been laid, and the boiler team is checking the boiler in the sauna wing! We’re in the final stage!”
“Good. You got the slope right, didn’t you?”
“What do you take us for, Young Master?! We’ve done this so many times we could do it in our sleep!”
Fortunately, every workshop employee and carpenter was already a veteran craftsman from building the public bathhouse.
The moment they saw the urgent letter and blueprints Akion had sent, they began construction.
Of course, they weren’t building this structure solely for the Empress Dowager.
“Son. My ominous intuition tells me another distinguished guest is bound to come next time.”
“Please don’t tell me they’ll be sleeping in the same mansion.”
“Of course she’ll have to stay somewhere else. You should build her a place.”
“Beg your pardon?”
With Delphord’s resigned prophecy—whose accuracy approached one hundred percent—turning out to be right, Akion built a guest residence while shedding tears of blood.
It was not quite a mansion, and borrowing from Akion’s knowledge of his previous life….
“A rich man’s house.”
It was like the kind of wealthy man’s country house one might find in Samseong-dong, Gangnam.
A high-end country house, complete with a fifty-pyeong sauna wing.
Of course, the facilities were still far more modest than anything in modern times!
“Finished.”
“Grrr…….”
After roughly 150 workers—and Akion himself—had been worked to the bone, it was completed in just two weeks.
Akion, half-sprawled in the estate’s courtyard alongside the employees, looked up at the completed guest residence and….
“I’m never mentioning the imperial family again… Grrrk…!”
“Wh-what?! Young Master! Please wake up!!”
“Good heavens, call a cleric! Hurry upppp!”
He muttered a dream that could never come true, then fainted.
*
“Good heavens…! You built this for me?”
“Hehe. Isn’t my disciple’s handiwork splendid?”
After Akion and the workshop employees were transported to the treatment center,
the Empress Dowager moved into the guest residence with the Magi Tower Master.
- Swoosh.
From the Empress Dowager’s perspective, the modern-style mansion design was so unfamiliar it could have seemed strange,
but its clean simplicity, born of that modernity, made her eyes sparkle despite herself.
“A genius…….”
From designing a house like this to its interior decoration….
The Empress Dowager had at least a vague idea of how difficult such meticulous planning was.
And yet he had built this so quickly, even if he had had an entire month to travel down from the capital!
“Hehehe, more importantly, didn’t you say your back pain had returned recently? I’ll show you how, so why don’t you try the sauna?”
“A sauna…!”
The Empress Dowager was so excited by the mention of the sauna that even her astonishment was washed away.
As a member of the imperial family, she could not help but hear news and reports from every corner of the Empire, and stories of the public bathhouse in Ridasid always reached her.
“They say old people who visit come out able to leap to their feet!”
“They say people with bad joints have their pain greatly relieved after recuperating there for several days.”
As an elderly person, it was only natural that such stories would pique her curiosity first.
In truth, she had come to Enersis this time to experience that bathhouse and jjimjilbang sauna, but she had never imagined they would build an entire private building for her!
‘I absolutely have to marry him to my youngest granddaughter.’
Did she look like someone who would give such a genius to another family?
With that resolve, the Empress Dowager entered the sauna wing, supported by her attendants and the Magi Tower Master….
- Whooosh!
“Huh?!”
The moment she opened the door, she was shocked by a scorching cloud of steam unlike anything she had experienced in the imperial palace.
*
“Young Master.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“I was wondering about something.”
Ridasid Treatment Center.
While Akion and over a hundred workshop employees had been laid up for several days, one workshop employee asked Akion:
“Why does the bathhouse need groundwater?”
“For starters… it’s relatively free from contamination issues—.”
As they lay side by side in their beds, trading questions and answers, Akion nodded at the mention of groundwater.
“Because it contains a lot of minerals.”
“Minerals?”
“Magnesium, calcium, sodium ions… things like that help relax the muscles and are supposed to help remove impurities from the skin, too. It’s roughly the same principle as how hot springs near volcanoes are good for your health.”
“Ah, I see. Amazing.”
The ions dissolved in groundwater really were beneficial to one’s health.
Of course, the workshop employee listening beside him knew almost nothing about chemistry, so he merely repeated, ‘I get it (I don’t),’ over and over.
“Ugh, anyway, once I get out of this bed, I’m definitely taking a vacation.”
“Was I some kind of tyrannical employer who never gave you vacation?”
“You’re certainly a fine man for giving it in the first place, but honestly, it’s true that the workload you assign, Young Master Akion, is terrifying. I mean, who orders us to finish a huge concrete mansion like that in six weeks…?”
“So what, do I not pay you? Did I say you couldn’t take vacation? Do you want to be fired, or do you want to stay loyal?”
“Heh heh, I’ll remain loyal for life!”
As he shot the breeze with the bored employees, one of the estate’s servants came over and whispered to Akion.
“Young Master Akion, you have a visitor.”
“Oh.”
So someone had come to break up this tedious stretch of time.
Besides, the treatment center’s meals were boring, so Akion had been looking forward to something tasty, and then—
“Ho ho ho! Grandson-in-law!”
“……Who are you?”
He found himself facing a woman around sixty, with taut, carefully maintained skin and a slight resemblance to the current Emperor’s face.
Who was this elder who had suddenly called him her grandson-in-law?
Just as Akion was growing confused,
“I am the Empress Dowager.”
“The Empress Dowager, Your Highness?!”
He nearly jumped out of his skin at the Magi Tower Master’s words as she followed the woman in.
Her skin had been wrinkled from being eighty years old—had it really improved this much?
“Ho ho ho! After bathing in the hot-spring bath my grandson-in-law prepared for me, I ended up like this! Of course, my back pain is still quite severe… but look how plump my skin has become! Ho ho ho ho!”
“What?!”
And another piece of his scientific common sense was shattered, leaving him mentally broken.
“Wh-what now…?! Grrrk!”
“A-Akion! Breathe, breathe!!”
As his common sense crumbled, Akion cursed the Lord God inwardly.
For coding it so damn poorly.