As soon as the rainy season cleared, Nightrow began to change. Carriages from the capital city lined up by the riverbank and came in, and the materials, stone, and ore they unloaded were stacked up in the vacant lot. Laborers and craftsmen busily came and went and started raising buildings.

A new embankment was built along the river, and on top of it a large waterwheel turned. Food piled up in the supply warehouse, which had been empty for nearly a few years, and the few livestock that had been there began to increase as well.

Inside the village, abandoned houses from long ago were being torn down and new frames were going up. All the materials and craftsmen had come from the capital city, and carriages bearing the marks of the Featherwing Trading Company and Count Windsor’s family had been entering the territory in a line for days.

“Now we can probably take in around fifty adult men.”

On the desk behind Bellian, who was looking pleased at the scene of lively smoke rising as he stood by the window, there was a stack of unfinished letters. Most of the envelopes bore the lion seal of Leonhart.

“If only they would leave us alone.”

Bellian, sitting on the desk, whistled and threw the Leonhart letters one by one into the fireplace without even opening them. After neatly tossing even the envelope marked “Final Ultimatum” into the fireplace, he only opened the letter with the canary seal.

In the middle of the letter, which began with the sentence, To the respected baron, it said this.

[As you mentioned before, we somehow managed to make contact with the foreign mercenary band, Red Prairie, and send them to Nightrow. Their numbers are not large, but they are said to be enough to scatter a force of about three hundred infantry in half a day. Since they are rough men by nature, they are difficult to handle, and now the issue of the mercenary captain’s succession is also coming up, so there is even concern that it may spread into internal conflict. Please be careful. Your faithful canary.]

Another strange wax seal was attached to the end of the letter paper. In the red seal, which looked like a crushed petal, a single blue curly hair stuck out. Heath had melted wax onto his own anus and stamped it.

“Your young master went to the capital and started selling his ass all by himself and taking cock juice, or what? The butt seal gets sloppier every day.”

Bellian chuckled and turned his head toward a dark corner where no sunlight reached. There, Til, who had brought the letter from Heath at the Windsor count’s family in the capital city, was crouched naked on the floor, panting as he twisted his waist.

Under his ass, a large fake cock carved from solid wood was embedded in the floor. Til pressed his anus to the fake cock stuck into the floor and humped away. The more he raised and lowered his waist and screwed himself on the fake cock, the more the semen pooled inside gushed out in spurts.

“N-nooo. O-our young master isn’t like thaat……. He just, every day, every night, fucks my pussy with me……. Me, and young master, every day, thinking of master, we touch each other’s assholes……. He doesn’t take just any cock…….”

It was to scrape out the semen he had spilled inside. No one knew how many times he had been ejaculated into his anus, but the semen already dripping down below the fake cock was more than enough, and yet Til showed no sign of stopping.

“But if the seal gets more and more ragged like this, you won’t be able to seal the letter properly, will you.”

“Strangee……. There’s no way our young master would go around selling his ass to just anyoneee……. Aaah, our young master only likes big cocks, so he can’t take just any cockk……! He wants only master’s big cock……!”

“Oh dear. He must be flying around while you’re asleep and eating other cocks.”

“Aaah, h-heeuh, young master, baaad……. I’ll watch him, more closely……. Aaah! I’ll even, before he goes to sleep, put my cock in young master’s ass and keep him there! My cock, now, has become a female cock that doesn’t leak cock juice, so it should be fine……!”

Til flailed his ass wildly as if he had thought of a good idea. Then Til’s cock also swayed and dangled, and below it there was only dark scar tissue, with none of the two beads that should naturally have been there as a man.

“You seem to have gotten rather clever. But this succession issue with the mercenary captain, tell me about it in detail?”

Til was happy just from the fact that he had been useful to master, and he relayed the details. After hearing it, Bellian patted his head and then left the office. Til’s disappointed voice could be heard behind him.

“Master, I’ll clean this pussy diligently. Til will work hard, well……!”

𖧷 • 𖧷 • 𖧷

“Not yet?”

The man with hair as golden as if all the gold in the world had been gathered and melted together pushed his wavering bangs back irritably. The golden hair, carrying both splendor and calm elegance, gleamed brilliantly as each strand came apart.

Beneath it, his beastlike flashing eyes were also the same gold. Yet unlike the soft light of his hair, those eyes were deep and sharpened like an animal’s.

One knight, already frightened by his gaze, asked timidly.

“What are you referring to? Nightrow barony, or Sir Mikhail’s body-”

“Damn it.”

The blond man frowned hard, then soon slammed his fist down on his desk. At the desk, which rang so loudly it made the items on top jump, the knight lowered his head deeply and begged.

“I-I’m sorry. Lord Vaskion!”

Vaskion Libre Leonhart. The empire’s one and only grand duke. He stood up abruptly from his seat with an air of frustration.

His broad shoulders and sturdy build showed that he was a man highly skilled in martial arts even without armor, and his firmly set jawline and straight nose added noble handsomeness to that imposing atmosphere of his.

“I’d like to clear my head alone for a bit.”

The grand duke, who almost never showed emotion, let out a rare long sigh and waved a hand at the knight, telling him to go out. After the knight left and the door closed, a heavy silence settled for a moment in the office. There were two reasons he was angry.

The first was the disappearance of the knight Mikhail. Mikhail, whose skill was so outstanding he had even served as the youngest knight commander, was called the empire’s Silver Knight, and he was Vaskion’s only subordinate and right hand that he could trust in this empire.

But a year ago, he had suddenly vanished without a word, and no body had even been found, leaving it impossible to know whether he was alive or dead. The vacancy he left, though he had been able to take on a hundred men by himself, was larger than expected. Especially because he disappeared right before an “important matter,” everything Vaskion had been planning went wrong.

And the second was the Nightrow barony, which refused to fall into his hands.

“Where exactly did we go wrong? Hm? Nightrow baron.”

Muttering to himself, Vaskion stood before a map of the empire set up in one corner of the office. A very small red dot was marked a little apart from the capital city where Vaskion was. In an instant, unable to cool his anger, he pulled a small dagger from his chest and struck that dot in an instant.

“How dare you stab me in the back?”

Even after sending letter after letter, there was no reply, and even after issuing the final ultimatum, the baron stayed silent.

“Only this place has to be taken……. Then all roads connect.”

Vaskion pulled out the dagger stuck in the map and moved it smoothly. Beside the red dot, several blue dots passed by. And where those blue dots led was the imperial palace in the capital city. After glaring at the mark for the imperial palace for a long time, he finally pulled out the dagger and put it back into his chest, smiling thinly.

“I may not be emperor yet, but killing some baron is nothing.”

The grand duke returned to the office desk, picked up a quill, and wrote a line on a scroll in elegant script.

[Having discovered a base of enemy spies near the Nightrow barony, by the authority of the House of Leonhart, I order the base to be suppressed. Dispatch three knight platoons immediately.]

“By the time not a blade of grass is left in that rural backwater, it will be too late.”

The grand duke rolled up the scroll and melted wax onto a ring engraved with a lion pattern, then stamped it.

𖧷 • 𖧷 • 𖧷

It was nearly midnight. The servants working in the baron’s manor of Nightrow were also one by one falling asleep, turning off the lights and preparing for the next day.

Mikhail, with silver hair that fell long to his waist neatly tied into a ponytail, was going down into the basement of the baron’s manor holding a candle.

A pure white uniform buttoned properly all the way to the neck. Straight eyebrows. A long, cool downward gaze. A sharp nose and neatly closed thin lips matched well, and though he was handsome, his always indifferent expression gave him an atmosphere that was hard to approach easily.

The basement had several small rooms used as storage. Mikhail went into one of them, massaging his shoulders as if to relieve the day’s fatigue.