"Damn it, feudalism," Noah muttered under his breath.
Looking at the two neat rows of respectful, bowing maids standing before him in the bedroom, Noah couldn't help but suspect things were exactly what he thought they were.
After spending several months living with a busty, aggressively affectionate imperial princess back in the Blazer world, he considered his self-control to be far beyond that of the average teenage boy.
But even so, he had to admit that having ten elegant, gorgeous maids standing shoulder-to-shoulder in front of him was an entirely different kind of pressure.
They were completely unlike the sickly, underfed girls he had seen begging on the streets after entering the Imperial Capital.
Ranging from voluptuous young women in their early twenties with long, shapely legs to cute teenage girls with innocent, every single one of them possessed flawless skin and a distinct charm of their own.
Yet, because they all wore the exact same tailored, form-fitting maid uniform, they looked almost like an intimidating set of sisters.
This was way too strange.
Was Laims really going this far just to entertain a houseguest?
In this era, under the brutal, class-based institutions of this Empire, feeding, clothing, and training these maids must have required a massive amount of money and a great deal of effort.
According to Noah's understanding of corrupt nobles, shouldn't valuable "resources" like this be used for bribery and currying favor with higher-ups?
Judging from the fact that all these girls seemed to have preserved their chastity, even Laims himself had apparently been reluctant to use them for his own pleasure.
And to Laims, Noah was merely the orphaned son of an old comrade.
Never mind lavish treatment like this—Noah doubted even Laims's own flesh-and-blood son would receive a welcome gift on this level.
"Lord Noah, please allow me to help you undress."
The girl who seemed to be the eldest and the leader among the maids stepped forward on her own initiative.
To put Noah at ease, she sank gracefully into a deep, elegant half-curtsy, carefully lowering herself so their lines of sight were as level as possible.
Noah didn't refuse her request.
The maid gently helped remove his dusty travel clothes and prepared a fresh, silk set laid out on the mahogany cabinet.
"Then, my lord," the maid said softly, her eyes downcast. "May I ask which one of us you would like to attend your bed tonight?"
Cough!
Even with Noah's rock-solid composure, he couldn't help choking on his own spit at that question.
He didn't expect them to be that direct!
For a moment, his brain stalled, and he didn't even know how to answer.
'Should I refuse? Of course I should refuse. There are way too many red flags here!'
When the head maid saw him cough and fall silent, she suddenly seemed to "realize" her mistake.
"My deepest apologies, my lord," she said quickly, panic flashing in her eyes. "I should not have presumed to make you choose. So long as you wish it, it would only be proper for all of us to attend you together."
The maid bowed deeply in apology.
The motion made her generous chest sway in a truly overwhelming fashion, a sight reflected clearly in Noah's eyes.
'All of them?'
At that exact moment, Noah looked over at the oversized, custom-built bed dominating the center of the room.
It was large enough to sleep ten people comfortably.
He suddenly realized it probably wasn't built that way just for show. It had been designed for this exact purpose from the very start.
"Wait," Noah said, raising a hand to stop her. "Let me ask you something first. Was this Uncle Laims's direct arrangement?"
"It is indeed our master's order, my lord."
"And all of you... agreed to this willingly?"
The moment he asked that question, Noah's heightened senses clearly picked up a wave of sharp, emotional turmoil spiking from more than half the maids in the lineup.
For trained maids in a noble household, serving their master—or even serving a stranger under their master's orders—was considered normal.
But for girls like them, who had been sheltered and never actually known anything of this sort before, the reality of it was still terrifying and alien.
Every single day, they underwent complicated, harsh training.
It wasn't just housework and serving tea.
There were many other lessons as well.
Because their master feared damaging their flawless skin, they were never whipped if they made mistakes or performed poorly in their lessons.
Instead, they were subjected to psychological punishments that were even more terrifying.
Many girls had failed to endure the pressure and had been broken, turning into mindless "tools" for the master.
Some had even been sold off to the city's brothels as punishment.
These ten girls standing before him were the survivors—the ones who had struggled desperately through that hell and stood out as the very best.
But in the end, despite all their hard work, they were still just servants.
They were property.
They could not disobey a direct order from the head of the Leiden family.
And tonight, after struggling to survive this long, this was the end awaiting them.
"Yes, my lord. We are willing," the head maid answered, flashing a gentle, practiced smile.
But it was completely fake.
The younger maids in the back of the line weren't as strong as she was. Their lips trembled, and their eyes were already brimming with unshed tears.
Noah sighed inwardly.
In a feudal society, a woman's status was lower than dirt.
Not only were they often subject to physical and psychological restraints, but even their most basic behaviors were strictly controlled.
For women trying to survive among the cutthroat nobility, it was a waking nightmare. In the eyes of the powerful elite, they weren't even treated as "human."
Methods that shattered the bottom line of basic morality were an everyday occurrence.
Even the prostitutes in the labyrinth city were engaged in a legitimate, Guild-recognized profession, and more importantly, the women themselves didn't feel any inferiority about it.
If anything, the Amazons of the Ishtar Familia felt like they were the ones taking advantage of their clients.
The world of the Blazers was the same.
It was basically a modern, egalitarian society.
Gender didn't matter, the hierarchy of a Knight's strength was the only thing people respected.
Both of those worlds shared one key trait: the strength of women was equally recognized, and women possessed the actual, physical power to fight back.
But this world did not.
These ten girls standing before him had zero combat stats and no magical power.
Living in this feudal Empire, they had never once been free to make a single decision about their own bodies.
"Willing? It doesn't look that way to me," Noah said flatly. "Anyway, this is probably just Uncle Laims testing me. You can all go and get some sleep. I'll go speak with him myself."
"...!"
The head maid looked at the boy before her in sheer surprise.
Then, it finally clicked.
She realized the intense sense of incongruity she had felt from the moment he walked into the mansion.
If she remembered his file correctly, he was only twelve years old.
For a twelve-year-old boy, especially one who had supposedly never left some backwater rural village before, every one of his reactions tonight had been far too calm.
Under normal circumstances, a country boy would have been dazzled senseless by the sheer material luxury of the estate, let alone the offer of ten beautiful women.
Yet not once had his eyes wandered, and his voice hadn't even trembled.
'Something was wrong with this kid.'
"Then... we will excuse ourselves for the night, my lord..."
The maid—no, her instincts as an older sister told her not to get involved in whatever political game was happening here.
She quickly bowed and ushered the other maids out of the room, closing the heavy doors behind them.
Once they were gone, Noah slipped his shirt back on, walked out of the bedroom, and headed back down the long, winding corridors toward the grand dining hall where they had eaten earlier.
As he walked through the enormous, lavishly decorated estate, there was not a single sound around him.
"How quiet."
'Too quiet.'
In a mansion this massive, there was no way the nighttime security presence could be this thin.
And there weren't nearly enough servants moving around either.
Even including the ten girls he just met, an estate of this size would require at least twenty times that manpower just to keep the floors swept.
Yet everyone was gone.
Only the dim gas lamps remained, casting long shadows across the marble floors.
Noah pushed open the heavy double doors of the dining hall. His eyes immediately locked onto Laims, who was still sitting in the seat of honor at the head of the massive dining table, acting as if he hadn't moved an inch since dinner.
Seeing the boy return, Laims gestured lazily for him to sit wherever he pleased.
Noah ignored the distant chairs and pulled out a seat right next to the former general.
"Uncle Laims, I have something I want to ask you," Noah said, leaning his elbows on the table.
"Is that so?" Laims swirled his wine glass. "Go ahead."
Noah raised a single finger and pointed straight up at the painted ceiling.
"What are the people on the roof doing?"
'Hm?'
Laims froze, the wine sloshing in his glass. He looked genuinely, completely shocked.
"You actually noticed them?"
Noah nodded and casually tapped the side of his own head. "As long as someone enters a certain range around me, no one can hide their presence."
Although Noah had just casually revealed a highly mysterious tracking ability, Laims didn't panic.
He slowly set his glass down and leaned forward, his eyes narrowing.
"Where did you learn an assassination technique like that?"
"I didn't learn it from anyone," Noah replied smoothly. "It's something like a sixth sense. An instinct that just exists within me."
"Inborn, then? I see. As expected..."
"What do you mean?" Noah noticed that Laims didn't seem particularly threatened by his abnormal display of skill.
Laims took the initiative to explain, dropping the lazy noble act. "Don't be afraid, Noah. All those tests I put you through tonight—the empty halls, the guards on the roof, the maids in your room—it wasn't because I thought you were an imposter. I just needed to see whether you actually possessed the mental fortitude to survive in the Imperial Capital."
Laims sighed, his handsome face looking tired. "To be honest, while this city looks prosperous from the outside, it breeds the most horrifying, depraved hell in the world within its walls. Once you fall into the trap of its vices, you're finished."
"Hell?"
"Everything I tell you next must not be leaked outside this room in the slightest," Laims warned, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.
"That's exactly why I sent all the regular servants away tonight, and why I had Claire and the other girls test your willpower."
'I see, so it really was just a psychological test.'
Still, Noah couldn't help but wonder—if he actually failed to hold back and slept with all ten of them, what kind of disgusted reaction would Laims have had?
"You performed even better than I expected," Laims admitted, a hint of genuine respect in his voice.
"Your reactions toward extreme wealth, political power, material desire, and lust were all perfectly calm. You didn't break."
Laims elegantly picked up the bottle of red wine and poured himself another glass.
Noah glanced at the bottle.
It was already more than half empty.
He realized the general had probably practiced that smooth, elegant pouring gesture quite a few times to hide how much he was actually drinking to deal with his own stress.
Noah didn't point it out, he just sat quietly and listened.
"First of all, perhaps you've grown used to the crushing poverty of rural life out in the provinces," Laims began, staring into his wine.
"You probably think that the strong taking from the weak is simply how the world works. But now that you've come to the Imperial Capital and experienced a taste of this luxury today, you should understand that the truth is far worse."
Laims gripped his glass tight. "The Empire is rotting from the inside out. Those in power indulge themselves in the sickest vices imaginable at will, while the common people outside these walls live in absolute misery, taxed until they starve."
"On the surface, the uneducated masses believe this is due to His Majesty the Emperor's incompetence, or perhaps that he is a cruel tyrant. But that is a lie. The true holder of the Empire's highest political power is Prime Minister Honest. The Emperor is merely a naive child, roughly around your age. Ever since Honest manipulated the court to prop the boy onto the throne, the young Emperor has effectively remained a puppet in Honest's hands."
'Prime Minister Honest.'
So he was the root of the country's corruption, controlling a child puppet from the shadows.
No matter what universe Noah traveled to, history always seemed to spit out at least one figure exactly like that—a man consumed by bottomless greed, towering in absolute political power.
"Isn't the Minister afraid that this kind of tyranny will cause the Empire to collapse?" Noah asked, genuinely puzzled by the logistics of it all.
Normally, even greedy dictators knew they needed to maintain favorable conditions for the working class to keep the economy afloat.
No matter how great a man's wealth or political power, if the Empire itself burned to the ground in a civil war, then none of it would matter.
He would be ruling over ashes.
Extreme tyranny inevitably bred rebellion.
Especially the kind of terrifying, hopeless politics that drove starving people straight into the arms of radical revolutionaries.
"Collapse?"
Laims stared blankly at Noah for a moment, as if he didn't understand the word.
Then, he barked a hollow, bitter laugh. "Why would it collapse? Ever since the bloody Age of the Sixteen Kingdoms was brought to an end, the Empire has endured for a full thousand years. It is a Thousand-Year Empire, Noah. Yes, it has fallen into severe moral corruption, but its military strength still remains unchallenged. So how could it possibly collapse?"
"..."
Ah.
So that was it.
A Thousand-Year Empire.
'How incredibly foolish,' Noah thought.
Back in his original world, even the Roman Empire—a dominion renowned for ruling the entire known world—eventually vanished into the current of history.
A mere thousand-year run was nothing to brag about in the grand scheme of time.
Laims was a high-ranking noble, and therefore, he was highly educated in state propaganda.
The "Age of the Sixteen Kingdoms" he referred to was probably the chaotic, warring-states era from a millennium ago, long before the Empire conquered the continent and became so vast.
Ever since the Empire's founding, its absolute rule had never been truly shaken.
Because of that unbroken winning streak, the citizens and nobles of today all blindly believed the Empire was invincible.
They thought it could never fall.
Even Prime Minister Honest likely believed the exact same propaganda.
Or, more realistically, he believed the Empire wouldn't fall within his own lifetime, so he didn't care what happened after he died.
It was the exact same flawed logic used by a gambling addict who spent every last coin of his paycheck each month.
Zero thought for the future.
Pure, destructive selfishness.
From Noah's perspective, just the political unrest Laims had described was already a deadly enough cancer to kill the nation.
Unless... unless there existed some kind of absolute, overwhelming military power capable of suppressing even the natural tides of historical rebellion.
Or rather, Noah realized, perhaps it is precisely because such a terrifying, unstoppable force exists that the Prime Minister can indulge himself in such absurd tyranny without fear of a peasant uprising.
Because he held the equivalent of "nuclear weapons" in his hands.
"Anyway, I've already contacted my associates in the Scientific Corps," Laims said, pulling Noah from his thoughts.
"In three days, I'll have an escort take you over to their headquarters so you can formally assume your new post."
"Until then, you may as well look around and enjoy the Imperial Capital. Coincidentally, there's a very lively, high-stakes martial arts tournament happening in the main arena tomorrow. If you're interested, I can arrange a VIP seat for you."
"A martial arts tournament?" Noah blinked, his interest genuinely piqued.
Martial arts.
Having personally witnessed the reality-bending power of a swordsmanship grandmaster like Ikki Kurogane back in the Blazer dimension, Noah never underestimated the potential of martial arts.
He just didn't know how far the martial arts of this specific world had developed.
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