He could feel the knot in his chest loosening somewhat. He couldn’t dump his personal problems on someone from work, but there was something he was curious to ask Qusta about as a noble.
“Are you married, Qusta?” Seiichirou asked, giving in to the temptation.
“Oh? Well, yes. I haven’t been for terribly long, though, despite my advanced age,” Qusta said with lighthearted self-deprecation. He was in his mid-thirties, which was late for a nobleman in this country to marry. He looked like someone who already had two or three children, and he knew it.
“I see. Is your wife a member of the nobility, too?”
“Yes, she is. She is of a higher-ranked family, and I am merely the third son of a count, so our courtship took quite a roundabout route. Well, fortunately, we are married now, so we can look back on those times and laugh.”
“I suppose matches among the nobility can be quite complicated…”
Having come from another world, Seiichirou obviously didn’t possess an ounce of noble lineage. His prospects were already sunk.
Er, not that he necessarily wanted to get married. But still.
“Do nobles get betrothed from a young age?”
“They do if it means securing an heir for a prominent family. I am just a third son, however, and I spent my student days absorbed in research, so I was a rather late bloomer in that regard…” Qusta laughed. He had probably assumed he had missed the window for marriage and would stay a bachelor forever.
Similarly, Aresh had never breathed a word about being engaged despite coming from a marquess family. Surely it would have come up when he and Seiichirou started living together.
At the same time, it was no secret that Aresh had many admirers vying for his hand in marriage. Even as the third son, his striking looks and good pedigree were more than enough. The fact that he was the brilliant commander of the Third Royal Order was icing on the cake. He was a catch—from both a political angle and an aesthetic one.
Given the wealth and standing of a marquess family, Aresh was privileged enough that he could turn down almost any marriage offer that came his way. But Seiichirou could imagine that it would be a very different story if it was foreign royalty who came knocking.
“Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule for me.”
“Oh no. I was wanting a status report.”
Seiichirou sat across from Camile. He was by now very well accustomed to the indigo-blue curtains and the antique table in the prime minister’s office.
Although Seiichirou had submitted a schedule beforehand, it had gone by the wayside to accommodate the Egorovans’ demands. It had been a good idea to arrange an intermediary meeting.
“Hm… Prince Lars has quite a keen interest in the affairs of our state, from what I can see,” said Camile.
“I got that impression as well. Although the others are here for the spells and magic tool research, Prince Lars has been observing Romany’s statecraft as a whole. I also feel that everyone besides Donato looks favorably on recruiting people based on merit rather than social standing.”
“Hmm…” Camile scrunched his face in thought as he flicked through Seiichirou’s papers.
The biggest issue from Camile’s perspective was who had the reins over Egorova’s politics. Seiichirou knew little about the circumstances in Egorova and merely stated his personal impression of the individuals. He was a finance man, no more, no less.
“So? Is there anything else you wish to tell me?” Camile asked suddenly.
For a moment, Seiichirou was flustered by the abrupt question, but he collected himself and presented the documents he had written the night before.
“Yes. There’s this… I have a theory based on my observations of the Egorovans and the relief house children. Ciro of the Medical Bureau has agreed to help me investigate.”
Camile’s blue-gray eyes widened as he peered at the sheaf of papers. “‘A Proposal to Expand Magical Capacity Through Environmental Magic and Magicules’? I see you’re at it again…”
There was a note of exasperation in Camile’s voice as he sighed and rubbed his temples. Seiichirou felt sheepish. He was a stranger to this world’s conventional logic; maybe his idea was too out there.
But then again, a specialist like Ciro had said there was merit to the idea. Plus, there was still a shortage of qualified magic users, even if they were able to educate the commoners to a degree.
Given that the Romany Kingdom planned to suppress the miasma in the forest without the Holy Maiden henceforth, they needed to work with other countries. In that sense, there were plenty of people with high magical capacity around, but they couldn’t increase the talent pool if magic was seen as a purely genetic talent. It was worth testing to see if a person’s training and living environment made an impact.
“Although my idea may seem a little unconventional, the nobility of certain regions are overrepresented among the children at the relief house and the members of the Sorcery Department. One could interpret a correlation between high magical capacity and said regions…”
“What are you trying to say? That their talents come not from blood but the land itself?” Camile asked in a low voice.
For a moment, Seiichirou’s breath caught in his throat.
Magic was an important measure of status in this world. One’s job prospects would change depending on how much magic they were capable of wielding, and even the academies catering to nobles divided their classes based on this distinction. Because of this, there was apparently an association between high magical capacity and family pedigree. A project which fundamentally rejected that premise was perhaps a bit too ahead of its time.
But there was no other way of speeding up magic research. And so Seiichirou bowed his head, knowing that he was getting ahead of himself in his haste to realize his goals.
“I apologize… I stepped out of line as an outsider…”
“There’s never a dull moment with you.”
“Excuse me?” When Seiichirou lifted his head, he saw a familiar sight: Camile desperately attempting to stifle his laughter.
“You’re a funny one! Imagine the uproar among the nobles if things happened your way!”
“R-right…”
Seiichirou had forgotten that Camile was a maverick—and one who wielded a frightening level of power and authority, at that.
“But I suspect that magicule-dense areas will have poor effects on the body,” Camile went on. “I suggest starting the experiments on prison inmates.”
“That would be unwise, Your Excellency.”
“How so?”
Having anticipated Camile’s suggestion to a degree, Seiichirou took a deep breath and straightened his posture. He argued that it was terribly inefficient for the people in power to experiment on prisoners and the weak as if they were expendable pawns.
“The nobles should be the ones to participate—provided that their safety can be assured to the utmost degree, of course.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Magic is very important to the nobles, yes? In that case, they should be the ones taking the lead. Having them participate only after the fact may risk widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. By involving themselves in the earliest stage and exposing themselves to the dangers, there will be no unfairness in the process.”
“You have a point…”
If the privileged only jumped in after they could get a practical benefit out of it, they would use their existing authority to monopolize it. This would further entrench the biases in noble society.
“Also, given that magicule-dense regions generally suffer from magical beast attacks, I suggest state funding for the regional lords cooperating in the project.”
They couldn’t just help themselves to the land without asking, and plenty of the local nobles already had a lot of magic. If they could teach magic control to those nobles at the same time, it would mitigate the risk of anyone’s magic going berserk.