“If you don't want to sleep with your bedchamber door wide open… I trust you'll handle it accordingly.”
Leaving behind a sour smile, Kirian returned to his desk. For some reason, he had no desire to head to the study today. He let it be known that he'd be handling the day's work from his personal desk. He was rather curious about how Luan would react.
What surprised him was that the man neither balked at the mountain of documents nor begged for mercy. Luan glared at the papers for a long while with eyes full of revulsion, then rolled his stiff neck a couple of times, left and right. He pushed up his sleeves. Slender, pale wrists were revealed.
“Black ink, red ink. And please prepare three sorting trays.”
Luan gave the chamberlain a curt instruction. It was different from the feeble Empress until now. There was a peculiar force in his voice, and the chamberlain found himself reflexively glancing to gauge Kirian's mood. When the Emperor granted permission with a jerk of his chin, the items were finally readied.
Kirian kept a sharp watch over the scene, arms crossed.
What's he planning to use red ink for?
Is this a ploy to make a show of effort before pretending to collapse? Maybe he asked for colored ink just to draw attention to himself. One wrong move and all those documents could end up as burnable trash.
But no. He was wrong.
Once the supplies were set, Luan sank deep into his chair and then, in an instant, straightened his posture. The body that had been slumping snapped bolt upright, and his gaze settled into something cold. It was the moment he switched over to the soul of the madman from the past-life audit team.
Scratch. The first document turned over.
Scratch, scratch. The second, the third.
The speed began to climb to an unreasonable degree.
Kirian's brow furrowed. He couldn't be sure Luan was actually reading the documents. The pace at which he flipped the pages was simply too fast. At that rate, a glancing skim was the most one could manage.
Is he giving up and just turning past them? Or hunting for content to memorize?
It was the very instant his suspicion deepened.
Swish, swish—!
The red ink in the pen held in Luan's right hand began leaping about. Red lines slashing across the paper, memos scrawled into the margins. The movements, fluid as a dance, were so fast it was a wonder any legible characters remained at all.
He grasped the content with a sweep of his eyes, found and flagged the errors, and tossed the documents into the sorting trays.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
The sound of documents stacking up in the sorting trays formed a rhythm so consistent it was eerie. This wasn't human labor. It was closer to a machine's manufacturing process.
In Luan's head, a massive screen had opened up. The paper documents of this other world were inconvenient beyond measure, but the patterns contained within them were the same as in his past life. If anything, the large lettering took it all in at a glance, making it easier to parse than an Excel sheet on a monitor.
Scan the data. Detect the error. Figure mismatch. Embezzlement suspected.
Within the review repeating at a steady rhythm, a foreign substance was found. Luan's eyes moved left and right like a machine. These weren't documents. They were merely lumps of unorganized data, waste that obstructed his clocking out.
Annoying.
Luan bit his lip. The bookkeeping was a mess. The numbers were filthy beyond measure. The totals for income and expenditure not matching was a given, and even the dates were all jumbled up. In his past life, this would have been the level that earned the person in charge a face-plant into the monitor and an apology letter to write.
His occupational habit had flared up. If he didn't put these chaotic numbers back where they belonged… he couldn't stand it.
“…Empress.”
Kirian approached and called out to Luan. But the man didn't answer. He didn't hear it. Right now he was utterly absorbed in these godforsaken documents.
“Can you not hear me?”
“Quiet.”
His voice rang low and dry. Head still buried in the documents, Luan raised his left hand to restrain the Emperor and answered mechanically.
“You're breaking my flow. Please maintain silence.”
“…Ha.”
Kirian swallowed a scoff. The audacity, to order the Emperor to shut his mouth. Beside him, Kael sharpened his eyes and glared at Luan. This time it was Kirian who held him back.
It was a matter that warranted dragging the man out for lèse-majesté on the spot. But he was too dumbfounded for words to come. And more than anything, he'd grown curious. The strange handling of the work unfolding at Luan's fingertips held his gaze.
Luan picked up a single document and clicked his tongue. The sheer impudence! Kael looked ready to lunge at Luan that very moment, but Kirian peered intently at the document held out to him.
“Take a look at this, Your Majesty.”
Luan tapped a number with the red pen.
“Did you leave this in for me to find?”
“Hm?”
“The cost breakdown for the imperial garden landscaping project from three years ago. The unit price for materials is set forty percent higher than the market rate at the time.”
“Hmm.”
“And what's more, the supplying vendor is Ares Trading. A place run by a collateral branch of the imperial family.”
So he had been reading the contents. No—he'd gone beyond reading. Luan spoke decisively.
“It's a textbook case of funneling contracts and inflating prices.”
At Luan's words, Kirian and Kael's gazes met.
“The difference went into the responsible official's back pocket, or became slush funds.”
Without mercy, Luan drew a large X across the document.
“Rejected.”
The document flew into the "Rejected" tray.
“I recommend full recovery of the funds and a summons of the responsible party to the audit office.”
Kirian picked up the document with a hardened face. Kael nodded. The man had pinpointed precisely the part they'd agonized over for months, holding only circumstantial suspicions. It would be a lie to say there'd been no intent to mess with him. But he hadn't expected the man to see through it in under ten seconds.
“This one's even more outrageous.”
Luan held up another document. It was a requisition for supplies from the Northern Knights' Order. This too was a document he'd deliberately slipped in.
“They've requisitioned five thousand winter cold-weather cloaks, but the actual receipt confirmation only shows three thousand five hundred. The remaining fifteen hundred exist only on paper and have evaporated.”
A textbook phantom-inventory scheme. What surprised Kirian wasn't only the fact that Luan had seen through it.
“…You calculated all of that just now, by eye?”
“Units of this scale can be done by mental arithmetic.”
Luan scoffed.
“Is the person in charge of this ledger stupid, or are they deceiving the imperial family? To pull off number-fudging this obvious and think they wouldn't be caught. They take whoever reviews this for a sucker.”
His tone carried unmistakable contempt. Kirian stared at Luan, boring into him. That contempt wasn't an act. He was genuinely enraged—more at the sloppy handling of the work than at the embezzlement itself.
What on earth is this man?
Kirian's confusion mounted. That Requies, saying things like this?
House Requies was the chief culprit gnawing away at the imperial budget. It was a place that propped the Empress up as a shield to keep even visible corruption from being touched. It was the very reason Kirian, married off at a mere fifteen, had kept the Empress at a distance ever after.
And yet what was the second son of that House doing now? In the "Rejected" tray, the documents belonging to House Requies were piling up, one neat stack at a time. The second son of Requies was mercilessly excising even the corruption connected to his own family.
Is this a show to flaunt his ability?
Or is it some elaborate trick to cut off the tail and hide the body?
Scratch, swish, thunk!
Without even a moment to think, Luan's hand kept moving. On the dining table, rejected documents marked with vivid red pen piled up like corpses. Beads of cold sweat formed on Luan's forehead. His pale cheeks flushed red with heat. In this moment, no trace of sickliness remained on his face. Only the fighting spirit of a warrior throwing himself into the battle that was work.
“…Phew.”
How much time had passed? The final sheet of paper settled lightly onto the "Approved" tray. Luan set down his pen and rolled his stiffly frozen wrist.
“It's done.”
He raised his head. The clock on the wall showed barely three hours had passed. It was a volume that should have taken the imperial administrators three days and nights of grinding.
“Now… may I go and sleep?”
A cracked voice. Luan leaned back against the chair and exhaled a sigh that seemed to drain the soul out of him.
“I don't have the strength to lift a single finger.”
Kirian was, for a moment, lost for words. He gazed at the three perfectly sorted towers of documents.
Approved. Rejected and to be rewritten. Audit and punishment requested.
The sorting criteria were clear, and the annotations written in red were the very picture of a manual. This was far too perfect an administrative job to call the maneuvering of a spy.
“You…”
Kirian asked in a low, sunken voice.
“What in the world are you?”
At Kirian's words, Luan, wearing the expression of a man tired enough to pass out, answered as if to say why are you asking something like that?
“An Empress in the middle of divorce proceedings.”
“There's no way Duke Requies taught you this. That old man is on the embezzling side, not the catching-it side.”
Kirian's eyes glinted sharply. His wariness hadn't vanished. If anything, it had deepened. The fact that someone with such dangerous ability had spent five years holding his breath was all the more chilling.
“What are you scheming? What do you gain by reporting even your own family's corruption?”
“Scheming?”
Luan looked up at the Emperor with eyes blurred and steeped in fatigue.
“Leaving wrong numbers as they are simply doesn't suit my temperament. Whoever's ledger it is.”
“…That's the only reason?”
“And the faster I finish, the sooner I can sleep.”
Luan slumped feebly forward onto the table. His platinum-blond hair scattered across the tablecloth. He truly seemed to have reached his limit. A cracked, mangled voice came out.
“Your Majesty.”
“…Speak.”
“Something sweet… give me something sweet. Sugar water, or the like.”
“…What?”
“My brain's on strike. If I don't supply it with sugar, it's going to shut down.”
It was a farce, plain and simple. The situation of the Empress, face planted on the dining table before the Emperor, mumbling for sugar water. Kirian was so dumbfounded that he ended up laughing.
“Ha.”
This is someone I should be wary of, yet I can't maintain any sense of tension. This man had just sliced and diced every last bit of the empire's corruption, and now he was hunting for sweets like a child. He was bewildered as to how he was supposed to make sense of this gap.
“Chamberlain.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Bring the sweetest thing you have. It'll be a problem if the Empress collapses.”
Kirian looked down at the slumped Luan, arms crossed. He was still suspicious. He couldn't trust the man. But one thing was certain.
He's useful.
This isn't a simple hostage or decoration. Used well, he could become a fine hunting hound for cutting down the nobles gnawing away at the imperial family. And as the second son of that Requies, no one could even argue against it. An interesting situation.
A cold calculation flickered through Kirian's eyes.
“Eat plenty, Empress.”
Watching Luan with his head planted on the table, he murmured low.
“You'll have to earn your keep handsomely from here on.”
Luan didn't hear those cold words. He was already half-unconscious.
