Toshiro sat at the conference table watching people having small talk as they took a small break. It has been a few days since he was made aware of someone or something trying to subvert the order in his kingdom and he was equally pissed off and stressed.
Nobody found the origin of the poison yet but whatever or wherever it is but now there is a filtration system in place. Not that there was a lot of it to begin with but it was there.
As he looked around he began to think about who would truly get something out of destabilizing the kingdom. The one person or group that would earn anything by freeing the royal dungeon from its contract.
Said contract had only one way to be broken that didn’t involve completely eradicating the royal bloodline and that was extreme civil unrest. A simple civil war wouldn’t be enough, it had to be something really big, apocalyptic big and by what he knew about people, slowly making the top of the government want the powers of the king for themselves usually did that. Frank, the alchemist, said that the poisoning began at minimum around the time he was first arrested or not much after. Without a diviner, someone that could see the past with psychic powers, that is also an alchemist it would be extremely difficult.
He had made his servants look at everything that led to Frank's arrest. While most of it was true and proper, what wasn’t was really damning. Frank had, for lack of better words, a fuck ton of small crimes, so much that the bigger crimes that put him in prison weren’t even checked because they logically would have been something that he would have to have done to commit the smaller crimes like, he used human flesh to perform alchemy once and he was charged with homicide. Or being charged for stealing a rare herb since he used it on a potion. The worst part was that nobody involved in the actual judgment could be found.
When a new King is crowned, a lot of positions in the kingdom change. Judges, prosecutors, lawyers, etc… A king usually stays in power for 50 to 60 years. Toshiro himself would already have given the kingdom to his son as he was in power for the last 50 years but he can’t drop the kingdom as it is now on his lap.
Out of everyone that was in the conference - not necessarily physically - Toshiro only had two possible culprits in mind for this problem. The first was the Flower Queen of Nardia. A country of plant lovers that exported just as much food as Azuria did. They were the other neighbors to Razan and bought a lot of horses for farm use. Nardia then had 75% to 80% of its borders shared with a Mercenary country that in exchange for free food would die to the last man to protect Nardia. Most of the world saw Nardia as an inoffensive country and they were mostly right, the problem was the Flower Queen herself.
The woman never left the country and Toshiro’s father was probably one of the few people alive that knew why. First, she was a bitch of the highest caliber as it was described. Second, was that she is literally the Flower Queen, she is basically a flower in human form and not the pretty kind that you had in a garden. The agricultural power of Nardia was only there to make sure the ground was always healthy enough to keep the woman alive as she had roots pretty much everywhere in her country.
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As for the reason she was a suspect, the woman hated Azuria for some reason. They never sold anything to Azuria and the one time his father went to ask if there was bad blood between the kingdoms he was almost killed by her. He got the knowledge on how the kingdom really works so it was a somewhat fair trade. It was a great surprise when someone from that country came to the conference.
The second person on his list was Baroness Blanka. She was the advisor of Duke Azalin but nobody could find anything about her. She just popped up at his side one day and it’s not like they were having a relationship or anything, the woman was married, had kids, a husband, a normal life in general. She was just good at her job but there was no history explaining how she got that good. The Blanka Barony was a leftover title given just before Toshiro got the crown and it was something like a late payment that went to a descendent of a family. That barony was supposed to be awarded to someone of that family not long after the kingdom was created but it took until 51 years ago for the rightful owner of the title to claim it. Toshiro really felt like he should have a talk with his father about all of this. There is no way there isn’t extremely bad blood between that family and the royal family. They could have been Dukes by this point.
“Speaking of him, where is the damn old man? I know that we are supposed to vanish after we leave the throne but I haven’t seen him for 10 years.” Toshiro talked to himself in a way that nobody could hear.
He also wished that he could just spend time with his family like he saw Mia’s family do with her. Once this is all over he thought to himself that he might take a few days of vacation to spend with them and who knows? Maybe make a new kid so he can just be her or his dad instead of the king. He already had 7 kids, what was one more?
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Hibiki looked at his father and he could taste the man’s stress. His father was ready to pass the crown to him but problem after problem began to pile up. He knew that he could deal with it if necessary, he was trained for it and was the best in the end. None of his brothers and sisters were old enough or good enough to be the rulers of the kingdom. The fact that he was also the oldest son would be a plus on the world stage as many countries saw the oldest as the rightful heir to anything. He knew it was stupid, in economic matters he would never be better than his sister Aiko, that is why she earned her position in Finances.
One good thing about him not being the king yet is that he could postpone giving his kids a giant pet tiger like his younger siblings got from Mia. Politically he knew that he should get to know the girl but his mother was adamant that no other members of the royal family made contact with her on their own. The girl was an asset to the kingdom but also a big risk. The only reason she was still in the kingdom is because she believed that the kingdom was competent enough to make her and her family safe and happy. Most of his siblings would break that image in a matter of minutes.
That was also a good thing in a way. More than once his siblings told that nobles went to them speaking about taking the crown, on how they deserved it more than him and what they could do with the power. If they weren’t told what being the King or the Queen really meant from a young age he truly believed some of them would have gone after those sweet words.
His father gave a mission to him and Aiko, not that he knew what mission she had. His mission was to make sure nobody drank or ate anything from out of the castle for the rest of the conference. A somewhat shit job for someone in his place but the simple fact that he couldn’t explain much of what was going on was good enough reason for him to understand that this was serious. He truly hopes that his time as a king will be more calm.