Magic Caster of Destroy

He had to carry out his purge when he did. Had he missed the chance, the authority to command the knights would have been stripped from him by the nobles, and his father’s death would have been meaningless.

And so he gave the word, and opened a path to the future for the Empire.

Women had to endure pain in order to give birth to a child. Similarly, the vast amounts of work he did every day was a necessary pain he had to endure in order to give birth to a radiant and reborn Empire. Beyond the difficulty that lay before him now was the treasure that he sought.

That line of thinking brought the topic of his own descendants to Jircniv’s mind.

Jircniv was not married, but he already had children. He had not yet taken an empress consort and merely sired some offspring with a few women that couldn’t even be considered mistresses, only concubines that he felt some affection for.

Unfortunately, there was no love in those relationships, but he hoped one of his children would prove to be suitably talented.

In the future, if his empress’ children were incompetent, and his concubines’ offspring turned out to be more suitable, he would gladly switch their places in the succession as needed.

“Even so, all the work that I laboured day and night to complete can hardly be considered the regular state of the country’s affairs. If only I could train up a cadre of officials that could take over these tasks… it would let me return to the tasks I should be doing, making high-level

pronouncements like the Emperors of old. And I certainly don’t want my child, the next Emperor, to have to suffer as I did. After all, if my descendants are overstressed, they’ll curse my name.”

The present Empire had been built by the work of an excellent young man, or rather, generations of talented men had laid the stable foundation that was the Empire. It was this foundation that Jircniv intended to use for building his great work, the Empire of the future. However, that did not guarantee that the next Emperor or the one after him would be equally talented.

Can I build an Empire that will stand the test of time, and a bureaucracy which can run the countrywithout the need for a talented ruler at the helm? Jircniv wondered.

“That would be very difficult. After all, Your Majesty has changed the Empire by his absolute power, and you cannot administer the country in the ways the old Emperors did.”

“Varmilinen, your job is to find a way to achieve my aims. Of course I possess absolute power; all the Emperors of the past labored to concentrate the powers of the nation in their office. However, even if I am such a supreme being, it would be wrong to micromanage the affairs of state. If that happened, then what use would bureaucrats be? Perhaps you’ve misplaced your head.”

“At the very least, he would not have left it in the Imperial Magic Caster Academy, Your Majesty.”

Those words were spoken by Fluder Paradyne, one of the senior members of the Imperial Magical Academy and also the highest-ranking member of the Ministry of Magic. The implication was that his academy would not have raised such a fool.

“Haha, yes, you’re right, gramps,”

Jircniv coughed softly, and with that, the mood inside the carriage turned serious.

“In my generation, the Empire has returned to its youth, like a newborn child. We will cast out that which is old and rotted and replace it with the new. As Varmilinen said, I will have to work hard until the Empire matures, but if it never grows, that would be disastrous. In the future, I will only define general goals for the Empire, and the officials under me will help make those goals a reality.”

A country ruled by a single man was weak. Jircniv was abundantly clear on that point.

Roune lowered his head, whose hair was greying and thin in contrast to his age, and awaited his Emperor’s command.

“The Emperor of the next generation… speaking of which, did Your Majesty have a child with that one?”

Jircniv instantly knew who Baziwood meant by “that one”. After all, Baziwood knew that Jircniv was particularly fond of one of the concubines.

Jircniv’s paramours were selected for their looks or their parents’ status, but one woman among them ignored those criteria. This woman had been chosen for her intellect, rather than for her appearance or her breeding. Thus, she was allowed to discuss politics with Jircniv ―though not in public and only in bed― and she was the only woman he allowed to do so.

At first, he had not intended to take her as a concubine at all, but things had ended up like this at her own insistence.

Jircniv, however, would have been happy if she had become his empress consort.