Medieval Knight System: Building the Strongest Empire Ever!-Chapter 32: The Marquis’s Invitation

I was looking for a noble mansion that was cheap but met my conditions, but even the cheapest ones started at 500 silver, which made me sigh. The broker warned that finding a place meeting my requirements for just 350 silver would be difficult.

If small mansions cost this much, wouldn’t grand mansions near the royal castle go for dozens of gold coins?

It seemed I hadn’t been seeing things clearly when I’d been celebrating my big payday. I hadn’t realized housing prices were this outrageous. Was there some capital premium? Like Manhattan real estate prices? I was wondering whether to give up on noble mansions and look for something more modest when an unexpected visitor came looking for me.

An old man with clothing so neat and refined you’d never take him for a commoner.

"I serve Marquis Bertheim."

He introduced himself as Wilhelm Göring. He seemed like one of those fairly well-off commoners. But Göring? The name reminded me of Nazi Germany’s air force commander. If his rank was marquis, he was incredibly high-ranking—the highest noble title permitted to non-royals.

The only marquis-level figure I knew was the northern Grand Prince, Marquis Offenburg.

He held a neutral position, not belonging to any faction, but was the most powerful prince.

The name Marquis Bertheim was unfamiliar. Since he wasn’t addressed as "Your Excellency," he seemed to be a noble who only held a title without occupying office. But why would a noble with no connection or acquaintance with me suddenly send someone? Since he was a guest, I had Sabine bring green tea.

This was still the era when tea flowed steadily into Europe through the living Silk Road. While the Ottoman Empire was blockading the Mediterranean and voyages to discover the New World and India were underway, nothing had been found yet. Medieval Knight’s worldview was set at the beginning of the Age of Exploration.

Anyway, this tea was exorbitantly expensive but was one of the luxury goods fashionable in noble society. Naturally, I bought it through the system and enjoyed the privilege of better taste and larger quantities. Besides that, there was coffee I secretly drank on my own. Plus, it was dirt cheap at 20 points per pack of ten servings.

If I’d stockpiled and sold this stuff, couldn’t I have bought a grand mansion by now?

But as the system had warned me, selling items purchased from the shop was illegal and subject to severe sanctions. It was a luxury I enjoyed alone, but I also used it to entertain distinguished guests like this. Even if he was a commoner, as a marquis’s man, he was worth treating well.

"You must be puzzled, but the Marquis has taken an interest in Sir Streit," Göring said.

"The Marquis knows about me? I’m just a lowly hereditary knight," I replied.

"When you were working as a site manager, the Marquis praised you as a promising young knight worth keeping an eye on. He’s particularly interested in your achievement of defeating Schlange’s Frost. So if it’s agreeable to you, could you relay that story to the Marquis in detail?"

Did I have some kind of magnet for old nobles, after the Finance Minister? If Marquis Bertheim held office, I’d have been worried. Göring was just a messenger sent by his master with an invitation. No matter how titled a noble, without holding office, they had no authority to command me.

He said he wanted to hear about my achievements, but that seemed like a pretext. In the noble world, give-and-take was ironclad, and one-sided favors aroused suspicion instead.

So I worried that Bertheim might use me for his own purposes while pretending to hold me in high regard. Getting caught between the Finance Minister and his successor had been a recent ordeal. I’d offloaded that shackle for 350 coins, so I’d been truly fortunate.

Given that he was citing a personal reason about wanting to hear of Frost’s defeat, I could guess he had some private business with me. Anyway, since a high-ranking noble had sent an envoy with a polite invitation, I also needed to show proper respect.

That was the unspoken rule among nobles.

Those who didn’t grasp this got shunned and ostracized.

So I brought Hans and Oscar along and visited Marquis Bertheim’s mansion under Göring’s guidance, but the scale was smaller than expected. Of course, even this mansion was incredibly luxurious by my standards, but it seemed modest for the highest-ranking noble to reside in.

Plus, this was the northwest district of Neuden Boulevard, right near the royal castle.

Perhaps noticing my gaze, Göring smiled gently and explained.

"The Marquis doesn’t care for flashy, bustling surroundings. So this area is generally a quiet district. After the late Grand Duke went to eternal rest, he’s come to prefer solitude."

Someone who preferred solitude wouldn’t simply invite me just to hear a story. There had to be another reason. Anyway, lately I’d grown so suspicious that I’d developed a habit of examining cause and effect before anything else.

Nobles are wary of unsolicited favors. This maxim, like an unwritten rule of noble society, had become a useful compass for how to conduct myself as a noble.

"You’re as handsome and vigorous a knight as rumored. A pleasure to meet you, Sir Streit."

"I’m honored by your invitation, Your Excellency."

"Hahaha, no need to be so formal. Your Excellency? Hardly fitting. That title suited the late King’s time. Now I’m just an old man tucked away in the back room."

"Then I’ll call you Marquis."

Walter von Bertheim was a very easygoing and gentle old gentleman, nothing like what you’d expect of a great noble. He made me wish he were my grandfather the moment I met him. Should I say he put me more at ease than any noble I’d encountered? Anyway, I felt warmly toward him from the very first impression.

When I checked with the Manager Scouter, his age was a whopping 80 years old, and though a marquis, he’d stepped down from office and had no affiliation. His disposition was conspiracy (good). Conspiracy? But good? The notable thing was that he was the Grand Duke’s guardian, which made sense given his age.

"Your father was the bravest and most loyal knight among the duchy knights, always the first to step forward for dangerous work. I considered his death in the French war a great loss."

"You knew my father, Marquis?"

"At my age, I know just about every noble. Especially during the late King’s era, I held a fairly high office, so requests for audience from nobles never ceased. That’s why I came to appreciate this quiet life. Well, sometimes I do miss the bustle."

I had no memories of my father.

My father’s existence was just a setting inherited from the player character.

But this world wasn’t a world of zeros and ones like in a game—it was a dynamic world that lived and breathed. It was a world with a history no different from reality, so I couldn’t deny my father’s existence.

A father I didn’t remember, Aseldorf Ritter von Streit, was a brave knight with some renown. I knew he’d died in the third battle of the Burgundy regional war five years ago. He’d passed away when I was 10 years old.

Five years later, the ego called "me" took over this body and was reborn as a new person. Who am I? I’d asked myself that age-old question, but eventually I’d come to accept it naturally. A working adult and the last head of the Streit family.

"The Lorden family was once a court noble family favored by the late King, but they made the fatal mistake of turning the ministers into enemies. The Lorden family’s power began to decline sharply due to diplomatic failures—they failed to win over a single minister. To make matters worse, the head’s wife miscarried, and no more heirs were born. That was the beginning of the tragedy."

In noble society, family lines dying out had various causes but happened with alarming frequency. Countless families that had once been prestigious now existed only in records. So in this era, having many heirs was considered a virtue.

On the other hand, wives who couldn’t bear heirs were treated like criminals.

It was even considered legitimate grounds for divorce.

Alfret von Lorden, the last head of the Lorden family, divorced his first wife after she miscarried and went through three more wives afterward but produced no offspring. From what I could tell, Alfret himself was clearly the one who was sterile, yet he’d pinned the blame on every wife.

Eventually, he murdered his last wife and hanged himself.

The Church called suicide the gravest sin, declaring that the soul couldn’t be resurrected and would be trapped in hell.

Because of this, rumors spread that the Lorden family was cursed. Now it was treated as merely a defunct family of the past, but at the time it had been an enormous scandal. As a result, knights who lost their master either found a new one or, failing that, mostly fell to commoner status.

Among those knights, Frost had drifted into the slums and joined Schlange, risen to officer rank, and ultimately met his death at my hands. And Bertheim showed deep interest in my tracking skills. It was thanks to the Searcher Scouter, not any ability of my own, so I broke into a sweat concocting excuses.

The more I talked with this old man, the more I felt my guard slipping.

He was an old man I wished were my grandfather, listening attentively and chiming in, which got me carried away. In truth, since coming to this world, there hadn’t been a single person I’d wanted to open up to like this. Perhaps that was my own form of loneliness.

"That the Reinfeldt father and son were locked in a power struggle was an open secret. So the two of them were gathering forces within Finance and splitting into factions, and then you suddenly appeared right in the middle of it," Bertheim said.

"It was a nightmare. They should fight among themselves—why drag in innocent people?"

"A nightmare for you, but a matter of survival for them."

At some point, I’d been pouring everything out to Bertheim.

I was so caught up in the moment that I nearly bragged about the heroic tale of squeezing 350 silver from Adelbert, the Finance Minister’s successor, in negotiation—when I caught myself just in time. The details of my negotiation with Adelbert shouldn’t be revealed to others, should they? What if the Finance Minister found out?

I’d nearly handed over my leash to the Marquis.