So the Medieval Age Has a Split Inheritance System…
Translator: Tsukii
Editor: Ai
Read at Watashi wa Sugoi Desu!
Chapter 05 – Marriage Partner
This engagement—which was agreed upon because Father wanted to borrow the power of Duke Schult for the war my elder brother Wagner engaged in—was not originally supposed to happen. The family patriarch, my father himself, told me that I would stay single for the rest of my life after all. That said, the whole debacle aside, I think I would have married a commoner otherwise…
My to-be fiancée was Burglinde Schult-san. ‘Burglinde’ sure was hard to say. She was eight years old, two years younger than I was. According to the rumors, she was very thin despite being an aristocrat and had red eyes and white hair. Ah, it was albinism. Because her eye color differed from her parents, others said that she was possessed by demons. It explained why she didn’t have a marriage partner decided for her yet, despite the fact that she was the daughter of Duke Schult, one of the top-class military powers in the empire.
As a former Japanese person with modern sensibilities, I didn’t feel averse to albinos, but the same couldn’t be said about this world. Indeed, her appearance was rare and different from the common people, so it couldn’t be helped. I also heard that she was a child of a concubine. I was also a child of a concubine, but things were difficult just because of that. The split inheritance system didn’t treat the children of the main wife and the concubine differently, but it still gave people a bad first impression, so it was painful.
This empire and many of the surrounding nations adopted the religion of the goddess Knut, which allowed a man to have three concubines in addition to his legal wife. This too applied to commoners, so regardless of their noble or commoner background, there were those who had four wives. The split inheritance ultimately favored men. Regardless of the number of daughters a family had, if the family had even a single son, no daughter would get a share. I was glad I didn’t reincarnate as a woman.
For the time being, I started correspondence with Burglinde-san—or Linde-san, for short—but I had no idea what she really thought since she only wrote formal sentences. Well, I guess she could be considered smart since she could write a letter like that despite being only eight years old. But there was also a chance someone else wrote the letter on her behalf.
If all goes well at least, we’d stay engaged until we were both of age to marry each other at 15. After all, my house couldn’t make a direct connection with the bride’s family right away. Knowing that, Duke Schult participated in Wagner’s war for the reward money.
Besides writing to Linde-san, I had been involving myself in wars between barons within the territories, received bounties and looted, and increased the number of my slaves to 50. At the same time, my eldest brother, Count Wagner, declared war on the king of the Aubrey Kingdom. He justified it by saying it was to reclaim the Dismore duchy, which Aubrey had unjustly occupied. Duke Schult and our father, Duke Klaus, also participated. The emperor of the Carling Empire, Emperor Paulus the IV, also declared his intent to participate in the warfare.
The total military strength of Carling exceeded 8,000 people even without including His Majesty’s Paulus’ army. It was enough to see that it was a losing battle for the Aubrey Kingdom, with their smaller-numbered 5,000 infantry and their preoccupation with their own internal civil wars between the counts in their kingdom, so it was totally a winning battle for us. There was no reason for me not to participate.
I joined the war, bringing my 50 slaves along. The second son Alfred also brought his army to war, of course. With this, Wagner’s army swelled even further, with many soldiers in a festive, buoyant mood even before the battle, like it was a sure win. Even with our arrogance, we did win the field battle, as usual.
In addition to our superiority in both number and quality, there was that certain old butler who was recruited from our family house and commanded Wagner’s army. He was more capable than I expected. Wagner’s army had amassed 712 kills, and compared to my group’s 16 kills, it looked like a rather nasty kill ratio.
…Really, could I just live peacefully as elder brother’s vassal instead? I guess it was impossible since he would target me anyway.
To make Wagner’s rule as difficult as possible in the future, I indirectly tried to loot and plunder as much as I could, but it wasn’t as much as I hoped. He had his main army, so of course they did more splendidly. That said, it would be difficult to plunder through other routes since we only had 50 people.
Perhaps it was better to say that Wagner’s army had already plundered it once before, so people already packed their belongings and fled. I did gain some experience by serving as a vassal army, but there wasn’t much financial reward. Granted, I just went along with them and plundered without permission after all.
But it did pay off since I was able to make three village girls into slaves. They looked quite good, so I was able to make about 2 million yen… the things I did were completely that of a thief and robber. Add to that, the slave who was a former thief made use of his intuition, so I also made about 2 million yen from looting alone. The reward to serve as a vassal army was about 1 million yen… and since I made 1 million for 50 people it meant each person was paid 20,000. It wasn’t much considering the campaign lasted two months. One bonus I could say was that our three meals were taken care of at the time, so I don’t have that many complaints.
In any case, while my eldest brother Wagner conquered his third county, I was also able to increase the number of my slaves to 100 people. No matter how it went, my elder brother had tread wider and longer than I did, but it was ill-advised to care about that. I have done what I could. I kept using my whip steadily every day. As a result, I acquired the characteristic Whipmanship Level II.
…Using the whip as my main weapon felt like a novelty, but it was the easiest weapon to create a sonic boom with human power, and it had relatively high killing power. I used a normal whip instead of the artifact with (pain) empathy, but if I bend it backward and then whip forward, I could easily make people lean back. If it could hit the enemy’s face, it was easy to render them unconscious.
I kept wielding my whip at my slaves. Would it be possible for me to be a master of whip one day if I kept doing this all the time? While thinking about such things, I continued to whip the slaves while feeling pain.
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