CH 11

“What are you thinking so much about? You even drooled around your mouth.”

The Crown Prince chuckled.

“It’s just a vibrant future idea. Where happiness comes from and where it goes. I think so.”

Somehow, it made me laugh, so I laughed too. The Crown Prince stopped laughing and suddenly coughed when I laughed along.

“Ahem, what is the prince’s happiness?”

Happiness? There are a lot.

When you and my sister have a happy ending without sweet potatoes[1], my happiness follows.

“Tell me. I’m curious. Because the future of the prince may be my future soon.”

It was me who was surprised by the question the Crown Prince asked.

Is he already trying to act as a brother-in-law?

This, this. It was clear that he had Leia in mind while pretending not to be.

It has already been a week.

The Crown Prince made various excuses and came to the outer castle where we were staying.

There were times like today when we would sit down and drink tea, but other times he would run with us in the morning exercises.

If there was one thing that bothered me, it was that when I was exercising or training, I would be with Leia, drinking tea, or I was alone eating.

Is it because the Crown Prince is still suspicious of me?

In any case, it was important to see each other often and build affection.

Maybe it’s because we keep seeing each other just like now, the time I had to chat with the Crown Prince was getting more and more enjoyable.

I didn’t even know that approaching me first without confronting Princess Leia was a strategy to shoot the horse first before catching the general.

“What is the prince’s happiness?”

“I… I just do what I love and earn enough to feed myself, and sometimes meet and eat dinner with my sister while hearing the news of her happy life. That’s my happiness.”

Although I happened to be a prince, I carefully expressed my desire to forget my extravagant past and live a simple life.

It would be a lie to say that I had no interest in wealth, power, or honor, but I wanted to quit being a prince which would not be suitable for me.

By the time I would be moderately away from the attention and people would not care what I would do, I would spread my wings and fly away.

When I opened my eyes, the Crown Prince tilted his head.

“What’s your favorite thing to do?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I like to eat, so it would be nice to be able to bake some bread.”

At my words, the Crown Prince laughed.

“You’re going to bake bread? You? I didn’t know the prince had such a funny personality.”

My face heated up for no reason.

Can’t a prince bake bread?

It was a country that was going to collapse anyway, and I was going to definitely ruin it and revive it.

By then, the people would have forgotten about the wretched prince of the royal family, who only practiced tyranny.

While Adrian and Leia are in a relationship, I’m going to study and save up some money to be a local bakery uncle by the end of the novel.

I will also marry Marco off and send Elizabeth off, therefore I have a lot of things to do.

Not everything in the world goes my way, but I have to hold my dreams big to get half the results. That is the wisdom of Jeon Woo-young, who has lived a rough life for 27 years.

But our protagonist didn’t seem very pleased.

He stopped laughing when he realized I was really serious.

He frowned, then sighed.

“Prince, you don’t have a ridiculous dream of going out of the castle and living like a commoner, are you?”

“Why, is it ridiculous?”

Am I the only one who’s weird again?

After Leia becomes empress, I’m literally a kkakdugi[2].

Even if I am a prince, what knowledge do I have to sit in a key position and remain in the castle, and what can I do besides being able to read and write?

I don’t know if I can use magic, but I have never felt magic before.

According to Marco, even the original Carl Lindbergh could not use any magic.

I glanced over at the Crown Prince who was in deep thought.

He folded his arms, tapped his forearms with his fingers, made eye contact again, and asked with his eyes, ‘Are you for real?’

I nodded.

Is there something wrong with you that you want to leave it in the castle and just pamper yourself with it?

Did you think I didn’t want to leave the castle because I had some sediment left there and wanted to pamper myself there for my whole life?

Or is it because you think I’m going out of the castle and trying to do something else?

From what I’ve read so far, all the emperor’s brothers left the castle one after another, and Lindbergh went out of the castle and set up his own territory when he got married.

The Crown Prince looked at my confused face and now started to laugh out loud.

I had a sense of foreboding. And usually all my forebodings are true. Unfortunately.

He showed unwelcome kindness in a very friendly tone.

“If you wish, I can arrange a place in the city where you can bake bread. Just tell me if you need to.”

The Crown Prince, who laughed for a long time, said with tears hanging from the corners of his eyes.

“Yes, well. You don’t have to do that.”

I wish I could live a handsome life with a golden spoon, no, with a spoon of magic stones.

“Why, are you not satisfied with your life in Heineken Castle?”

I shook my head at the unexpected question.

Every time I opened my eyes, snacks were served at three meals a day, and the maids were cheerful and kind.

Marco has become very cheerful and the dog can run around the garden to her heart’s content. There could be no better life than this.

Most of all, it was good to see my sister, who used to stay in her room and read books every day, doing activities outside.

Princess Leia’s hobbies were a little different from those of other princesses, and I have seen her lining up with the knights a few times to do things like horseback riding, archery, and swordsmanship.

Surprisingly, unlike Lindbergh, the Empire did not impose a gender limit, and the proportion of females among the knights was almost half and half. Leia, who was sweating and walking around the training hall with them, was really cool.

“I’m so happy that I’m overwhelmed. Once again, thank you for your kindness.”

As I bowed my head, the Crown Prince looked at me with his chin on his hand.

“It’s too early to thank you yet.”

“Yes?”

Adrian’s eyes were half-folded, but they quickly took on a serious glow.

“Prince, I haven’t decided to help you completely yet.”

“Yes?”

With my mouth gaping like a fool, the Crown Prince extended his arm and closed my mouth.

Then he crossed his legs and said:

“We have to hold an uprising soon, so let’s decide the contents of the negotiation.”

As expected, the protagonist was not easy.

The Crown Prince, who was supposed to negotiate, remained silent for a while.

After watching a butterfly bustle in the greenhouse, where the four seasons exist in one space, the Crown Prince talked.

“After thinking about it, I think it is not enough to just get the right to mine the Magic Stones in exchange for helping the prince.”

“Even though the magic stones buried there are 100 percent pure?”

“…… 100 percent?”

Uh, not really.

“Ahem, that’s not it, I meant that the purity was very high. Even 60 percent of all the continent’s reserves are in the Mochu Mountains alone.”

When I first entered the novel, I thought it was fortunate that the genre was fantasy.

Even if I don’t read romance novels well, my strap of the bag for fantasy novels was rather long[1]. Thanks to this, I was well aware of how important magic stones are in most worldviews where magic exists.

Lindbergh, a great country that once stood side by side with the empire, gradually dwindled after a long civil war over the Mochu Mountains as the number of wizards began to dwindle.

That’s probably the biggest reason why Lindbergh, who has nothing, is condescending, and I was sure it would have a big impact on the two main characters meeting.

The protagonist said ‘only’ Magic Stones mining rights.

I narrowed my eyes and gave an awkward smile in a hurry.

The unfortunate thing was that he was on my side, so I didn’t have to touch the protagonist’s nerves in the first place.

“Carl Lindbergh, what the prince promised me was the mining rights, not the mined magic stones. Do you know how much it takes to mine and process the Magic Stones?”

Oh, right. I didn’t think that far.

The Crown Prince furtively drew his body towards me.

“In addition, the Mibari Forest surrounding the Mochu Mountains is famous for its habitat for demons. You may not have seen it, but it is very ferocious. Just dealing with it and trying to mine is a big deal. The Mochu Mountains are practically like a cake in a painting without magic.”

“T, that’s true.”

That’s all I have to offer.

There was only one thing I believed in when I came up with all this. It was the development of the novel.

Adrian Heineken and Leia Lindbergh. It was ignorant to think that as soon as the two met, they would fall in love on their own and the Crown Prince would move on his own.

In fact, I was so obsessed with the idea that I had entered a novel that I had unknowingly turned away from the fact that this was a reality for them.

Sunflowers were blooming behind me, and snow was gently falling on the thin branches of the tree behind the Crown Prince.

It was a sight that matched the Crown Prince, who was sitting in a simple outfit with a snow-white shirt and black rose-patterned epaulettes.

TL Notes:

[1] Mentioned in Chapter 2, but since some of you may have forgotten it, 고구마 or Sweet potato means situations that are so frustrating and annoying that you feel stifled.

[2] 깍두기 or  kkakdugi is literally a radish kimchi, but in games, they are the spare/leftover person; a player left over after teams have been formed; an undrafted player.

[3] “Strap of the bag is long” means he is highly-educated. In this sentence, he has a lot of knowledge when it comes to fantasy novels.