“I don’t need to work!”
It was back when I was still ten years old.
Chosen as a study companion to Filori, the heir of a ducal house, I sat alongside him receiving lectures from a private tutor on the management sciences necessary for running a domain.
That’s when Filori declared it, bold as you please.
Then he called in his favorite maid — a stunning beauty with a chest that was almost comically large — and promptly vanished into his room with her, groping her backside the whole way in.
Looking back on it now, he was the very picture of a spoiled noble’s idiot son.
Shamelessly disgraceful conduct for a nobleman.
And yet, my ten-year-old self thought this:
——God, that’s so enviable!!
——I just wanna laze around fooling around with a beautiful maid.
……To fulfill this, in one sense, pure-hearted dream, I threw myself into furious effort.
In my position as the third son of an earl, I’d normally be expected to work as a domain lord. To get around that, I first set my sights on golem technology. Golems had mostly been used on the battlefield as disposable soldiers. I took their simple logic circuits and made them more complex, going even further by incorporating elements of ancient technology into the improvements. Once I’d gotten them capable of handling simple tasks autonomously, I also undertook building the organizational framework to put golems to practical use.
And so, ten years on from when I first started developing golem technology.
I succeeded in automating nearly all of the work in the town of Alfado that my father had entrusted to me.
It was the fruit of daily effort born from the sheer force of my desire not to work.
All-nighters doing research and work, of course — but I also endured a life of extreme penny-pinching that was anything but befitting a nobleman, all to buy expensive technical texts.
Yes, when all was said and done, I worked like an idiot for the sake of living an easy life.
I’m probably the only person in the world who, despite being the son of an earl, survived whole days on a single black bread roll and fell asleep slumped over his desk almost every night.
And yet my father——.
“To think you’d turn out such a slacker……. I must have raised you poorly.”
Called before my father for the first time in a long while, I couldn’t believe my ears.
I frantically asked why, and he immediately furrowed his brow.
“I received a report from the servants that you haven’t been doing any work lately. I had a spy investigate, and it turned out to be exactly as claimed. What is the meaning of this! The last ten days in particular — you haven’t left your room except to eat and bathe!”
With that, my father handed me what appeared to be an investigation report compiled by the spy.
It contained a thorough log of my activities over roughly the past month.
Hmm, even by my own standards I’ve been shockingly reclusive……
The time I’d spent on my duties as domain lord over the entire month came to a mere two hours.
And that was just signing a stack of backed-up documents.
Every other waking hour I’d been in my room researching a new type of golem.
“It’s fine. The town of Alfado is automated to run on its own.”
“Automated! A domain lord’s proper path is to toil and sweat for his people! Why, I myself, as head of the earldom, begrudge myself even sleep in service of my work!”
“Well, if the workload is really that heavy, isn’t that just inefficiency……”
“Silence, don’t talk back! You are being reprimanded right now!”
There was simply no reasoning with him.
Father slammed the desk hard, and then spoke with his shoulders trembling, venting the anger he could no longer hold back.
“……It seems I must knock some backbone into you.”
“Does that mean I’m to come home?”
“That’s too easy! I am ordering you to pioneer the Sariel Great Forest!”
The Sariel Great Forest is a vast woodland spreading across the kingdom’s northwest.
Its area is large enough to fit two or three of the Embance Kingdom we live in.
The greatest unexplored territory on this continent — it’s said that whoever successfully pioneers it will hand the kingdom dominion over the world — but.
Powerful monsters and demi-humans have taken up residence in this great forest and blocked every kingdom incursion.
As a result, plans to pioneer it have been drawn up time and again only to fail without exception.
For the past hundred years it’s been completely abandoned — truly a demon frontier.
“That’s completely unreasonable……! If I’m gone, the town of Alfado will fall apart! The golems keeping that town running — I’m the only one who can maintain them!”
“Not a problem. If the golems stop working, we simply hire people again. That’s how things ran before.”
“That’s wrong! If I hadn’t replaced most of the officials with golems and then cut taxes by the same amount, that town would have collapsed!”
The town called Alfado that my father entrusted to me had originally thrived on the lumber industry.
By the time I was posted there, though, the nearby forests had been over-logged and the town was on the verge of decline.
So I handed off the majority of the town’s operations to golems, and used the freed-up labor costs to cut taxes.
By stimulating commerce, I managed to make the town viable even without the lumber industry.
If my golems disappeared now and people were hired to replace them — driving taxes back up to cover the wages — this town might genuinely collapse for good this time.
But my father just furrowed his brow.
“I’ve heard nothing of this. Alfado’s tax revenues have been stable, as far as I knew.”
“That’s because I acted preemptively!”
“Don’t make things up. Regardless — your assignment to pioneer the Sariel Great Forest is final! Pack your things and set out at once!”
Father declared it in a tone that brooked no argument.
And so I found myself heading out to pioneer a demon frontier.