“If you’d rather not sleep with the bedroom door wide open…… I trust you’ll handle that yourself.”
Kirian left behind that cold smile and returned to his own desk. For some reason, he found himself with no desire to head to the main office today. He gave word that he would handle the day’s matters at his private work desk. He was quite curious to see how Luan would react.
What was unexpected was that Luan did not panic or beg for mercy at the mountain of paperwork. After glaring at the stack of documents with undisguised loathing for a long moment, Luan rolled his stiff neck left and right a couple of times. Then he rolled up his sleeves. Slender, pale wrists came into view.
“Black ink, red ink. And please prepare three sorting trays.”
Luan issued a brief instruction to the head chamberlain. It was nothing like the meek Empress of before. There was a strange authority in his voice, and the head chamberlain found himself instinctively glancing over at Kirian. Only when Kirian gave a nod of permission did the items get prepared.
Kirian watched the scene sharply, arms folded.
What is the red ink for?
Was he planning to do a half-hearted show of working and then fake a collapse? He might have asked for the colored ink just to make a point. At worst, every one of those documents might end up as worthless scrap.
But that was not what happened.
The moment the supplies were set, Luan sank deep into his chair — then snapped upright in an instant. The body that had been drooping went straight as a rod, and his gaze settled into something cool and sharp. It was the moment his soul switched over to that of the mad audit team member from his past life.
Scratch. The first document turned.
Scratch, scratch. Second, third.
The speed began to increase at an unreasonable pace.
Kirian’s brow furrowed. He wasn’t even sure Luan was actually reading the documents. The speed at which he was flipping through the pages was simply too fast. At that rate, skimming was the most one could hope for.
Is he giving up and just turning pages? Or is he scanning for something to memorize?
He was just deepening his suspicion when —
Swish, swish —!
The red ink in the pen held in Luan’s right hand began to leap across the page. Red lines slashing across the paper, and notes scrawled into the margins. The movement was so fluid it seemed almost like dancing — and so fast it was astonishing that legible writing remained at all.
He scanned with his eyes, grasped the content, found the errors, marked them, and tossed the documents into the sorting trays.
Thwap. Thwap. Thwap.
The sound of documents stacking in the sorting trays formed a rhythm so consistent it was almost unsettling. This was not the work of a human. It was closer to a machine’s process.
In Luan’s mind, an enormous screen was open. Paper documents in this other world were inconveniently cumbersome, but the patterns contained within them were exactly the same as in his past life — if anything, the large handwriting made it easier to take in at a glance than an Excel sheet on a monitor.
Data scan. Error found. Numerical discrepancy. Suspected embezzlement.
Within the steady, repeating rhythm of his review, foreign objects surfaced. Luan’s eyes moved left to right like a machine. These were not documents. They were simply unorganized lumps of data — waste materials getting in the way of his going to sleep.
Annoying.
Luan bit his lip. The bookkeeping was a disaster. The numbers were an absolute mess. Income and expenditure totals that didn’t add up were the baseline, and the dates were all over the place too. In his past life, this would have been enough to make him slam the person responsible face-first into a monitor and demand a written apology.
An occupational reflex flared up. If he didn’t set these chaotic numbers back in their rightful place…… he simply couldn’t stand it.
“……Empress.”
Kirian approached and called out to Luan. But Luan did not answer. He didn’t hear it. He was fully immersed in this wretched stack of documents.
“Can you not hear me?”
“Quiet.”
The voice came out low and dry. Head still buried in the documents, Luan raised his left hand to stop the Emperor and answered mechanically.
“You’re breaking my flow. Please maintain silence.”
“……Ha.”
Kirian swallowed a hollow laugh. How dare he order the Emperor to shut his mouth. Kael, standing at his side, fixed sharp eyes on Luan. This time it was Kirian who held him back.
By rights, Luan should have been dragged out immediately for contempt. But he found himself too struck speechless to act on it. And more than anything, he was curious. The strange manner in which Luan was processing documents had caught and held his gaze.
Luan picked up one document and clicked his tongue. The sheer nerve! Kael looked ready to lunge at Luan at any moment — but Kirian studied the document being held out toward him with careful eyes.
“Look at this, Your Majesty.”
Luan tapped the numbers with his red pen.
“Was this placed here for my benefit?”
“Hm?”
“I’m referring to the itemized costs for the Imperial Garden Landscaping Project three years ago. The unit price for materials has been set 40% higher than the market price at the time.”
“Hmm.”
“Furthermore, the supplier is Ares Trading. That would be a company operated by a collateral branch of the Imperial family.”
So he was actually reading after all. No — he had gone beyond reading. Luan said decisively:
“This is a textbook case of funneling contracts and inflating unit prices.”
At Luan’s words, the gazes of Kirian and Kael met.
“The difference would have ended up lining the pockets of the officials in charge, or become slush funds.”
Luan drew a large, unhesitating X across the document.
“Rejected.”
That document flew into the ‘Rejected’ tray.
“Full recovery of funds and a summons of the responsible party to the audit office is requested.”
Kirian picked up the document with a hardened expression. Kael gave a slow nod. Luan had pinpointed exactly what they had spent months deliberating over with nothing but gut feeling. It would be a lie to say there hadn’t been some intent to test him. But they hadn’t imagined he would see through it in under ten seconds.
“This one is even more outrageous.”
Luan held up another document. It was a supply requisition from the Northern Order of Knights. This too had been deliberately slipped in.
“A requisition for 5,000 winter cold-weather cloaks was submitted, but the actual receipt confirmation shows only 3,500. The remaining 1,500 exist only on paper and have vanished.”
Classic ghost inventory tactic. What surprised Kirian was not only the fact that Luan had seen through it.
“……You calculated all of that just by looking at it right now?”
“Numbers at this scale only require mental arithmetic.”
Luan gave a dismissive scoff.
“Is the person responsible for these ledgers stupid, or are they deliberately deceiving the Imperial family? To manipulate numbers this blatantly and expect not to get caught — they clearly think whoever reviews this is an idiot.”
There was unmistakable contempt in his tone. Kirian stared at Luan fixedly. That contempt was not an act. He was genuinely furious — not at the embezzlement itself, but at the sloppiness of the work.
What on earth is this man?
Kirian’s confusion deepened. That this came from a Requies?
The Requies family was the very ringleader of parasites draining the Imperial budget. They were the ones who used the Empress as a shield to prevent anyone from touching corruption that was visible in plain sight. It was why Kirian — who had married at just fifteen — had kept the Empress at a distance ever since.
And yet what was this second son of that family doing? Among the documents flying into the ‘Rejected’ tray, documents tied to the Requies family were stacking up one after another. The second son of Requies was mercilessly carving out corrupt ties even to his own family.
Is this a performance to show off his abilities?
Or was it a sophisticated play to cut off the tail and hide the body?
Scratch, swish, thwap!
With no time for further thought, Luan’s hands kept moving. On the dining table, rejected documents marked with vivid red strokes piled up like corpses. Fine beads of cold sweat formed at Luan’s temples. His pale cheeks flushed with a heat that colored them red. In this moment, no trace of sickness remained on his face. Only the fighting spirit of a warrior charging into battle — a battle called work.
“……Phew.”
How much time had passed. The last sheet of paper settled gently onto the ‘Approved’ tray. Luan set down his pen and rotated his stiff, aching wrist.
“It’s done.”
He raised his head. The clock on the wall showed barely three hours had passed. This was a workload that imperial administrators would have needed three days and three nights to get through.
“May I…… go to sleep now?”
A voice gone rough and ragged. Luan leaned back against the chair and let out a sigh as though his soul were leaving his body.
“I haven’t the strength to lift a single finger.”
Kirian was momentarily speechless. He looked at the three perfectly sorted stacks of documents.
Approved. Rejected and requiring revision. Requiring audit and disciplinary action.
The sorting criteria were clear, and the annotations written in red were nothing short of a manual. This was far too flawless an administrative performance to be the work of a spy.
“You……”
Kirian asked in a voice that had gone low and quiet.
“What exactly are you?”
At Kirian’s words, Luan looked up at him with the expression of someone on the verge of passing out from exhaustion — a look that said: What kind of question is that?
“An Empress in the middle of divorce proceedings.”
“There’s no way Duke Requies taught you any of this. That old man is the one doing the embezzling, not the one catching it.”
Kirian’s eyes sharpened. His wariness had not lessened. If anything, it had only grown denser. The fact that someone with such dangerous capabilities had spent five years living in complete silence was even more unsettling.
“What are you plotting? What do you gain from reporting even your own family’s corruption?”
“Plotting?”
Luan looked up at the Emperor through eyes glazed over with exhaustion.
“I simply cannot leave numbers that are wrong where they are. That’s all it is. Regardless of whose ledger it may be.”
“……And that’s the only reason?”
“And because the sooner I finish, the sooner I can sleep.”
Luan collapsed forward onto the table. Platinum blond hair scattered across the tablecloth. He seemed to have genuinely reached his limit. A voice gone rough and slurred reached Kirian’s ears.
“Your Majesty.”
“……Speak.”
“Something sweet…… please give me something sweet. Sugar water, perhaps.”
“……What?”
“My brain is on strike. If I don’t supply it with sugar, I believe it will shut down.”
What a farce. In front of the Emperor — the Empress, head buried on the dining table, murmuring requests for sugar water. Kirian found it so absurd he ended up laughing outright.
“Ha.”
Someone I should be guarding against, and yet I can’t seem to maintain any tension. This man had just slaughtered every last piece of Imperial corruption in the paperwork, and now he was asking for sweets like a small child. The dissonance was bewildering enough to be disorienting.
“Head chamberlain.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Bring the sweetest thing available. We can’t have the Empress collapsing.”
Kirian stood with arms folded and looked down at the limp, deflated Luan. Still suspicious. Still impossible to trust. But one thing was certain.
Useful.
Not a mere hostage or a decoration. Used correctly, this could become an excellent hound for rooting out the nobles gnawing away at the Imperial household. And if it was that second son of Requies doing it, no one could even raise an objection. Quite the interesting turn of events.
A cold calculation passed through Kirian’s eyes.
“Eat well, Empress.”
He murmured quietly, looking down at Luan with his face planted on the table.
“From here on out, you’ll need to earn your keep — thoroughly.”
Luan did not hear those cold words. He was already half-unconscious.
