Little Tyrant Doesn't Want to Meet with a Bad End[1-200]

Chapter 127: Child, It's Time

Two years later, in the Rosa Merchant Confederacy's Rosa City.

In a classy office that carried a breath of history, a ginger-haired middle-aged man was seated before a study desk. In front of him, at the center of the room, stood a girl with auburn hair and emerald eyes.

The man was Bruce Sorofya and the girl was his daughter, Charlotte. They were the most renowned father-daughter pair in Rosa. They were usually on good terms with one another, but the atmosphere in the room felt a little different from normal.

"Father, why did you call me here?"

Charlotte couldn't understand what was going on. Bruce had sent her a letter using their house's high-priority envelope to summon her back from the Land of Chaos. The high-priority envelope was reserved solely for situations where the house was in dire trouble, which was why Charlotte was alarmed to receive the summon. Without any hesitation, she rushed all the way back home, taking hardly any rest along the way, only to have Bruce ask her all sorts of trivial questions over the past half an hour.

Bruce had also noticed Charlotte's confusion as well, and he sighed softly to himself. He knew that it had skirted around the issue for too long, and it was about time for him to get straight to the point.

"Charlotte, what do you think of the Ascart House?"

"Ascart House? Are you referring to the house ruling over the neighboring Ascart Fiefdom?"

"Yes, I'm referring to them. I would like to hear your evaluation of them."

"Hmm... The Ascart Fiefdom itself holds a lot of potential, but it seems like the fief lord managing the territory has been quite inept thus far."

The almost offensive evaluation caused Bruce's eyebrows to shoot up, but before he could say anything, Charlotte had already started backing up her evaluation with all sorts of statistics, such as the progress of development of the fiefdom barely reaching 40%, its dilapidated roads, the inaccessibility of its mountainous terrain, the low border taxes that were hardly sufficient to make up for its expenditures, and so on.

All in all, it was a miracle that the Ascart Fiefdom managed to survive for the past thousand years.

The incredibly long rant left Bruce feeling a sharp migraine settling in.

"Enough. I'm aware of your view of the Ascart Fiefdom now, so you need not say anymore."

With a wave of his hand, Bruce gestured for Charlotte to halt her analysis. He felt that he had just asked the wrong question, and it left him at a further loss as to how he should approach the topic.

The Sorofyas was a house of merchants. Even though they had strayed away momentarily from their primary trade to fight a war, they didn't abandon their roots. Even the Rosa Merchant Confederacy, which they stood in the center of, developed through expanding its economic prowess. Due to that, they naturally evaluated others through their finances and economic development too.

The Ascart House, despite its high and lofty position over the past millennium, had horrible figures when it came to its economic development. In fact, it was regressing half of the time, which was how it managed to remain more or less stagnant even after so many years. Given so, it couldn't be helped that Rosaians thought very little of it.

The patriarch of the Sorofya House, Bruce, had a different thought about this matter though. The Ascart Fiefdom was indeed an unqualified mess from the perspective of a merchant, but its military prowess was formidable.

Each fiefdom had its own strengths and weaknesses depending on its specialization. Rosa chose to develop its commerce, and that was why it was prosperous. On the other hand, the Ascart Fiefdom chose to grow its military might, and that was why it was stable.