Liscia woke up the next day feeling quite refreshed. Focusing her vision a bit, she remembered her current situation as Souma was sleeping right beside her. Assuming it was still morning based on how chilly the air around them was, she was considering waking him up before taking another good look at him.
He'll probably not like this, but he needs his rest.
Electing to not wake him up, she gave his forehead a quick kiss and slowly made her way out of the bed. She went to her closet and quickly changed before gently opening and closing the door. As soon as she thought she was in the clear, she felt like her heart was about to jump out of its chest when she saw Serina was right behind her.
"Oh! Serina! Goodness, you scared me!"
Serina answered with such a deadpan expression to the point where, from an outside perspective, it was difficult to discern whether or not she was joking. "Oh, Princess. It breaks my heart to know that I bring such discomfort towards you when all I want to do in life is serve you."
While she said that, Liscia has known Serina long enough to know when she is joking and when she is being genuine. In truth, Serina fits the common troupe of a stereotypically cool maid whose emotions are nowhere near as expressive as the average person. While no one could fault the many people who simply thought that she was repressive, that was simply her natural personality, and oddly enough, she shared that trait with her entire family.
Rubbing her eyes, Liscia retorted, "Thanks for the early morning jokes. By the way, why are you here right now?"
This time, Serina really was confused as to why she asked such a question. Showing this by cocking her head slightly, she replied, "What sort of question is that? I am of course here to replace your sheets."
Panicking, Liscia quickly moved to block her door. "You don't need to do that! It's perfectly okay!"
God, Mother Dragon, whoever, please don't let Serina through this door! Who knows the rumors that she'd spread!
Partially because of her upbringing, Liscia had a somewhat irrational fear towards Serina whenever it came to any type of sensitive information. The reason being is that Serina has been her exclusive maid ever since she was a child, and because she wasn't allowed to harm her physically whenever it came time for punishment, she had to result to other methods, and she chose things along the line of blackmail material.
Of course, there really wasn't anything truly revolting or dangerous that she held, but whenever there was someone who fully knew just about every piece of embarrassing information about her, she'd rather keep it locked away in a place that no one would ever find, and currently, the only two places they resided in were Serina's and Liscia's minds.
Unfortunately for Liscia, the word 'idiot' never was really used to describe Serina. Yes, she could sometimes be clueless, but she was normally very astute, and it took less than a second for her to figure out what Liscia was trying to hide.
Sporting a smile that was half teasing and half genuine, she pumped the formalities up to eleven and bowed while saying, "Oh, princess. Words cannot express how happy I am that you have finally found a man to spend the rest of your days with." Raising her head, she continued, "When can we be expecting?"
"We're not-! Nothing even happened! Get your mind out of the gutter!"
Still keeping her teasing look, but this time slightly shrouded behind mild disappointment, she quipped, "My dear princess, you say nothing happened despite bringing a man into your room? Are you not just leading him on? I will happily bear his child if you aren't up to the task."
Liscia looked like she was about to pop a vein. "That's not-! Oh whatever. I'm not going to argue with you this early." Exhaling a large sigh, she continued on, "Souma is currently sleeping, so I'd rather not wake him up so early."
"I see. A man does need his rest after all."
"Yeah. So, if you could come back a little later and-."
"Unfortunately, the country needs their king, so please either wake him up or step aside so I can do it."
After a bit more back and forth, Liscia eventually surrendered to Serina when the latter threatened to reveal her embarrassing secrets to Souma. Ironically, the best way to defend against her threats was simply to tell Souma herself, but she was vehemently against that idea for the time being. With Liscia opening the door, she was followed by Serina in entering their room and seeing Souma still pleasantly asleep. However, where Liscia slightly faltered and slowed her steps, Serina showed no signs of stopping as she confidently walked up to the bed.
Despite Liscia's hushed protests, she got to Souma and started gently prodding his cheek with her finger. After a couple of pokes, Souma stirred awake and lazily looked up. Focusing his eyes, he was surprised to find Serina standing over him and Liscia a couple feet back. Confusion started marring his face, and to give voice to it, he asked, "Is everything alright?"
Serina was the first to answer. "Yes, everything is fine. The princess wanted to let you rest, but I figured you would want to be up early, so I decided to wake you up. Please forgive me if I was mistaken."
"Oh, don't lie like that! You were saying how 'The country needs their king' and just decided to wake him up!"
Souma offered a little chuckle at their antics before realizing that Serina was still waiting for an answer to her statement. "No, you weren't mistaken. Thanks for waking me up. Though I would have liked to sleep in, if I really wanted to do that so much, I wouldn't have scheduled an important meeting so far away."
Serina gave a little smile which warmed his heart, but he tried not to show it on the basis of his fiancée standing right behind her. Yawning both to cover it up, and because he felt like he needed to, he was completely caught off guard by her next words.
"I see. Still, as an apology, would you like me to service you this morning?"
Souma started having a coughing fit mid-yawn as Liscia surprisedly shouted out Serina's name. Turning around, Serina questioned her master by asking, "Surely you know about men and mornings, correct?"
When she just got a quizzical look in response, Serina disappointedly added on, "Oh dear, it seems the princess really is too pure for this world." Turning back around to face Souma, she saw him calming down from coughing and figured she should clarify her words. She correctly guessed that Souma was experiencing the very same phenomenon she was alluding to, so she continued, "I am only joking. However, I would be more than happy to guide the princess into doing so."
Seeing Souma's face go red, the pieces finally clicked for Liscia as to what Serina was referring to. Feeling her own face go completely red to match, she grabbed Serina by the shoulders and 'guided' her to the door.
"Out! Out!"
"But I still nee-."
"I don't care! Come back later! Out!"
Slamming the door right after she rushed Serina out the door, she breathed heavily, composed herself, turned around, and walked back to the bed. "I'm sorry about her. I didn't think she'd react like this when she saw us together. I'll make sure to have a talk about her antics later."
Souma was certainly taken aback by her forwardness, but he'd be lying if he said he'd never considered it. Still, he'd rather not have it become a regular occurrence, so he asked, "Can you even stop her from doing these sorts of things?"
Liscia pondered a bit on it. While it was true that she couldn't really stop her, as she would just retaliate with some juicy gossip, she could try and reason with her. Serina certainly teased a lot, but she also knew when to pull back.
"Don't worry. At the very least, this won't be a regular thing. Besides that, are you going to get up or are you going to stay in bed all day?"
At Liscia's question, Souma jostled out of bed and went to wash up and get changed. Today was set out to be an important day, and he wanted all the time he could have to make sure everything was working smooth.
One of the major things to solve the food crisis was trade, as not only would it increase the food supply, it would also bolster the economy for the kingdom. While there were multiple different transportation methods on land, the only transportation from the sea was Lagoon City, and this was in Duchess Walter's territory.
While this in of itself wasn't a huge problem as she didn't impose any additional tariffs from crossing her lands into the main kingdom, it was a problem when the only harbor for sea trading was also the only harbor for the navy, and this created a huge conflict of interest when it came to trading anything during wartime. For the past few years, it didn't pose much of a problem, but with such a sudden change in leadership, the gears were moving towards war. During this time, secrecy was of vital importance, and trading from that port was just asking to leak important information, so what often happened was that trade from the sea was halted all together.
Souma devised a way around this by building a brand-new city off the coast. The land they had chosen was a location that angled outward towards the coast. Surprisingly, it was prime real estate with nothing built on it, so it didn't take long for them to choose it as their primary spot. There were some fishing villages near the place, but few of them would be displaced by the city itself.
This is also where the country's wild technology, and the world as a whole, flew all over the place. The world's technology on land was of that of the Middle Ages because there were always enough magically inclined people to do the jobs that would normally have required inventions and research of machinery to do. However, for some reason that they just couldn't figure out, magic in the sea functioned much worse than magic on land, and that required extensive research into weaponry, engineering, and architecture for shipbuilding1.
The resulting combination produced vessels that were on par with late 19th century and early 20th century ships that were outfitted with powerful cannons. Additionally, they figured out that while magic casting was weaker, things that stored magic, such as weapons, weren't. While they weren't able to store a whole lot of magic simply due to not researching extensively enough thanks to not having the proper tools, they could use the magic stored in them to cast a couple spells before they burnt out.
Again, however, the main point that Souma wanted to hammer home was the additional trading port. And currently, Souma was already putting Liscia's head through the wringer by challenging her traditional views of how things are used. The most powerful vessel in the kingdom's navy was an absolute behemoth of a battleship called the Albert, and was filled to the teeth with canons. However, because the kingdom relied on Duchess Excel's navy, without her support, it was just a very powerful sitting duck which could be ransacked by much smaller and quicker vessels. To make it more useful, he took out all unnecessary canons and armaments to use it as a trade ship.
After a couple hours, he arrived at the construction site and was presented with plenty of people bustling around and building plans being tossed back and forth. The actual site was approved long ago, so once he got the funds, the construction guild was assigned to start planning the site and how everything was supposed to be. However, with the sheer scale of the city, the Royal Army was also helping out.
"So, why am I here again?"
"Didn't you say that you used to be a general contractor? I was hoping for some advice on this."
"… I feel I should remind you that building anything in the 21st century is vastly different than building anything in what resembles the Middle Ages."
Souma dragged along Rimuru in hopes of using his knowledge of contracting in order to make sure buildings were up to code and to maybe give some ideas as to how to best utilize the land. While Rimuru definitely has more knowledge than he's letting on with the subject, there were a couple reasons as to why he chose not to help.
Firstly, when he was building his city, it was from scratch, and he had two of some of the best blacksmiths he knew. This allowed him to set the regulations and infrastructure the way he wanted so that it would be both easily maintainable and able to scale to whatever size he wanted as long as the land permitted. Currently, with the capital city of Rimuru housing almost a million people and the country itself housing well over 30 million, he would say that it's been doing a good job.
Secondly, and this was the main reason, was simply that he didn't want to. While he would certainly be able to do a better job, and he might have very well done so if he could use his power nonchalantly, he would currently be limited to little more than the average human when it came to construction work. Even if he was a foreman, he didn't see the reason to help out much, especially since the people present were doing a pretty damn good job with all things considered.
"Yeah, I know that much. I was mainly asking for some infrastructure tips and quality of life changes that you might have."
"Hmm… Well, I would start by making sure the streets are more than wide enough to support dual carriageways, make sure the underground pipes are made of the best material we have as we don't want to have to constantly maintain them if we don't have to, bank the streets to prevent flooding, make sure some storm drains are present, and we'll probably need to add floodgates on the coast if tsunamis are a regular occurrence."
"Hmm. Makes sense. The only thing I didn't think of was banking the streets. I don't know how that missed me, but it's probably better than having it flood with a little rainfall."
"Yeah, and if this world takes the same technological progression as ours did, we don't want to have the streets too narrow for cars. At least not for the main roads."
While the two were having a conversation, Ludwin took notice of them and started walking towards them. Unlike his normal attire when on duty of a suit of armor, he was wearing something much more similar to how he was when he was in the catacombs, which was a black pair of pants, brown boots, a white long-sleeve shirt, and a leather vest.
Currently, the people from the castle outside of himself were Souma, Liscia, Aisha, and Rimuru. Testa and Hinata chose to stay behind, and to the surprise of many, Hinata took on the task of helping teach the children.
Once he was within a decent earshot, he greeted them. "Hello, sire. I'm glad to see you could make it today. Everyone else too. I know it must have not been easy to come here at such an early time."
The two women gave wry smiles at him while Rimuru simply chuckled. The one who gave him an actual response was Souma, who said, "Yes, well, for such a vital component to us, of course I'd make time to be here. How's construction going?"
"Well, as you can see, the place is properly roped off to begin construction, but…" He exhaled a heavy sigh and continued, "We've already hit a hurdle."
When Souma questioned him about it, he simply answered, "It's probably best if you see for yourself."
Leading them to a tent a little ways away, they were slightly surprised to see the roadblock in the form of an old man who was vehemently arguing with one of the foremen on why not to build the city. Once they were ushered inside, Ludwin addressed the old man and properly introduced him to the others. "Mr. Urup, these people are Sir Rimuru, Princess Liscia, Madam Aisha, and His Majesty Souma. Please tell them what you were telling us."
While Ludwin felt a bit bad by essentially passing the problem onto them as soon as they got to the site, he felt that the only people who could get through to the old man were either Rimuru or Souma. The old man has been against this whole idea ever since they proposed it, and was always desperately trying to stop construction whenever he saw them, so he was just hoping that they could deal with him.
What Souma and the others were presented with was a short tanned old man with a headband made from a towel, He was balding quite fierce, and only had hair at and above his ears and around his head. However, his eyes were anything but old, showing both vitality and concern. To all of them, it was clear that he wasn't just here to be a nuisance, but genuinely trying to warn them against something.
Souma started off. "Hello Mr. Urup. As Ludwin said, I am the 14th king of Elfrieden. Now, as much as I would like to chit-chat, I'm a bit short on time, so let's go ahead and skip the formalities and please tell us what the main issue is."
With what amounted to a direct order from the king, the old fisherman explained his story. He believed that this land had originally belonged to the sea god that inhabited the local area, but after a vicious battle, the land god reigned supreme and pushed the sea god back. However, when the people started building on the land, the sea god, in an act of vengeance, destroyed all the homes with a torrent of water. This was the main reason as to why none of the land had been developed.
While Souma and Rimuru almost immediately understood what he was alluding to, the others just thought that it was a load of bullshit. However, when a map was brought and Rimuru asked how far the water reached, he realized that some serious changes would have to be done.
"We need to change plans."
"Agreed. The tsunamis in this region must reach some seriously dangerous heights."
While Rimuru and Souma were all for changing the plans, Ludwin and the others weren't so enthused. Liscia and Aisha gave some exclamations on what the hell they were thinking while Ludwin said, "We will be losing a lot of time if we make changes now… Can we at least know the reason? Surely it isn't because you believe the old man."
Rimuru explained to him, albeit a little annoyed at his little quip, about the correlation between earthquakes and tsunamis. "While Mr. Urup isn't the most articulate person, what he is basically describing is an earthquake in water, and that water is pushed out in all directions, this being one of them. Previously, we thought that we could just put some floodgates in, but the tsunamis in this region seem to be much more aggressive than most of the ones that we're used to back on earth."
"And about this… earthquake, is there any dealing with it?"
"Not really. I'm not surprised if you've never felt one. They are usually centered around the coasts and are arguably more dangerous there than inland."
"Well can you tell us how they work? At least we might see some of the warning signs."
With the other two women supporting Ludwin in wondering how they worked, Souma and Rimuru exchanged wry smiles before the former started explaining in detail how they worked.
"Basically, you have these things called tectonic plates that encompass the entire planet and are about 200km beneath the ground. They contain a molten hot core of iron that is about 3500km in diameter and whenever that core releases enough energy, the plates start shifting and cause vibrations that are felt on the surface. We call these vibrations 'earthquakes.' When they happen underwater at sea, they will displace a large amount of water and cause giant waves known as either 'tidal waves' or 'tsunamis.'"
Even with the hand diagrams that Souma tried to do, the others were completely lost as to what he was saying. After Souma was finished, Rimuru summed it up by saying, "To answer your initial question, earthquakes usually happen within the span of about 30 seconds from the plate moving to the ground moving, and tsunamis aren't much better with maybe a couple minutes. Though you can tell when the water from the coast recedes quite a bit, it's too late by that time to do anything about it."
The others in the tent seemed dejected by the revelation that there was nothing they could do about such a natural disaster, despite now knowing how they come to be. However, Souma had what was essentially a quick fix for the problem. It was far from perfect, but it was better than what they had now.
"So essentially, we'll have things like an amusement park of some sorts and other things in the flood zone that we'll be okay with losing, as we can just rebuild it. The residential and commercial districts of the city will be further back and we'll have smaller floodgates so as to not obstruct the view of the city, since we would eventually like to use this spot as a tourist location. Furthermore…"
As Souma kept talking with Ludwin, Mr. Urup, and the foreman, Rimuru quietly left the conversation and went up to Liscia. "I heard you had a fun night last night."
Her face went red, and she started panicking, especially with Aisha giving her a look that said, 'you guys did it?'
Rimuru chuckled a bit. "I'm only joking. However, you should expect the entire castle to know by now as Serina spared no effort in making sure everyone knew."
Liscia groaned at the inevitability of the events that followed after letting Serina into her room this morning. Since Aisha was desperately trying to hide her curiosity with a poor straight face, she told the dark elf what happened the night before. This, as she expected, went with Aisha wanting to join in, but Liscia was able to hold her ground on the basis that she was his fiancée, and asked her to wait a month. At the end of the day, she simply wanted to monopolize him for a little longer.
Rimuru grinned at this. "Well, regardless of how your things play out, I do wish you the best of luck. In all seriousness, keep at it. Souma may be an impressive kid, but at the end of the day, he is exactly that: a kid, no matter how much he tries to deny it. He'll undoubtedly need all the support he can get."
Though Liscia wanted to point out that she was a year younger than him, she understood what he was saying. While she has been trained for this position pretty much from the moment she could walk, according to Souma, his upbringing was far more lax, and he certainly wasn't planning on running a country any time soon.
"Don't worry, you can leave it to us!" She said with a large smile on her face.
Looking back towards Souma, he found him acting far more like his age with the three other men he was talking with. Instead of the persona of a ruler, he was looking giddy with excitement, as if he was tackling a big group project with his friends.
Well, maybe my concern is unwarranted.
With nothing else to talk about, he affirmed Liscia and said his goodbyes and, rather than take the ride in a carriage again, he walked far enough out of view and teleported back to the castle. After waiting a couple hours and enjoying his time with Ciel to not arouse any suspicion, he went down to the daycare and taught the rest of the class with Hinata.
After the day turned into night, Rimuru was in his room with Hinata and Testa, and they were discussing their travel arrangements. They ultimately decided to go back to Tempest tonight and simply teleport back in the morning, but there was the question of how long to stay.
"I was thinking that we could always break it up into shorter visits. Maybe with not such a long gap in between like we did."
"Yeah, but I feel we should stay for around a week before coming back."
"A week's too long. I might not want to come back after experiencing Tempest."
"… You're really saying that despite having a copy of yourself there right now?"
After the three of them came to an agreement, Rimuru opened up a portal back to Tempest and the three walked through it. However, the sight that awaited them was something they were not expecting, and each of them had a different reaction.
Testa simply looked blankly at the scene, trying to process what it was. Rimuru was joining her in making the same expression before he disappeared back into himself, and Hinata had the most expressive emotion, that being one of exasperation mixed with mild annoyance.
"Oh, Hinata-chan, don't look at me like that! We're going to be sisters soon!"