Her vision went dark for a moment, as if she saw countless sheets of parchment labeled “Need Money,” “Need Grain,” “Need Repairs,” “Need People,” turning into ferocious beasts with gaping maws lunging at her.
The three documents she’d just finished were but a few inconsequential scales shaken loose from the beast’s back.
“Ugh…”
A soul-weary groan escaped from her throat.
The last bit of energy left her, and she collapsed limply, falling back against the hard chair with a “thud.”
Then, sliding down the chair’s curve like a salted fish washed ashore, she slowly, hopelessly slipped down until her forehead bumped against the cold, hard desktop, motionless.
Like a freshly minted corpse.
“My beautiful… border… carefree life…” came her muffled, lifeless mumbling from under the desk. “Is a beast of burden… a corporate drone… an endless… overtime hell…”
The border lord’s life she’d imagined was not this paperwork hell! It was birdsong and flowers, rolling on green grass with girls! Paperwork hell—she wanted no part of it.
Leila looked at her young lady’s utterly un-noble “dead fish flop,” her mouth twitching almost imperceptibly.
She quietly stepped forward, righted the ink bottle Irene had knocked over, and returned the scattered documents to their places.
In the salty-fish despairing silence, the heavy oak door of the study creaked open, letting in a gust of lively air.
“Young Lady! Good news! Super—big progress!”
Clarette bounced in like an energetic canary.
Her golden braid swung cheerfully with her movements, her face flushed from running, but her emerald eyes sparkled with excitement and a desire for praise.
There still seemed to be a hint of the dungeon’s damp chill on her, contrasting oddly with her radiant expression.
Irene’s head, buried under the table, didn’t even budge. Only one limp arm dangled off the edge, weakly waving as she let out a faint, dying syllable: “Speak.”
Clarette didn’t care at all about the Young Lady’s dejected state. She bounced to the desk, planted both hands on the paperwork-laden surface, leaned in close to the head under the desk, her voice lively as ever:
“That bastard Vincent, at first, his mouth was hard as stone! Even with three broken bones, he wouldn’t say a word! But…”
She raised her chin proudly, a mischievous, slightly devilish smile on her lips. “When I took out my treasured ‘Moonlight Butterfly Scale Powder’—a powder that amplifies pain for interrogation—and just waved it in front of him, before it even touched him, he wet his pants in fright and spilled everything, crying for his parents!”
She straightened up, hands on hips, wearing a “praise me now!” look. “The main point! The Empire seems to be planning some move against our border soon! And it might be big! Vincent was just a pawn to be discarded once used up!”
Imperial unrest!
Those two words shot through Irene’s numb nerves like a cold current, instantly awakening her from her paperwork stupor.
She sprang up from the desk, moving so fast she nearly twisted her neck.
A clear red mark was still on her forehead, a few strands of silver hair clinging messily to her cheek, but her golden eyes had regained their sharpness and clarity.
“Against the border?” she repeated, her voice hoarse from sleep, but her gaze icy. “Details? Troop numbers? Timing?”
Clarette spread her hands. “That bastard’s rank was too low. He only heard rumors from some bigwig behind the Blackstone Trading Company, likely to keep him smuggling mithril. He didn’t know any specifics.”
The sharp light in Irene’s eyes faded a bit, but her expression remained grave.
She rubbed her throbbing temples, exhaustion surging back along with worries about the Empire’s threat.
“Understood…”
She let out a long breath and slumped back in her chair, that heavy sense of helplessness returning. “Sort out this intel, along with Vincent’s confession, the smuggling accounts, and that letter to the Imperial Chancellor. Send them by the fastest encrypted channel to my mother in the capital. As for Vincent’s final fate, let Mother and His Majesty the King decide.”
She only wanted to be a salted fish lord, not get dragged into the power games between the Empire and the Kingdom’s top brass.
“Understood! I’ll get it done!”
Clarette replied energetically.
Only now did her gaze really fall on the mountain of paperwork covering Irene’s huge desk.
That chaotic, nearly overwhelming sea of documents gave her a strange, indescribable feeling.
Her eyes swept over the dossiers, ledgers, and reports.
The messy stacks, the blotchy notes, the mountain of pending tasks…
All this chaos didn’t annoy her. Instead, it felt like a magnet, firmly drawing her attention.
A strong, almost instinctive urge welled up inside her—she wanted to organize them, to write on them, to see them sorted, categorized, and neatly stacked.
She shook her head, trying to shake off the inexplicable thought, but her eyes seemed glued to the pile.
“Uh… Young Lady?” Clarette hesitated, her emerald eyes blinking with a hint of testing… and eagerness? “You look… like you’ve been bullied badly by these papers. Should I… try handling them for you?”
This sentence was like thunder from a clear sky.
Leila, who had been quietly organizing documents, suddenly looked up, her usually calm ice-blue eyes filled with undisguised shock, fixed on Clarette’s face.
That look seemed to say: Handle paperwork? You? This isn’t a joke, right?
Irene was stunned too, wondering if she was hallucinating from document fatigue.
“Let you… handle it?”
She repeated incredulously, her gaze darting between Clarette’s bright, “I can do it, let me try!” face and the despair-inducing mountain of paperwork.
“Clarette… do you know how to handle administration?”
“Of course!” Clarette puffed out her chest, chin held high, her golden braid bouncing. Her tone was full of self-assurance. “I’m a genius! You know, the kind who learns anything fast, just needs to see it once, and is good at everything!”
She tapped her temple playfully with a finger. “Fighting, tracking, interrogation, sewing, baking cakes… and of course, handling these… uh… hmm…”
She hesitated, searching for the right words to describe the pile before her. “These… troublesome slips of paper! If I want to learn, there’s nothing I can’t master!”
She tried hard to ignore the faint voice inside—why did these “troublesome slips” feel so damnably, almost instinctively familiar?
Irene and Leila exchanged a glance.
The shock in Leila’s eyes had turned into deep suspicion.
Irene rubbed her forehead, looking at Clarette’s bright, “trust me” eyes, then at the despair-inducing “mountain.”
A ridiculous thought flashed by: Let her try? If it doesn’t work, I’ll do it myself!
“Alright…” Irene waved her hand weakly, sounding as if she’d given up. “I want to explode just looking at them now. The top few are urgent, try those first? Show me what a genius can do.”
“Yes, Young Lady! Just watch me!” Clarette cheered as if she’d received an imperial edict, immediately darting around the desk, unceremoniously squeezing Irene out and plopping herself into the wide lord’s chair.
Irene was nearly knocked over, barely steadying herself by grabbing the desk.
She stared, dumbfounded, at Clarette’s actions.
Clarette, the new “genius administrator,” showed not a hint of unfamiliarity.
She first glanced disdainfully at the ordinary quill Irene had been using, then, without hesitation, pulled out the lord’s signature pen from the holder, its shaft inlaid with tiny gemstones.
Next, her fair fingers moved at dazzling speed, quickly sifting through the mountain of documents. Several marked “urgent” or “priority” were precisely picked out and stacked before her.
The whole process was as smooth as if she’d practiced it a thousand times, with a natural, flowing rhythm.
Then, she picked up the report Irene had just annotated.
Her eyes scanned it, her brows faintly knitting, as if dissatisfied with Irene’s hasty notes.
She dipped the pen in ink, her wrist hovering for a moment in thought. The next second, the pen tip fell, her movements astonishingly fluid, and lines of clear, forceful, sharp handwriting swiftly flowed across the parchment.
With a flourish, she finished the annotation, set the report aside, grabbed another, scanned it, and began writing again.
Irene was completely stunned.
That speed! That efficiency! That logic, so clear it was almost cold!
From setting objectives, assigning personnel, execution steps, supervision mechanisms, to attachment indexing—everything was tightly linked, not a single detail missed!
And that handwriting…
When Clarette focused on writing, her usual lively air vanished. Her script became exceptionally neat and severe, exuding an undeniable authority, even… a faint trace of a ruler’s sharpness?
Was this really the same Clarette who waved a little whip around all day, always loud and fond of interrogations?
Irene felt her entire worldview shaken.
Leila stood to the side, her ice-blue eyes roiling with turmoil.
so… this basically confirms she’s the empress as hinted before, right?