Chapter 4

I barely even had time to warm my seat as vice minister before an urgent report came in from the south.

The Southern Riverlands had just been hit by a once-in-a-century flood. The main dam had completely collapsed, leaving hundreds of thousands of civilians homeless and displaced

Right on cue in the royal court, Victor seized the opportunity to make his move.

"Your Majesty, since our newly appointed Vice Minister of Finance possesses such extraordinary talent with his strategies, dealing with a little water should be a total walk in the park for him. I formally nominate Vice Minister Valerius to head south and handle the flood relief matters!"

That old fox was positively toxic. The national treasury didn't have a single cent to its name, and he wanted me to fix a massive flood? This was a blatant setup to watch me fail so he could have a legitimate excuse to have me executed.

Even Catherine hesitated, throwing a deeply worried glance in my direction.

But I didn't even flinch. I stepped right forward, looking completely heroic. "I accept the mission, Your Majesty! If I fail to build a brand-new dam within ten days, you can take my head on a silver platter!"

The entire court looked at me like I was a literal dead man walking. Ten days? With zero funding and zero materials, even a miracle worker couldn't fix a broken dam.

When I arrived at the disaster zone in the Southern Riverlands, it was total devastation, with tragedy stretching as far as the eye could see. To make matters worse, the local corrupt officials weren't doing a single thing to help.

Instead, they had actually pocketed the government's pathetic relief funds and swapped the emergency food supply with moldy, dirt-filled grains.

"Sir, a traditional packed-earth dam is never going to hold back a flood of this scale!" the engineering official traveling with me cried out, panicking.

"Who said anything about using packed earth?" I let out a cold laugh before slipping away to a quiet spot where no one could see me, and woke up the System.

"System, use the points I racked up from winning the Imperial Governor Selection to buy me the recipe and manufacturing blueprint for old-school cement!"

The second I got the blueprint, I immediately drafted the local refugees into a workforce, blasting rock quarries and setting up makeshift kilns.

We blasted a crazy mix of limestone, clay, and iron slag together at extreme temperatures.

When the first batch of dusty gray powder was mixed with water, blended with crushed stones, and poured over iron bars scavenged from an abandoned weapons vault, the craftsmen genuinely thought I had lost my mind. Pouring mud straight into water was supposed to stop a flood?

Fast forward three days later, the cement had completely cured.

The engineering official took a massive sledgehammer and swung it with absolutely everything he had against the new cement barrier. It left nothing but a tiny white speck, without even a single hairline crack. Instantly, everyone gasped in awe.

"It's a miracle! A literal miracle! Vice Minister Valerius must be a saint send by God!" The crowd collapsed to their knees in the dirt, weeping and reaching out toward me like I was a living saint.

With the dam securely holding, it was time to settle the score.

I immediately brought in soldiers to lock down the local governor's estate and dragged out all the secret ledger books hidden away in their vaults.

"Vice Minister Valerius, these ledgers are incredibly messy and involve dozens of different businesses. It'll take at least two weeks just to make sense of all this fraud," the governor's secretary muttered, sweating bullets.

"Two weeks? Please, I’ve mastered complex financial auditing. I could balance these books in my sleep!"

I had my men haul in a massive wooden board and started drawing a giant Excel spreadsheet right onto it.

I introduced standard double-entry bookkeeping: every debit must have a credit, and the two must always balance out.

The corrupt officials thought they had designed the ultimate bulletproof scam, but against modern accounting, their books were absolutely riddled with massive holes.

In just three short hours, I traced the exact destination of hundreds of thousands of stolen silver coins with absolute clarity.

The local governor—who happened to be Victor's prized golden boy—was still aggressively shouting in my face.

"Asher Valerius! I am the Prime Minister's personal protégé! You wouldn't dare touch me—"

"You're exactly the one I'm looking for!" I drew the legendary imperial sword Catherine had gifted me before the trip and swung it without hesitation. With a clean slice, his head rolled right across the floor.

"Open the vaults! Distribute the food! Seize every single asset belonging to these corrupt politicians and funnel it directly into disaster relief!"

I stripped off my fancy court official robes, threw on basic clothes, and jumped straight into the muddy water to carry sandbags alongside the refugees to reinforce the levee.

What I didn't realize was that on a nearby hillside, a slender figure wearing a hooded cloak was quietly watching my every move.

It was Catherine. She had slipped out of the palace incognito because she was too anxious about the disaster to stay behind.

She watched the guy who usually acted like a total slacker in the royal court, now completely covered in mud with bloodshot eyes, confidently taking command in the middle of a torrential downpour.

Catherine felt her heart skip a beat.

Ding!

[Alert: Empress Catherine Alden's affection levels are skyrocketing. Current Affection: 60%]

Hearing the ping echo in my head while standing in the freezing mud, I wiped a splash of dirt off my face and flashed a massive grin.

With the Southern Riverlands crisis officially solved, I made a triumphant return to the capital, bringing back millions of silver coins confiscated directly from the corrupt officials. The national treasury went from dead broke to completely loaded in a single day, and the way Catherine looked at me was so intense she could burn a hole through me.

But Victor was now completely backed into a corner.

He knew with absolute certainty that the second I secured my political position, he was a dead man. So, taking advantage of the fact that the main imperial army had been deployed to the borders to keep the barbarian tribes at bay, the old traitor teamed up with foreign spies and launched a massive coup right in the capital!

A rebel army of a hundred thousand men, made up of Victor's private forces and bribed capital guards, marched forward and completely surrounded the royal palace. Meanwhile, the total number of loyal troops left to defend the capital was barely ten thousand men.

Catherine stood tall with a longsword in hand, fully prepared to go down with her country like a true ruler.

"Asher Valerius," she said, suddenly walking up to me. Her voice trembled slightly, her eyes filled with a heavy, devastating mix of longing and pure finality. "I have ordered my elite guards to escort you out of the city through a secret underground tunnel."

I froze, completely stunned. "What about you, Your Majesty?"

"I am the ruler of the Alden Empire, and I will not run away." Catherine's eyes welled with tears as she suddenly reached out and pulled me into a tight, desperate hug, her tears soaking right through my shoulder.

"As long as you stay alive, the empire still has a future. If there is a next life... I don't want to be the empress anymore. I just want to be your wife."