"...Have faith in God..." The Prime Minister muttered, not sounding confident at all.

  "Yes. Exactly." The King repeated.

  He reached over Prime Minister's shoulder and grabbed the stack of reports out of his hand.

  With a spectacur dispy of brute strength, the King effortlessly ripped the entire ream of confidential documents in half. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister stood still with his mouth completely agape from shock.

  The entire stack of documents was probably the thickness of a small textbook, so it took an incredible amount of force to tear it apart with one's bare hands. Galuterican parchment was also much thicker and sturdier than ordinary A4 paper on Earth, so it was something like ripping through 3 inches of solid cardboard or heavy duty card stock.

  The frozen expression on the Prime Minister's face was roughly analogous to the reaction of a hard-working office worker who just had his work ptop abruptly stolen by his boss, which was then thrown on the floor and smashed into pieces.

  ......

  —The King is a really scary person, isn't he?

  + + +

  "Sebastian. Just let it go. You don't need any of this."

  The King stretched his arm over the railing that they were standing on, and then he released his fingers.

  The stack of torn documents plummeted, spinning like helicopter seeds, as they spread out in the air like a shower of falling leaves. Finally, they nded in the water — a rge indoor pond that was about the size of a swimming pool. A hundred or so golden dragon fish (note: simir to carp or Koi on Earth) immediately swarmed the shredded paper, as they must have thought it was fish food. Their little round fish mouths globbed like O's as they slowly nibbled away at the damp parchment.

  The King and the Prime Minister stared at the hungry fish for a while.

  Sebastian, the minister, was completely expressionless.

  After a minute or two, the King eventually spoke again:

  “I’m tired."

  And then he spun around and walked away from the pond.

  A few seconds after, the Prime Minister followed, hurrying to catch up.

  + + +

  Meanwhile, I bit my lip tightly.

  I waited quietly until I confirmed that the footsteps from those two nerve-wracking individuals had disappeared, after which I leaned back against a wall and took a deep breath. I squeezed the oversized broom that I was holding to my chest. A small mess of fallen leaves had accumuted around me again, as I had stopped sweeping at least 15 minutes ago. The neat and organized pile that I was previously working on had already blown away in the wind.

  I closed my eyes and did some thinking.

  My heart was pounding.

  There were actually multiple troublesome things that the Prime Minister and the King had mentioned.

  For instance — it occurred to me in passing that perhaps some of those incidents were caused by my missing cssmates? There were a total of 23 members in my css, yet only thirteen of us were accounted for. I could only assume that the rest of us had transmigrated somewhere in this world as a consequence of the wish that they made.

  However, the bigger issue that instantly dominated and overwhelmed the entirety my thoughts — and this was coming from Hana's perspective — was that I couldn't confirm if my family was safe.

  As a child, I had grown up in the province of Evensworth, which was around a month's journey from the capital and across the mountains that bisected the Kingdom in half. The western and southern regions were an economic breadbasket of Galuterica, but the regional nobility had an independent streak given that they were on the opposite side of the mountains and retively far away from the King's direct influence. The "Reformist" faction that the King mentioned had recently incurred the King's anger, and most of the "camities" that the Prime Minister described were concentrated in those territories.

  The Prime Minister did not mention my hometown by name, but it was not far away from Duke Reinfeld's domain or the Barony of Rosevale.

  If my family’s vilge was damaged by a rge fire, rampaging dragons, or if there were (…god forbid) medical expenses to pay for, there was no way they could afford it, especially when I calcuted the amount of money my family had accumuted in savings. I was the eldest of seven and my father was disabled after losing his legs in the frontier wars. The reality is that my family depended on my sary in order to pay the bills, and I had been sending home 75% of my monthly paycheck ever since I first started working at the Royal Pace. Recently, my younger sister had also found a job, so the situation wasn’t nearly as bad as before, but they still lived paycheck to paycheck.

  In short, I absolutely needed to know if my family was affected.

  It was my responsibility an older sister.

  Even if they were safe, I probably needed to warn them that there wasn’t going to be any assistance coming from the government. They should stockpile food and water, and they needed to take preparations because our shitty King wasn't going to spare a cent for the citizens who lived in those territories. If there wasn’t any disaster relief on the horizon, rioting, vagrancy, and a breakdown of w and order was inevitable as increasing numbers of people were likely to turn to banditry and violence in the midst of impending famine.

  Unlike modern nations of the 21st Century on Earth, the social and public infrastructure in the Kingdom of Galuterica was merciless and primitive. There was no such thing as “social security” or “national public health insurance”. People simply starved to death if there was no food, and the sick died on the streets if they couldn’t afford a healer.

  I really needed to send my family as much money as I could possibly spare.

  Every single little bit of additional information could be an immense help.

  If I knew which roads were closed, which granaries had caught fire, which towns had been afflicted with the “unknown disease”, those types of details could mean a matter of life and death for my younger siblings. Earlier, I had caught a brief gnce of the Prime Minister's reports, and there were multiple diagrams and paragraphs of dense bck text. They were clearly written in much more detail than the brief verbal report that he had summarized for the King.

  My eyes immediately snapped towards the sheets of torn parchment that were floating on the surface of pond. There was still a giant swarm of fish actively trying to devour any snippet of soaked paper they could possibly fit in their mouths.

  I didn't even hesitate to think twice.

  + + +

  There was a loud series of spshes as I scrambled as fast as I could into the pond.

  My teeth chattered as I was immediately assaulted by a impenetrable wall of freezing water.

  —Holy fuck! It's so cold!

  It was the tenth month of the year (note: October), and there had already been a few icy nights in the capital city.

  Shivering with my arms wrapped around my chest, I waded into the pond. My waterlogged dress felt as heavy as bricks, and I fought the tears in my eyes as I pushed deeper into the water. Everything was completely soaked through as I reached an area of the pond where the water level was as high as my stomach.

  I frantically waved away the fish in front of me.

  As the minutes passed, I gingerly collected every single piece of wet parchment, trying my hardest not to tear the paper or smudge the ink any more than it was already damaged. I honestly did not know how much of it was salvageable, but at least the paper itself was thick enough that it hadn't yet disintegrated.

  Was jumping into a pond a proper maid-like thing to do?

  What about my peaceful NPC lifestyle?

  What about hiding from my cssmates who had transmigrated from another world?

  At this present moment in time, I cared about none of those childish things. None of that was significant.

  I had one priority that was more important to me than anything else.

  ?