Enlightened Empire

Chapter 273

The trip back through the island wasn't a long one for Corco. While in reality, the place was larger than in his cartoon imagination, it was still small enough to be crossed on foot in a single day, at least so long as one didn't lose his direction. Though he didn't have a working compass with him and thus struggled with his absolute orientation, on the way back he simply had to follow back the markings he had left on the trees. Thus, he shouldered the small bundle of firewood he had collected on his way here, and began his return trip.

As soon as he entered the center of the island, he could hear the mosquitoes buzz all around him again. Without his heavy armor on, he felt naked already. The constant exposure to not only the elements, but also to bloodsucking beasts didn't really improve his mood. At least there were the many dark caves around to brighten his day.

The entire island was created like a giant sponge, with tons of porous holes all over its surface. All of these caves came in different shapes and sizes, some of them too small to fit a person and some of them massive, like the open maw of an ancient beast. However, what all of these caves had in common were the deep darkness that made investigation from the outside impossible, as well as the thick layer of gunk on their floors.

Rather than look for wood, Corco had spent much of the day going inside various cave entrances and investigating the ground. While he couldn't do much proper analysis without any instruments, he was still sure that he had found the goldmine he had been looking for on this journey.

However, just as he got excited at the thought once again, another insect buzzed past his ear and returned his focus. Now wasn't the time to get worked up, and it wasn't the time to be too happy either. So long as he was stuck here, all the gold in the world couldn't feed him.

For now, he was still stranded on this island, still without any food and without fresh water. Thus, he set his priorities straight and ignored all the precious treasures around him for once. Instead, he showed great determination as he walked past all the caves.

Not long after, he returned to a second beach, the place where he had been washed ashore. In the distant waters, he could still see the leftovers of the wreckage that used to be their ship, though by now most of it was just floating bits wood and sail bobbing up and down in the sea.

Although he hadn't wasted much time on his trip back across the island, his fellow survivor presented him with a finished task already. Corco shrugged the few bits of firewood he managed to collect back onto his shoulder and marched down to a shady area near the beach, where a silhouette was already waiting for him with all kinds of goods lined up to dry on the sand.

“Everything going alright?” he announced his arrival from a distance so he wouldn't scare her. Sumaci looked up from the pile of wood she had been working on. Unlike her usual, well-kept self, she looked a lot rougher around the edges, though she still seemed as energetic as ever. Her current, unkempt state wasn't any surprise, and Corco was sure that he himself looked far worse than the pirate's daughter at the moment. After all, she would have spent far more time in the wilderness than him and knew how to handle herself in such scenarios.

“Not fantastic,” she looked up to him before she answered. “Not a big surprise, but everything I salvaged from the wreck is still wet through and through. I couldn't salvage any usable food, and all the wood is still wet. None of this can be used without a proper drying, which will take days. With the wood you got, I think I can at least get a fire going if you give me some time, but our biggest problem for now is water. You didn't find any freshwater sources, did you?”

“No such luck,” Corco replied. At the same time, he had moved next to Sumaci and dropped off the collected wood. “Plenty of caves, probably filled with bats. Also tons of mosquitoes, no shortage of those. No water though, beyond the salty stuff around the place.”

“This is such a mess,” Sumaci said with a sigh. “We don't even know where north is.”

“At least that part is easy, isn't it?” Corco asked with a raised brow. “Just look at direction of the sun.”

“Have you actually tried looking up at the sky?”

After her dry reply, Sumaci checked through Corco's wood pile and began to arrange it to start a fire. Meanwhile, the king followed the instructions of the princess. Up above, the sun had disappeared behind a solid layer of clouds a good while ago.

“So you weren't looking up before?” he asked.

Corco remembered that earlier, the sun had barreled down on him. There would have been plenty of time to check the direction back then.

“We're no longer in the freezing south, genius,” she said without looking up from her work. “The last time I saw the sun was midday, and at midday the sun here sits right above your head. No help for navigation at all.”

Faced with a new challenge, Corco tried to stress his brain for an answer. In his previous life, he had watched some survival shows, but that knowledge came from a dubious source at best. Even worse, it had also been ten years since he had gained his new knowledge.

Predictably, survival guides hadn't been his top priority when he had begun to write everything down back then. All this time, he was too busy with his business empire, or his proper empire, to focus on boy scout stuff. Still, he somehow managed to unearth an answer from the recesses of his brain.

“I think moss always grows towards the sun, right? So let's just look at patches without moss on the trees and then we know where south is. And by process of elimination, we'll know north too.”

While Sumaci had begun to rub sticks of wood together, Corco looked at the trees in the distance for an answer. However, they were overgrown on all sides, with all kinds of plants. Some of those plants may have been moss, but if it was, it was all around the trunk. This wouldn't help them much.

“Never mind,” Sumaci said absentmindedly as smoke began to rise between her fingers. “I'll find out the directions once the stars come out.”

As an accomplished captain, she would be able to get their position by looking at the stars. However, the mention of nighttime made Corco realize another problem.

“So I just thought of something, and I don't think you'll like it,” he started, which made Sumaci look up from her pile of sticks. “Right now, making a fire is a bad idea in the first place, isn't it?”

“Without a fire, we can't cook food, we can't purify water and we can't be found by passing ships.” After her obvious statement, she returned to her work. Although she had stated the obvious, Sumaci had overlooked a crucial problem.

“Do we really want to be found by passing ships though?” Corco asked. “Whoever attacked us could still be out there, searching for us. If we still have a fire going by night, we'll only show our enemies the way. So long as we can't find a hidden place to light a fire, we're better off not lighting one at all.”

Once again, Sumaci stopped her work and looked up at Corco. This time, she didn't look focused, or pragmatic. Instead, she stared at him with a wide open mouth for a few seconds, before all tension left her body.

“Well... fuck,” she said, and flipped from her knees onto her backside, facing away from the wood and towards the ocean.

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Corco added and joined her.

Thus, the two castaways sat next to each other and stared into the blue. Nothing much had changed from Corco's time sitting alone on another beach of the same island. Among the salvaged goods, the king's eyes found his trusty chainmail armor, half sunk into the sand and useless. Without it he felt defenseless, but he knew that wearing it wouldn't help them anyways, not here. By now, the clouds above had begun to darken. The distant storm was closing in.

Despite his best attempts, Corco failed to push back the bath house event on his itinerary. Fadelio had made sure to book the event and invite all lords of the southern kingdom long before the king could come up with excuses to weasel out of it. And as expected, the bath house event turned out to be a chore.

Before Corco had arrived in the south to form his own kingdom, the city of Saniya had been in possession of House Pluritac for thirty years. In that time, it had gone through some luxurious changes. In order to better service the noble personages who lived there, the entirety of Rapra Castle's ground floor had been transformed into a giant bath house in the process.

By now the bath was a like a maze, with countless fountains, pools and smaller, private rooms. Today, every lord of the south had either come in person or sent their representatives to witness the splendor of Medala's imperial family reflected within the waters of the imperial bath house. Of course, they had also come to pay their respects to their king.

At first, the event had gone according to the usual rules of Medala nobility's social gatherings. The lords of the south had come together in the larger halls of the baths to strike deals, spread gossip and talk the politics of the empire. And of course, there were obscene amounts of food and wine everywhere, like with everything the Medala nobles did.

In truth, the only difference to a banquet was that the occasion happened with everyone barely clothed for no good reason. While Corco disliked having to give up his old armor, at least none of his guests could hide any knives or guns either. Better yet, their unclothed state had given the king plenty of excuses to show off the soap and hopefully spread its use across the entire kingdom. Before they were hit by pandemics, he wanted to improve hygiene standards to reasonable levels.

Yet to Corco's misfortune, the lords soon lost all interest in the king's bathroom rituals. After all, this party was being held in a bath house, and for Medalan nobles, that came with a number of unique features. Not long after the evening had started, a throng of attractive, young women had appeared, wearing barely any more than the old and middle-aged nobles in the room.

Of course, for these nobles, getting half-naked would be accompanied by getting laid, and the host was the one who would have to provide the fodder. Since Corco himself didn't want to be involved and ruin his clean reputation, he had loaded the work off to Fadelio, who had delivered what the lords had expected. Soon, most of the nobles had disappeared in the nooks and private rooms of Corco's private bath, their new accompaniments in tow.

Meanwhile, Corco himself was stuck on the outside. As a lord with no direct offspring and no reliable relatives to inherit the throne, he couldn't be as frivolous as the other nobles with these sorts of things. At the very least, he would have to abstain until he he had invented reliable contraceptives, or risk getting some new family members who would only complicate everything.

Even worse, after today's mess, it would take ages to get the stains out of his bath again. And he couldn't even leave, or risk the reputation of a bad host. Thus he sat there alone, and contemplated his great misfortune. Silently, he weighed his chance at replacing the local nobility with a less decadent bunch, when a sudden noise of wet soles on tile broke his concentration.

From around a corner, Princess Sumaci marched in his direction, with haste but without panic. Though when Corco looked up, he realized that she wasn't walking towards him, since she looked just as surprised to see him as he was to see her. He knew that the princess had come to the occasion as well, but he hadn't seen her since a while into the evening and had expected that she had already left early.

No matter what, the still-present princess changed course to close in on him straight away. In the process, she showed off her curves quite well, only hidden underneath a thin, wet piece of cloth. Drops of water dripped from her hair and ran down her smooth skin to enhance her beauty even further. However, Corco had no time to admire his guest's appearance, since she complained as soon as she had gotten close enough, like she usually did around him.

“King Corco, you really should keep your guests under control better,” she said. Although he had no idea what was going on, he could taste the sourness in her words.

“What happened?” he asked with a frown.

“Maybe, King Corco, rather than me, you should be asking that question to your cousin I'll go calm my mood somewhere else, if you wouldn't mind.”

Before Corco could ask any further questions, Sumaci showed off a sneer and walked past him, before she disappeared into another hall of the bath house. However, there was no need for Corco to follow her – or to ask anything else – since his answer showed up just seconds later.

Mayu Sonco Saqartu, Corco's cousin and Governor of the South, rounded the same corner as Sumaci had not long after. Though unlike her confident stride, he walked in a slower, cramped manner. His eyes flitted around for a while, until they fell onto Corco as well, just like Sumaci's. And just like the girl before him, he slowed down to talk to the king.