Yesterday's Great Ship World, Vienna, Schönbrunn Palace.
Vienna was in the midst of winter. A heavy snowfall had blanketed the entire city in silver, a thin layer of ice had formed over the Danube River, and steam locomotives chugged through the swirling snow, belching thick smoke.
Compared with Frankfurt, the northern capital established to appease the northerners, Vienna—the former capital of the Austrian Empire—was clearly far more prosperous.
These days, the old emperor had been in a heavy mood.
It was not because winter had arrived and another batch of his subjects would lose their lives to the cold.
In this era, people freezing to death every winter was simply too normal.
What worried him was the increasingly tense situation in Europe.
Not long ago, the powder keg of the Balkans had finally exploded. Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Greece had formed the Balkan League and declared war on the Ottoman Empire.
Franz naturally had no fondness for the Habsburg family's old enemy, which had once marched to the gates of Vienna. But watching the Balkan region, backed by Pan-Slavism and the Russian Tsar, tear bloody chunks from the Ottoman Empire time and again still filled Franz with deep concern.
After all, large numbers of Slavs lived throughout the Crown Lands of Bohemia and Illyria, Galicia-Lodomeria, and even the Crown Land of Hungary. The Tsar proclaimed himself the protector of all Eastern Orthodox believers and the Savior of all Slavs—though the former might not necessarily wish to become the Tsar's obedient subjects, their pursuit of independence and statehood had never ceased.
Even when both sides were still bound by the Holy Alliance, and Germany was merely the Austrian Empire, Franz had always feared that enormous, aggression-prone beast to the east.
After obtaining the Texas white crystal deposits, Germany's greatest weakness had