Within the cool, silent Great Spirit Book Gallery, only the rustle of turning pages could be heard.
Asano Kiyoshi rubbed his slightly sore eyes. His head felt swollen, and after letting out a long breath, he had finally more or less memorized the information on the Tsunayashiro Clan.
When the time came, he only needed to provide a general direction for investigating each incident. As for why the cases were all from around ten years ago, that was because of Central 46's statute of limitations. In principle, they claimed that any crime could be prosecuted forever, but everyone knew that principles were one thing and actual procedure was another.
Ten years was Central 46's cutoff point. Once a case exceeded that limit, Central 46 would basically refuse to handle it.
After all, everyone was so busy. Who had the time to investigate something from over a decade ago for you? It was exhausting. Better to be a parasite, drawing a salary without doing any work.
Of course, major cases were major cases and could not be lumped together with everything else.
As he recalled the materials he had just read, Asano Kiyoshi grew increasingly disgusted by the ugly faces of those nobles.
They threatened servants' families with their lives, forcing them to commit suicide in order to manipulate public opinion. They arbitrarily raised housing and shop taxes, driving countless merchants into bankruptcy and forcing them to sell their sons, daughters, wives, or even themselves to nobles as slaves, using their own lives and their children's lives to repay mountains of debt that should never have been theirs!
During years of famine, they deliberately hoarded grain and sold it at exorbitant prices, leaving starved corpses everywhere along the roads!
They monopolized industries, set prices as they pleased, maliciously squeezed out competitors,