Elisa's Coming-of-Age Ceremony loomed ever closer, a clear dividing line between the "past" and the "future." It made Leon feel even more keenly the vast gulf between his own strength and the maelstrom he was caught in. His daytime physical training and nightly mana meditation continued, each slight increase in Spiritual Power and every gain in muscle strength accompanied by sweat and tedium. Yet Leon gradually realized that in the Imperial Capital, where power intertwined and undercurrents surged, personal valor and magic were merely the strength of a pawn on the board. If he wanted to escape his passive position—or even shift the balance—he needed another kind of power: information.
The thought came to him during an apparently ordinary breakfast.
At the table, Aunt Margaret was reading the Court Briefing as usual, its text formed of magical energy and constantly refreshing. Leon had sneaked a few glances at it before. It was full of concise, almost cryptic official language: "Northern Frontier patrol forces routed a small band of barbarian scouts at Wolf's Kiss Gorge"; "Minister of Finance Duke Windsor has submitted a proposal to review the new year's tariff adjustments"; "The spring floods in the eastern Roland Marquisate—request for partial tax relief"... The information was dry and one-sided, entirely in the voice of the official mouthpiece.
Meanwhile, Fili and his crowd of friends offered the opposite extreme: street gossip full of exaggeration, speculation, and salacious rumors. "I heard the Second Prince's Consort's family, the Soros Family, secretly arrested another border merchant. The charge was smuggling forbidden magical materials!" "At Marquis Metternich's wife's salon, some countess was making eyes at her minstrel!" "Good heavens, have you seen the new dancer on Nightingale Street? The way she moves..." The truth of these stories was impossible to discern. Most were boring and vulgar, and beyond satisfying idle curiosity, they were worthless.
Caught between these two extremes, Leon found himself stranded on an island of information. He knew almost nothing about the Empire's truly important developments, the subtle relationships among the great families, or the maneuvering behind its policies. His sources were either official announcements, filtered through layer upon layer and dressed up to make everything seem peaceful, or distorted street talk spreading among the common folk. This imbalance left him like a blind man trying to size up an elephant, liable to stumble into a trap at any moment because he had misread the situation.
I have to change this. Leon told himself. He needed a relatively reliable source of information of his own—one that could help him understand the real Imperial Capital, see through its undercurrents, and perhaps even shape public opinion someday.
A thought flashed through the fog like lightning, exploding in the mind of someone from an age of information overload: a newspaper! He would found one!
But the moment the idea arose, the cold reality swiftly doused it.
He eagerly recalled how modern newspapers operated: efficient printing presses, cheap newsprint, widespread distribution networks, professional reporters... But then the brutal conditions of this world came into focus one by one.
The problem of materials: Written materials in this world were mainly expensive parchment, tough but scarce animal-skin paper, or even more extravagant magical scrolls. Ordinary wood-pulp paper? The process was crude; it tore easily and yellowed, making it difficult to write on and preserve. Cheap paper for mass printing simply did not exist. Every "newspaper" would cost a fortune to produce, making widespread circulation impossible.
The limits of technology: Movable-type printing? Perhaps prototypes existed in some dwarven workshop or alchemy lab, but the technology was nowhere near ready for commercial use on a large scale. The main way information was copied was still by hand—a slow process prone to errors! Distributing a "newspaper" through handwritten copies? Utter fantasy. Magical duplication? That would cost an astronomical sum; only the most important laws or the highest-grade magical notes would warrant it.
The difficulty of distribution: The Empire's postal roads served mainly the military and official communications. Private messages relied on merchant caravans, couriers, and mercenaries—slow, risky methods. Establishing a timely, reliable distribution network would require an unimaginable investment of manpower and resources.
The problem of content: Even if he solved the issues of materials and technology, where would the content come from? Hire reporters to conduct interviews? Under the aristocratic system, prying into nobles' private affairs or reporting on sensitive political matters would be tantamount to courting death. What would a newspaper publish? Poems and novels? Those would be no different from existing handwritten books. News? Which stories could be reported, and which could not? Where would he draw the line? It would be like dancing on the edge of a blade.
The narrow audience: Literacy! The common people of the Empire could barely read. Knowledge was monopolized by nobles, clergy, mages, and a handful of wealthy merchants. Even if he managed to publish a newspaper, the readership would be extremely limited, making it impossible to build broad influence over public opinion.
One obstacle after another, each seemingly insurmountable. Leon's fresh enthusiasm quickly cooled. Trying to copy the modern media model in this medieval magical civilization was sheer delusion. The productivity, technological level, and social structure of the age simply could not support a newspaper in the true sense of the word.
A deep sense of helplessness seized him once more. He had ideas far ahead of his time, but no soil in which to put them into practice. This frustration of knowing what could be done, but being unable to do it, exhausted him more than Captain Hans's training.
He irritably set down his cutlery, and his gaze happened to fall on the Magic Puppet silently gliding through the corner of the dining room, delivering food. The magical light in its eyes, signaling that it had received a command, made him pause.
If he couldn't publish a newspaper for the masses, then what about a small-scale, targeted, even secret channel for information?
A vague idea began to take shape in his mind.
He didn't need to be able to influence public opinion right away. That was far beyond his reach. What he urgently needed now was a tool to "calibrate" information for his own use. He needed to know what the official briefings concealed and how much truth lay in the rumors circulating among the common folk. He needed to build an information-screening and verification system of his own, however tiny and primitive.
What would the rudiments of such a "system" look like?
Make use of his existing resources and establish information nodes: Fili and his crowd of friends might be useless in many respects, but they mingled with all sorts of people and were well informed, even if their information was a jumble of fact and fiction. Perhaps Leon could guide them in a more focused way, so that instead of merely spreading gossip, they would seek out information in specific areas. For instance, was a rumor about an official's transfer true? What obstacles had a new law run into when enforced among the common people? The quality of the information might be poor, but at least he would have another source to cross-check.
Tap into higher-level channels and glimpse the movements of the upper echelons: Aunt Margaret's Court Briefing, the occasional tidbits Elisa shared about the Magic Tower, even the affairs of the City Guard that Victor mentioned in passing... These were all high-quality fragments of information. Leon needed to pay closer attention and use more skill in gathering and analyzing them, trying to piece together a partial picture of the ruling structure. To do that, he would have to improve his analytical and judgment skills.
Explore the possibilities of magic and seek a technological breakthrough: This world had magic! Could he use it to solve the problem of transmitting information? For example, could he develop a short-range, targeted magical messaging technique? Or make a magical slate that could record and erase information a limited number of times? That would require extensive magical knowledge and resources, which were beyond his reach for now, but it could serve as a long-term research goal.
Most importantly, establish the habit of processing information: He began consciously recording the things he heard and saw each day, whether they came from official sources, the streets, or the people around him. He would try to separate fact from fiction and analyze the logic and connections behind it all. The process itself would train his mind and sharpen his ability to distinguish reliable information.
Once he had thought it through, Leon felt much calmer. Founding a newspaper was a grand vision for the future. For now, he needed to set aside unrealistic fantasies and take practical steps toward the most basic and discreet forms of information gathering and analysis. This was a silent war, fought in his study, with his mind and the tiny information network he was gradually building as his weapons.
He swallowed the last bite of bread, his expression once again calm. Being unable to publish a newspaper didn't mean he could do nothing. He could start by building a miniature "intelligence analysis room" of his own.
Perhaps the first step would come tonight, when he saw Fili at the Canary Club. Instead of simply listening to him brag and ramble, Leon would deliberately steer the conversation toward seemingly trivial matters that might conceal clues.
Information was power. And Leon von Hohenzollern was about to learn how to seize this first, and perhaps most important, kind of power. The road ahead was bound to be long and secretive, but at least he knew which way to go.
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