Number One asked the question without expecting Herta to answer.
After all, Herta was just a foolish girl from the Southern Region.
What could she possibly understand?
So Number One's words were more like talking to herself.
She was voicing what she truly felt.
In her view, the incident involving Lina was only the fuse. The powder keg buried beneath it was the product of her own failures in governance.
Number One was a soldier through and through, and over the years, her focus had been on building up the military.
Number One knew about the problems affecting the common people's livelihoods, but she paid them little mind.
She had always felt that internal conflicts were nothing to worry about. Once the war to conquer the Southern Region began, all those tensions could be redirected outward.
So, as long as the war machine kept running at full speed, who would notice that one of its parts needed maintenance?
Only when the gears suddenly jammed and the machine stopped working did Number One begin taking the problem seriously.
But by then, repairing it was no longer as simple as maintaining it would have been.
Number One felt that this incident really could not have come at a worse time. It had happened on the very eve of war, when she most urgently needed to unite the people.
If she handled it badly, the foreign war she had spent years preparing for would come to nothing.
Then all the effort she had put in would become a joke.
At that thought, Number One sighed.
Just then, Herta asked curiously:
"Is the problem that hard to solve?"
"This concerns the fundamental structure of our society," Number One said with a sigh. "Both sides causing trouble belong to the lowest tier of this ordered