HTLCCBFT Chapter 20

Has The Lord’s Career Chart Been Filled Today? – Chapter 20

He had indeed prayed with great earnestness.

But in reality, Oliver still only considered the different gifts provided daily by the God of Wealth statue to be random events.

According to common sense, gold ingots had the highest value, so their appearance rate should have been set to a lower value.

Although appearing consecutively was rare, it still fell within the scope of “low probability.”

Therefore, when Oliver woke up the next morning and discovered a gleaming copper ingot truly lying on the Cat God’s right paw pad, he felt a small sense of pleasant surprise but had no suspicions.

He smiled as he took the copper ingot from the Cat God’s right paw, stored it in his game backpack, and then, as usual, placed a freshly picked bouquet of flowers on the now-empty paw pad. Feigning seriousness, he said, “Oh, lovely Cat God, thank you for fulfilling your believer’s wish. Please continue to bless me tomorrow.”

As soon as he finished speaking, he deftly stored the God of Wealth statue in his game backpack, then got up and left the bedroom.

As Oliver—whose diligence was inconsistent with his elegant and beautiful appearance, and not at all befitting his status as a pampered lord and duke—headed to the woods with Butler Fosse and the others as usual… Annie the cook, who saw this scene from a second-floor castle window, confidently lifted the lid of the large soup pot with the servants who usually assisted her. Without batting an eye, she ladled out large chunks of fish, quickly filling a bowl to the brim.

“Pah!” Annie chewed on the fish that was beyond her own share, feeling perfectly justified as she cursed indignantly, “I really don’t get why His Lordship wants those filthy, despicable slaves to enjoy this. People like them only deserve to grovel on the ground and gnaw on rotten grass roots!”

Her words quickly resonated with the other servants.

“His Lordship is simply too kind-hearted,” someone chimed in. “But if this continues, it will only spoil that bunch of naturally awful lazybones and make them greedy!”

Another person also said, “His Lordship not only helps those good-for-nothings farm and chop wood, but he also sent Ed to teach them how to build toilets! Heavens, I really don’t know why Mr. Fosse doesn’t admonish His Lordship. If this goes on, it might bring misfortune instead!”

Some were purely curious. “By the way, have any of you tried using the toilets those slaves built? I saw that quite a few have already finished and even received rewards from Mr. Ed.”

The person who asked this had, in fact, already tried one in secret.

Those excessively exquisite and elaborate ‘toilets’ were a novelty to all of them. Aside from the nobility, most freemen, like the slaves, would simply find a random spot to relieve themselves or collect their waste in wooden buckets to be dumped into a nearby river.

It was her first time taking care of those troublesome little matters in a completely private place.

Incredibly, it didn’t smell at all inside! There was no need to carefully lift her skirt, constantly worrying about brushing against feces left on the ground by others. There were small buckets of soil ash and dry leaves right beside it; you just had to cover it with a layer after you were done.

“Hmph,” Annie said disdainfully. “Only filthy bugs that grew up gnawing on dirt will emit such a foul stench from their bodies!”

The person who had asked the question felt awkward and didn’t dare bring up the topic again.

Ever since they figured out the lord’s routine of working from dawn till dusk, and that the most capable and prestigious of his attendants—the steward Fosse and the knight commander Noel—would invariably accompany him, Annie and the others, who had initially worked with fear and trepidation, grew bolder and bolder.

Compared to the previous lords who were difficult to serve, this new lord was very young and possessed a naive, childish kindness, making him seem very easy to deceive. Even the shrewd and strict steward, Fosse, hadn’t noticed that she secretly pocketed some fish every day to take home.

Thus, Annie and the others became increasingly brazen, to the point of openly slacking off, stealing food, and pilfering items.

“Such fine fish, personally caught by the Lord and cooked by my own hands—how are those slaves worthy of eating it?”

The more Annie thought about it, the more indignant she became, and the more justified she felt in her thievery.

As freewomen, and castle servants at that—a position envied by outsiders—the treatment they received was actually the same as those slaves outside! How could that possibly be reasonable!

No, it was even worse than the slaves’ lot. She had to toil away preparing the ingredients, sweating profusely in the hot kitchen, while those lowly slaves only had to hold out their bowls and wait for someone to pour them the delicious fish soup!

“Damn little brats!”

Even after gorging herself on a meal, Annie still felt furious.

So, upon lifting the soup pot’s lid again, she craned her neck forward and spat viciously into it!

They were just lowly slaves anyway. Even if they drank soup mixed with her saliva, they should consider it an honor—

Just as Annie, having done this, felt a slight thrill of vengeance, she caught sight of a small figure in the corner of her eye.

“Who’s standing there!”

Annie’s heart skipped a beat, and she whipped her head around to glare.

When she saw clearly that it was the little slave girl who had been tacitly isolated by the castle servants recently, the heart that had leaped into her throat immediately settled back down. “So it’s you, you little bitch-raised brat. What are you looking at with those filthy eyes of yours?!”

She had long found this slave girl named Lucy to be an eyesore.

A slave who hadn’t even fully matured, with no chest and no ass to speak of—who knew what methods she had used to bewitch the noble Lord.

Not only had he granted her the privilege of frequently entering and leaving the castle and seeing His Lordship, but he had also allowed her to run around with several other equally detestable slaves, carrying a pile of wooden planks.

Annie had once, with the thought of figuring out “what trick this cunning slave girl was up to,” secretly followed them to observe.

When she discovered that the girl had people take such fine wooden planks only to burn them black using all sorts of strange methods, turning good material into ugly, useless trash, she grew even angrier.

—The Lord has definitely been deceived by this little bitch!

Lucy stood motionless, but her eyes were filled with a cold chill.

Her voice still held the tenderness of a child, yet the content of her words was sharp and to the point, completely unintimidated by the other woman’s aggressive display.

She resolutely took a few steps toward the group of fierce-looking adults where Annie stood and pointed out icily, “Not only are you stealing the fish the Lord caught and bestowed upon the slaves, but you even dared to spit in that pot!”

Before Annie could lash out, Lucy had already raised her voice. Her child’s voice, made incredibly sharp and piercing by her anger, shot through the window and reached the ears of those standing nearby. “You used the same pot when you made soup for the Lord! How dare you let the Lord drink soup cooked in a pot tainted with your disgusting saliva!”

“Damned little brat!”

Annie’s face flushed red, a mixture of anger and panic.

She wanted to grab Lucy and tear that troublemaking mouth of hers to shreds, but her chubby body was no match for the small, nimble girl. She could only roar in exasperation, “Lock the door! I’m going to cut out that rotten tongue of hers for spouting nonsense!”

The other servants, who had been watching in a daze, finally snapped out of it. A few of them surrounded Lucy, while another rushed to lock the door.

Trapped and unable to escape, Lucy watched as Annie grabbed an iron poker used for tending the firewood and advanced on her with a savage expression. Lucy was already preparing to jump out of the second-floor window—

“What do you think you’re doing?”

A calm voice, tinged with a hint of schadenfreude, suddenly rang out.

Lucy, who had been forced to the window’s edge, froze, not recognizing the speaker’s voice at all.

But Annie recognized it instantly.

The fat on her body trembled, and the ferocious look on her face froze completely.

She slowly turned around and, just as she expected, saw the male servant Johan—a man she had never gotten along with, who had clearly left with the Lord earlier but had somehow returned.

“Hmph, kitchen affairs have nothing to do with a male servant, I’m afraid!” Annie said, feigning composure. She preemptively pinned the blame on Lucy. “This damned slave girl stole the fish soup His Highness kindly bestowed upon the slaves and even spat in it. I was about to punish her. This is none of your business, Johan! Get out!”

“His Highness’s heart is indeed the kindest. It’s just that such kindness is always taken advantage of by wicked and despicable people…” Johan, however, didn’t move. He stared at her flushed face and said slowly, “That’s why Mr. Fosse and Knight-Captain Noel are needed to stand guard, to decisively drive these shameless parasites out of a place they don’t deserve to be—that is, by His Highness’s side. Wouldn’t you agree?”

The series of events that followed left Lucy feeling both bewildered and gratified.

The cook, Annie, who had just been shouting and making excuses, along with the few servants who were friendly with her and had erred alongside her, were all pinned to the ground and securely tied up by several strong male servants at Johan’s command.

After they were gagged and dragged away, several unfamiliar women who looked far more competent than Annie and her group entered. They bowed respectfully to Johan and began to clean up the mess in the kitchen.

Were they the new cooks?

“Although we don’t yet know if you can pass the great Cat God’s trial,” Johan suddenly leaned down and whispered with a smile to the bewildered Lucy, “it’s worth celebrating that you’ve at least successfully passed Mr. Fosse’s test for you.”

—That was a loyalty that would defend the Lord absolutely, even at the cost of her own life.

Fosse, who had spent the day with his most important young master felling trees in the woods, had been in perfect control of this little storm in the kitchen the entire time. And so, when Oliver returned to the castle after a long day and began to relax over dinner, the first thing he noticed was a difference in the taste and texture.

“It seems that clumsy cook’s skills have finally improved somewhat,” Oliver remarked with genuine feeling. “It’s all thanks to my dear steward. If it weren’t for you, Fosse, she would undoubtedly be the person I’d most want to dismiss.”

“In fact, the castle has just replaced the cook, Your Highness.”

With a slight bow, Fosse unhurriedly gave a brief account of the day’s events.

To Fosse’s surprise, the lord—who was usually softer-hearted than a real angel (after all, in the stories passed down in the temple, even the most holy and beautiful of angels would deliver a fatal blow to an apostate who violated the precepts without a moment’s hesitation)—for once did not voice any objection to the severe punishment Annie was to face.

For once, Oliver was truly angered.

In an environment where food and clothing were scarce, he had actually tried his best to be as tolerant as possible toward everyone who made mistakes—at least, what he, a modern man, considered mistakes—whether out of ignorance or deep-seated class differences.

If a slave, driven by unbearable hunger, had stolen and eaten the fish in the pot—even the entire pot—he would absolutely not have been displeased.

The reason he insisted on saving some energy every day after felling trees in the forest to go fishing was, in fact, quite simple.

He just wanted to do what he could to allow his subjects to supplement their nutrition a little through these means before they had a truly stable source of meat.

Even though the existence of the game system allowed him to obtain large amounts of food more easily than others…

That absolutely did not mean he could tolerate a bad apple like the cook.

Over eighty percent of the people in the domain did arduous work every day, yet because of the food shortage, they regarded their single daily bowl of hot fish soup as a “divine gift.”

As the castle’s cook, Annie had originally lived a comfortable life that countless people envied. Yet, for the absurd and laughable reason that ‘lowly slaves are not worthy of enjoying the fruits of labor from a cook who has always served only the lord,’ she had maliciously wasted precious food.

“All that fish was a gift from the merciful Cat God to His faithful believers who endure hunger.”

The lord, who always wore a gentle smile, now wore a rare, cold expression. “A despicable thief, a shameless liar, is fundamentally unworthy of being a believer of the Cat God… In her eyes, whatever kind of life a slave should live, let her go live that kind of life.”

That also included—”being fit only to grovel in the filthy mud and gnaw on rotten grass roots.”

In Fosse’s view, even if Annie were hanged on the gallows, her corpse pecked at by vultures until it was dried into a skeleton, it would be a deserved punishment for her actions.

But upon hearing Oliver’s decision, he still couldn’t help but reveal a gratified smile. “I understand, Your esteemed Highness.”

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