My name is Claire, and I am the adopted child of a Baronet house.
I don’t have a family name yet, but if things take their course, I’ll be a Kamishiro soon enough anyway.
I had already abandoned my birth family's name when I entered the Imperial Officer Academy, as I had no desire to get dragged into a succession dispute with my brother.
(Since then, the house was elevated to a Viscount house, and I was personally ennobled as a Count.)
That said, my brother was also adopted.
We were raised without any discrimination, so I had no particular complaints. I considered my adoptive parents to be my real father and mother.
My only struggle was a slight, lingering anxiety regarding my identity.
My adoptive parents were a couple who had no biological children of their own. Perhaps because they worked in agriculture, they were naturalists at heart; they preferred adoption over methods like in vitro fertilization or test-tube babies.
My aunt-in-law never raised any objections either, treating me as her own niece.
Our family only entered the nobility in my father's generation.
Originally, our home was located on a planet far from the Imperial Capital—a tiny Baron territory.
It was a world where unmodified humans could barely survive. As was the case with many such places, the youth migrated to the capital, the aging population skyrocketed, and the settlement had effectively become a marginal village.
My father was the one who turned it around.
He had stayed on the planet where he was born and raised, serving as an executive for a local agricultural corporation. Since there were no young people left, he sought a new path forward by selling ornamental garden plants.
Initially, things went well, but that place was on the edge of the galaxy where the law of the jungle reigned supreme.
One day, pirates raided the territory, and the ruling lord’s entire family was slaughtered. My father stepped up, led the residents, and managed to wipe out the pirates.
In the aftermath, my father was appointed as a Baronet. Effectively, he was seen as a representative of the residents, though the Empire's stance at the time was essentially that they wouldn't formally recognize him as a proper lord.
There were no rewards for fighting at the risk of one's life. That was simply how the Empire operated back then.
Now, however, my father is a formal lord and a Viscount. This was almost certainly due to his connections with Veronica-chan—our Emperor—and Leo, His Excellency the Grand Duke.
My father eventually teamed up with a neighboring planet to open a shop in the Imperial Capital that served as both a product exhibition and a general supermarket. My mother and the rest of us moved to the capital as well, and we spent our days traveling back and forth between our home planet and the heart of the Empire.
We did everything we could just to survive.
Within months, that supermarket expanded to twenty locations. The joint venture father started with a trading company Veronica-chan is close with—a wholesale business—is also thriving.
Every day, my father and mother tell me how grateful they are to have such a wonderful daughter.
They were already quite old when they took me in, and now they have one foot in the door of their twilight years. I truly want to show them all the filial piety I can while they are still with us.
My relationship with my fiancé, Leo, is going perfectly well. I had worried he might have something to say about my hobby of watching pro-wrestling, but that turned out to be a groundless fear. If anything, he actually invited me to go see a match with him sometime.
I’m glad he’s such an understanding man.
Despite being in the middle of this expedition, I was currently handling a different set of duties. I was in contact with Sam Kamishiro—Leo's older brother.
Until just a few months ago, the management of the Kamishiro territory had been a living hell.
It was baffling. How could an agricultural planet near the capital, with such a massive scale of surplus land, be drowning in debt? It made no sense.
So, I asked Veronica-chan to dispatch an investigation team consisting of lawyers, accountants, and tax accountants. I am a lord's daughter myself, after all. I knew exactly how abnormal it was for a fertile, arable planet near the Imperial Capital to be hemorrhaging money.
In the past, Leo never breathed a word about his family home. If the local officials had just been blowing a bit of the budget on small drinking parties, I wouldn't have even bothered to complain. That sort of thing happened all the time.
But the results of the audit... they discovered that a massive number of people in the central organization of the Agricultural Cooperative were corrupt. They had teamed up with the Duke Association to systematically exploit planets whose lords were poor at management.
And they had been doing it for generations.
A furious Veronica-chan exposed the scandal, and the investigation's ripple effects spread to other nearby planets that had been victimized in the same way. It turned out that on those other worlds, the exploitation had led to a staggering number of deaths.
On Planet Kamishiro, things only ended with Leo sighing and saying, "Man, our house really is poor, isn't it?" but they managed to scrape by.
I wanted to shake him. Your house is a Marquis House, for goodness' sake!
Thinking back, the reason Ren’s family hated the Kamishiro clan was also due to pressure from the Duke Association. It was honestly a miracle that the Kamishiros had survived so long without a care in the world while being targeted by the Duke Association.
That was likely another manifestation of Leo's ability. It served as a reminder that in most places where Leo's eyes didn't reach, this world was nothing but hell.
Given the severity, the perpetrators likely wouldn't escape the death penalty. That was how deep Veronica-chan's rage went.
However, I didn't tell Leo the details. If I did, his ability might trigger and force a lukewarm resolution where everyone was forgiven. I couldn't allow that.
Passing the torch to Sam had a wonderful impact. By collaborating with my family on everything from cultivar selection to land reclamation and distribution, they secured enough productivity to actually improve the food crisis that had been haunting the capital.
Now, I've started to worry about the state of the Empire's overall economy and distribution networks. Veronica-chan felt the same; she often had a look on her face as though she were swallowing bitter medicine.
Regardless, the forces that had been obstructing Planet Kamishiro were gone. Sam became a regular fixture in economic magazines as a rising young entrepreneur. In his interviews, he showed off his excellent communication skills, humbly stating, "This isn't my own doing; it's all thanks to my brother and our allies."
He was the type who knew how to delegate to experts when he was out of his depth. The future of Planet Kamishiro looked bright.
Lately, I couldn't help but wonder... would the Empire have collapsed if Leo hadn't been here?
The previous Emperor died at the perfect moment (though it was an assassination), and because Veronica-chan ascended the throne, she was able to louse out the rot that had been building up for years. That was the only reason the Empire was breathing again.
If someone like Luna-chan had decided, "I'm bored of anime and games; maybe I'll destroy the Empire to kill time," the whole thing would have vanished in an instant.
In that sense, Leo really did save the Empire. Even if he just insisted, "It was all a coincidence~."
Despite all those heavy thoughts, I was currently facing a more immediate problem.
"Is that actually possible?"
"Yep! With my ESP, probably?"
I was speaking with Luna-chan. She claimed to be a bodiless information-based life form, but she was effectively the consciousness inside the Mother AI. If she ever got serious, she had the power to end the Empire herself.
And she had just made a proposal.
She wanted to create a physical body for Aoi-san.
Was such a thing even possible?