Sister, I'm the Queen This Life (330 Chapters Left to Complete) - Chapter 330

Sir Elco remained silent on the floor, pinned down for a long while. Then, he struggled to lift his head.

Alfonso gave a wordless nod to the knights, his face expressionless. The knights who had been holding Sir Elco down immediately and uniformly released their grip. In the space they vacated, Elco barely managed to pull himself up, fixing Alfonso with a fierce glare.

“That was all—all of it—to make you the noblest man on the Central Continent!”

Prince Alfonso’s expression didn’t flicker. He merely folded his arms and stared sharply at Elco. Before the prince, Sir Elco cried out passionately.

“We’re weak! Galico is a great power!!”

Tears welled in his one remaining eye—not the fake moisture he’d squeezed out earlier, but genuine tears now, brimming with frustration and indignation.

“Gunpowder, heavy cavalry, standing infantry! Tax collection through central administrators instead of feudal lords or private contractors!”

The Kingdom of Etruria had delegated traditional levies like land and poll taxes to feudal lords. For newer taxes—such as customs duties, tolls, or textile levies—it hired local merchants or prominent citizens as royal tax collectors.

“If we don’t emulate Galico—if we don’t absorb how Galico leaped in a short time from a third-rate agrarian state to a superpower—there’s no hope for us!”

Because private collectors could pocket whatever they didn’t remit to the central government, they became especially ruthless.

Over time, being appointed a royal tax collector became an enormous privilege, and both those vying for it and those who secured it eagerly bled the common people dry.

Compared to Galico’s system—in which centrally dispatched officials collected a fixed amount and returned—it was inefficiency beyond comparison.

“Unless we import advanced civilization and acquire strategic weaponry, the fragile Kingdom of Etruria won’t survive the next generation’s contest!”

As Sir Elco said, defense was indeed a problem. The Kingdom of Galico possessed gunpowder, a strategic weapon. There was even a bitter joke that the Yessak War was the last cold-weapon war.

Gunpowder technology was monopolized by the southern elite within the Moorish Empire and thus never sent to Yessak, a peripheral province on the empire’s northern edge and merely a loose member of its confederation.

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