The Villainess Wants to Make Her Husband Slim Down

CHAPTER 30

2.5 – 3

Hundreds of years ago, Mohnton was once effectively a penal colony.

Thinking about it rationally, compared to the green rolling hills and pastures of the rest of Sonnenlicht, Mohnton was a very different land.

It was always humid, with miasmic winds constantly on the air. A damp and horrible swamp like this, who would ever willingly move here? Your skin would crack and redden if exposed to the miasma for too long and if you were someone with strong magical energies, just coming into contact with it could make your powers run amok.

Yet it would make sense for exiled criminals to find themselves submerged in such a place, digging manastones out of the swamps as their skin was covered in sores. The well-established mining industry that operates throughout Mohnton had not yet developed back then. Manastone excavation was a difficult and hazardous task, that truly put a miner's body on the line.

There weren't just a few deaths either. But no matter how many people died, the manastone mining had to go on. For the war machine, for the study of sorcery, for royal prestige and to cow the nobility into obedience. Even if there were some sacrifices, they served their purpose.

Therefore, there wasn't much cause for worry if someone died as a result of the mining.

It was the House of Montchat and their vassals, the House of Ende, that organized and coordinated these mining efforts. This was also doing the Royal Family's dirty work. That was what it meant to be a shadow.

The Montchat family, who proudly boasted of their bloodline being a cadet branch of the royal family, was said to have kept their marriages within the family in order to keep their lineages pure. Other noble families in the territory followed the lead of their liege lords and did the same.

Of course, this was long ago now.

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Camilla didn't know much about the history of Mohnton.

She had known that it had a reputation for being a miasma filled bog, though it was a land rich with manastones. What she also had known that its lord was from a branch family of the Royal Family, although that lord very seldom visited from Mohnton, nor did anyone for that matter.

More than anything, Camilla simply had never been interested in Mohnton's past. You could say the same for most of the young daughters of the nobility in the capital. It was an eerie and enigmatic swamp. The lord was a bulbous and ugly toad. Who exactly would be interested in the profundities of a land that could make your skin fester simply through being licked by the wind?

In particular, back when Camilla was still in the capital, there was once a push to find a marriage partner for the head of the Montchat family. 'You seem delightfully enchanted with him, so why not marry?' would be the mocking words she would hear if she ever showed any interest in the Mohnton lands or the Montchat family.

Even when Camilla had been sent to these lands, she didn't care to learn anything further about the House of Montchat or the history of Mohnton. That was only natural. It had been completely against her will. She had no desire to marry that man. She even held a faint hope that everything might be cleared up and she could return to the capital, as much as she would deny that, so she never truly intended to immerse herself in the culture of the Montchat family.

But, she was beginning to rue her lack of studying.

"...I am not a criminal!"

"Of course you ain't. This all happened over a few hundred years ago."

As Günter melted a wad of butter in the frying pan to grease it, he bluntly cut through Camilla's angry shout.

"These days, when a criminal is locked up, that's usually just the end of it. That said, people don't exactly choose to come to a place like this if they can help it. This damp and depressing place."