It wasn’t unreasonable for Horn to be angry; if he hadn’t happened to swing by on inspection today, he still wouldn’t know about this.

Originally, within the Holy Seat Mansion area of the ry Court Barracks, everything had been neat and orderly, fully compliant with the safety regulations.

Yet in this corner that Horn couldn’t see, they’d actually pulled this kind of stunt again.

Unwilling to let it go, Horn dragged Catherine and the others along to make surprise inspections at several more outlying construction sites, and everywhere it was the same damn sight.

He even went all the way to the docks, circling around almost the entire outer ring of the ry Court Barracks, but there was no difference.

Ask them why? The answer was performance metrics, looking good on the indicators, promotion, and the big settlement for the year 1457.

Horn knew that in the early stage, safety was impossible to manage that well.

First, there was no experience; second, they simply didn’t have that level of management.

But you can’t just not manage at all; Horn had set adulthood at sixteen, and that kid just now looked only thirteen or fourteen at most.

The civil engineering Monastery under the Holy Product system, along with its subordinate engineering teams, were directly violating the Anti-Child Labor Act, the Safety Regulations, and the Labor Protection Act.

His original intent in designing this set of performance indicators was that, on the premise of protecting the believers, he wanted all believers to live better lives.

Not to deceive and sacrifice one part of the believers so that another part could live better.

He knew this was hard, so when mistakes happened, he could tolerate them.

But that didn’t mean the presiding priests and monks should tolerate them, could tolerate them, or even proactively look the other way for the sake of political achievements.

In his line of sight, they behaved themselves; out of his line of sight, they snuck around in the shadows?

That scene just now might well be only the tip of the iceberg; who knew how much more he hadn’t seen!

Or was he making a mountain out of a molehill? Or was this just an isolated case?

Face dark, Horn leaned against the carriage wall, eyes tightly shut as the carriage rolled along the street, not saying a single word.

The entourage around him didn’t dare speak, barely even dared to breathe; even Catherine and Petier, sitting with him in the carriage, opened their mouths several times only to close them again.

Fortunately, halfway along, Horn finally spoke: "I’ve already ordered the Cheka to investigate. Don’t worry, I won’t raise the butcher’s knife lightly."

Seeing that Horn was still rational, everyone in the carriage breathed a sigh of relief.

Seeing their expressions, Horn instead smiled faintly and tried to ease the mood: "What’s this, are you all that afraid of me?"

"You’re the Saint’s Grandson, and also the Pope, after all."

Catherine added, "And if you wanted to, it wouldn’t be hard at all to make heads roll like a torrent."

In the eyes of the people of the Holy Alliance, Horn and the Holy Father and Saint Master were practically the Holy Trinity; there wasn’t really any difference between the three.

Although Horn, as head of state, rarely interfered in day-to-day government to a certain extent, that was because he was unwilling, not because he was unable.

Under the system of the Holy Alliance, Horn’s authority as Pope was unlimited.

Horn knew this, and he also feared that this tidal wave of power would swallow the Holy Alliance, so the greater his power, the more carefully he used it.

Which was why almost every time he used it, it was like a thunderclap—enough to make everyone’s blood run cold.

"I saw a lot of new houses going up. How many people live in the ry Court Barracks now?" Horn turned the mood a bit lighter.

"Around one hundred sixty to one hundred eighty thousand." Edwin answered without missing a beat. "For the exact figure, we’ll have to wait for the year-end census."

"That many?" Even Catherine was a bit surprised.

Petier explained with a smile, "Those gentry and nobles who lost land in the redistribution, if they want to leave the Holy Alliance, have to pay a 65%–80% Holy Product exit tax.

They’ve lost their land, while the Holy Alliance’s industry and commerce are booming.

Egged on by quite a few of the newly transformed upstarts, they all poured into the cities and started investing in various businesses.

These nobles aren’t idiots; they can see the potential of Spring Mechanism.

Each one is fantasizing about investing in a single invention and striking it rich overnight. If you ask me, they’re dreaming shit."

Catherine recalled something and couldn’t help sighing: "No wonder there are always old nobles jumping off the clock tower in Rapids City..."

Listening to their talk, Horn fell silent once more.

With the development of the Holy Alliance and the debates at Spring Castle, he had successfully established the Holy Alliance’s orthodox legitimacy.

Thanks to the Holy Alliance’s near-imperial-top administrative efficiency and business-friendly environment, plus its superb geographical advantages—

Massive amounts of capital were flowing in from Falan, Leia, and even Norn.

Bonds from the Thousand River Valley had already become the trendiest financial product in Falan.

The better the Holy Alliance developed, the more bonds they bought, the more they profited, which naturally led them to buy even more.

On the surface, it looked like they were extracting large sums of money from the Holy Alliance, forcing it to pay Falan a huge sum every year.

But all they carried away was a heap of precious metals, while what they left behind were piles of workshops, canals, hydraulic projects, and agricultural plantations.

At times, Horn himself felt moved by their "no homeland, only the believers" selfless spirit.

What’s more, those precious metals would soon be sucked back along the canals by the sugar, spices, and liquor produced by the workshops and farms.

The more they bought Holy Alliance goods, the more industries the Holy Alliance created, the more it earned—a positive feedback loop.

Take Red Leaf Hill as an example: it had basically abandoned its original sugar trade and was now so utterly immersed in acting as an agent for the Holy Alliance’s financial products that it had all but forgotten the Holy Father.

And the whole Falan Kingdom had been swept up in a craze of speculation and arbitrage; even the grannies at the village entrance were talking about it.

But that was no business of Horn’s; it was your choice, Your Highness Charles VIII.

The Holy Alliance’s government credit was rock-solid; when it said it would pay, it paid, never once defaulting.

The Falan Kingdom, on the other hand, was reduced to forcing judges to mortgage their own property to borrow money from the populace.

Why force judges to mortgage their own property?

Because the royal family’s collateral was simply not credible, while judges had bought their offices, so they obviously had money.

Where did their money come from? Naturally they had businesses of their own.

So the people who bought their way into office ended up treating officialdom as a side gig; running their enterprises was their main job.

Helping the crown borrow money might make them look bedraggled, but once a lawsuit came up, scenes like "Who are you, standing before this court, to dare sue me, an official?" became common.

But that was Charles VIII’s problem, Falan’s problem.

Horn, however, faintly sensed that similar problems were emerging inside the Holy Alliance itself.

This construction incident was a wake-up call for him.

Even though it was only a gut feeling, he still keenly sensed that something was off.

Establishing the Court of Judgment in advance had been the right move; as the Holy Alliance got rich, all those water conservancy and canal projects meant one thing: flows of capital.

Especially after the Holy Alliance’s wealth surged and Falan’s funds poured in, the sheer volume was so huge and complex that oversight lagged behind.

In projects like the slope reservoir in Mountain County and the joint wheat-and-rice planting program in Kasha County, there had even been people daring to dip into the Holy Treasury.

The Holy Alliance had actually absorbed a large number of former priests, former Tax Collectors, and former Stewards, turning them into auxiliary forces in local administration.

Many of them had come out of the Trinity Education Team.

It wasn’t that Horn, while physically in the Holy Alliance, had his heart set on the Knights; it was that without these people, local governance simply wouldn’t function.

Horn knew that unless he could create some kind of robot to replace the bureaucracy, corruption could never be completely eradicated; at best, he could only launch periodic campaigns to swap out the blood.

In fact, Horn had even left a back door open for the bureaucrats.

If you got things done, if you developed your region and the believers enjoyed the dividends, then you had ability.

As for the leftover money, if you turned it into welfare for your own department, Horn would just turn a blind eye.

On the surface, this Holy Alliance seemed to be running smoothly—but was that really a good thing?

Horn seriously doubted it.

In the beginning, the Holy Alliance’s institutional framework had been bare, so he’d had no choice but to employ those old bureaucrats.

Now, with secondary schools and universities at all levels established, waves of literate and devout young people were starting to graduate.

Horn would send them out as Wandering Cultivators to train, then slowly use them to replace those local bureaucrats.

Precise excision, constant transfusions of new blood, stability ensured.

This plan had always operated smoothly; he just didn’t know if it was because the Purification Chief and the Chief of Judgment had both gone to the front that corruption cases had suddenly spiked recently.

Whether from the Audit Office or the Advisory Council, leads and denunciation letters had been coming in constantly.

Previously, Horn had thought this was normal; it meant the Purification Court and the Court of Judgment were functioning well, catching lots of corrupt officials.

But now he suddenly realized: if the Purification Court and the Court of Judgment were really working well, how could the number of denunciations keep rising?

At the very least, the curve should be one spike, then a drop, then another spike, and so on.

After sending Catherine and the others away, Horn sat alone in his empty, silent office, lost in thought for a long time.

"Bring René, Raphael, and Duvalon to me."