Chapter 376
Emmanuel stood up from his desk and stepped through space to arrive in one of the palace's personal gardens. It wasn’t one of his or Carissa's favorite ones but it was empty and he needed to think.
The Empire’s economy was… not great.
Fighting a war nearly alone against three opponents was not easy, and it surely wasn’t cheap.
They had been digging deep and at most, they had another century before they would have been forced to throw in the towel solely due to mounting costs. And they certainly were not fine just because they pulled out before they had truly reached the bottom of the barrel. This was even in spite of the diversion of resources from the Farm.
For all its expenses, the military and its various support structures had been bolstering the economy as money flowed in and out of a million and one facets of the civilian and military economies.
With those institutions being shuttered, the core financial mechanisms had more money to spend on other things, but it also lost an easy way to circulate money back into the economy.
Frederic was doing a masterful job in keeping things balanced without a recession or inflation of mortal economies which tended to be the most susceptible to such fluctuations. The immortal economies on the other hand were not doing quite so hot and it was causing some political fallout.
Things should improve, as wealth from the other Great Powers began to flow in thanks to the terms of the treaties, but it would take centuries before that started to actually generate a meaningful impact and stabilized them. Normally, that wouldn’t be an issue, but the Empire hadn’t been truly robust since before Emmanuel had come to power. Since before his family came to power, really. They’d been stretched thin even before the war, and that had pushed them nearly to the breaking point.
Now? Emmanuel wouldn’t say that Matt’s Talent was solely, or even primarily, contributing to the solvency of the Empire, but the amount of mana he was receiving from the Ascender, paired with the times he spent producing mana using his Talents himself, was responsible for an uncomfortable amount of their mana bank.