Chapter 261: The Tin Knight and The Banquet of Madness (1)
The terms “meritorious retainer who helped found the nation” and “discarding a loyal subject after achieving one’s goal” were often treated as a set.
Indeed, a core talent who contributed to establishing a nation would naturally possess outstanding abilities, high reputation, and intense drive. While these elements were reassuring in the process of founding a nation, they often became obstacles in the process of strengthening royal authority.
Of course, not all founding monarchs simply struck down their meritorious subjects. Some rulers took good care of their meritorious subjects, saying they wouldn’t discard them after use.
However, many of these rulers often met the end of being devoured by meritorious forces that had strengthened to the point of threatening royal authority within a few generations.
As if to prove that this was the nature of power.
In this sense, the relationship between the Arcturus Imperial Family and the Lennart Ducal Family could be evaluated as quite the rare case.
The Imperial Family did not purge the Ducal Family, and the Ducal Family did not rebel against the Imperial Family.
The reason this was possible… to put it extremely, could only be described as luck.
There were plausible reasons, such as the strong loyalty between the first Emperor and the Lion Duke not wavering during their lifetimes, or the common recognition that there were still plenty of foreign enemies after the Empire’s establishment, so causing internal strife would only lead to mutual destruction. However, even these couldn’t be called fundamental reasons.
If there had been even one emperor among the successive emperors who fell into suspicion and inferiority complex, if there had been even one duke among the successive dukes who harbored excessive ambition, the relationship between the two families would have broken down regardless of such safety measures.
The fact that such misfortune never occurred even once and the two forces were able to coexist for nearly 200 years was indeed difficult to describe as anything other than “luck”.
However, unless one tampered with the dice itself, good rolls couldn’t continue forever.