Soldo looked taken aback as he tilted his head quizzically. He clearly hadn’t anticipated I would ask a serious question. “Why, you ask... I cannot say for certain, but perhaps there were only three influential families of prominent royal blood at the time the judgment was made?”

I couldn’t readily accept Soldo’s proposed explanation. For those three families to have come out on top of the fierce political struggles and then maintain their position for hundreds of years... No, there had to be some kind of deeper reason. Maybe now they held their positions simply because that was the status quo, but there must have been some initial reason they had been able to keep them in the first place.

It was like how inRomance of the Three Kingdoms, there had been a three-way deadlock between the warring factions that had prevented the concentration of power within a single family. Come to think of it, the Tokugawa family had had three branches too... Sure, I was getting off topic, but cramming the facts of history into your head was pointless if, in the real world, you couldn’t explainwhy things had turned out the way they had. Thanks to my newfound interest in history, I was now coming to understand that the reason you studied the past was so you could use it as a guide for the future. Maybe my failure to realize that in my past life was one of the reasons I had never managed to achieve anything of note.

If I hadn’t awakened, this would probably be around the point where I’d lose any interest in studying and attempt to distract Soldo with fruitless questions. But I wasn’t that child anymore.

Ultimately, my desire to understand thewhy of history was unnecessary for a short-term goal like studying for entrance exams. So I left the question be, and Soldo continued his lecture, moving on to the rank of marquess as my hands semiautomatically took notes.

Nine distinguished marquesal families were spread across the sprawling lands of the Kingdom of Yugria (saying that, I still had no idea of the actual size of this kingdom). Each family had a vast estate of their own, and each also served as a minor ruler over the counts, viscounts, and barons within their region. In other words, this kingdom was composed of nine large regions, every one of them led by a marquess that often—overtly or otherwise—fought in his or her own interests. Each region featured a Noble College, a large branch of the Explorer’s Guild, and various other establishments and institutions. The children of noble families who hadn’t managed to enter the Royal Academy generally enrolled in the Noble College of their own region, just as my older siblings had done.

The next rungs on the hierarchy belonged to th