Reincarnated as the Crown Prince
Chapter 49: The Smell Beneath the Progress Part 2

Chapter 49: The Smell Beneath the Progress Part 2

The next morning, the headlines in La Voz del Pueblo read:

REGENT WALKS THE SEWERS: A PRINCE IN THE GUTTERS

Below the bold typeface was an etching—a hand-drawn image of Prince Lancelot crouched beside an open sewer drain, sleeves rolled, boots caked in mud. It was not a staged portrait. A local artist, witnessing the event, had captured it from a rooftop using charcoal and instinct.

The image spread across the city faster than any decree.

In the northern quarters, aristocrats sipped tea and muttered that it was unbecoming of a prince. In the tenement rows of Lavapiés and Embajadores, it was pinned to every door. Children pointed and whispered, "He really came." Laborers, who once saw the palace as distant marble, now spoke his name with a newfound sense of ownership.

But symbolism alone wouldn’t fix the crisis.

Inside the Ministry of Urban Works, Lancelot gathered with his core team. Alicia stood to his right, and Chief Engineer Bellido—an aging man with oil-stained hands and a scowl etched into his face—unfolded a new map across the table.

"This," Bellido began, "is what we were trying to avoid."

He pointed to several black dots drawn along the southern basin of the city.

"These are outbreak zones. Confirmed cases of dysentery and waterborne fever. Small clusters for now—but give it a week, and it spreads faster than fire in a cotton mill."

Alicia leaned over the table. "We have to quarantine."

"And cut off water from half the districts?" Bellido barked. "We don’t have the pipes for a full reroute!"

Lancelot interjected, calm but firm. "We’re not rerouting everything. We’re decentralizing."

The room paused. Even Bellido raised an eyebrow.

"Every neighborhood gets its own localized filtration unit. Simple gravel, sand, and charcoal layers. Nothing complex—just enough to purify well water and runoff from minor pipes. Get the blueprints copied. We’ll employ district masons and laborers directly."

"Community filters?" Bellido asked skeptically.

"Exactly. We build them fast, cheap, and in bulk."

"People will need to be trained. It’s not going to be easy at first, but they’ll learn."

"Then we start training today," Lancelot replied. "In every public square, in every church courtyard. Use town criers, schoolteachers, even innkeepers. If someone pours piss down a clean drain, I want them scolded by their neighbors before the guards ever find out."

Alicia gave a faint smile. "That might actually work."

Lancelot pointed to another part of the map. "Now—about the sewers themselves. How many workers can we mobilize if we offer triple pay for hazard duty?"

Bellido ran the numbers in his head. "A thousand. Maybe more if we call on the railroad crews. But we’ll need gear: lanterns, boots, ventilation rigs."

"You’ll have it," Lancelot said. "Raid the military stores if needed. The war is over—let’s put those supplies to use."

By the end of the week, Madrid was alive with movement—but not the panicked chaos that had been feared.

In every district, makeshift workshops were built overnight. Masons pounded stones into basins. Children passed buckets of sand, stacking them like treasures. Elderly women volunteered to cook hot meals for the sanitation teams, and students from the newly opened technical school drew chalk diagrams of water filtration units for passersby.

It was not pretty. It was not clean.

But it was working.

In the district of Arganzuela, Lancelot visited a newly completed filtration well. A group of young boys had painted his sigil—the crowned lion—in bright yellow beside the structure. "For the Regent," it read, written in crooked but proud handwriting.

He chuckled. "Did you all build this yourselves?"

One of the boys, no older than ten, puffed his chest. "We helped dig the pit. My uncle’s a mason!"

Lancelot knelt. "Then your uncle’s a good man. And you—you’ve done more for the city this week than most men do in a year."

The boy beamed.

Beside him, Alicia whispered, "Public sentiment is rising. You’ve turned a crisis into solidarity."

He nodded slowly, watching the people work.

"But it won’t last if we don’t solve the core."

That evening, back in the palace, Lancelot convened a final meeting. This one, smaller and sharper. No mid-level clerks. No assistants. Only Alicia, Bellido, and Finance Minister Darias.

"We’re fixing symptoms," Lancelot began. "But the cause remains: poor urban design. Our sewer network was built for a Madrid that no longer exists."

Darias adjusted his spectacles. "Expanding the whole system would take years and millions."

"Then we think bigger," Lancelot replied. "No more patches. I want a second-tier sewer system beneath the existing one—deeper, wider, with proper slope. Brick-lined. Ventilated. Designed from scratch."

Bellido gawked. "That’s... monumental."

Lancelot looked him dead in the eye. "So was this kingdom. So was the war. So is peace."

Darias interjected, voice cautious. "We’ll need funding from the Cortes. The industrialists may resist—they’ve already been taxed heavily to fund the hospitals and rail expansion."

"Then we don’t ask for donations," Lancelot said. "We offer shares."

"Shares?" Bellido blinked.

"We create the Madrid Urban Works Company. State-owned, but open to private investment. Dividends paid through municipal service contracts. Every factory owner who benefits from clean streets and healthy workers gets a stake—if they pay in."

Darias sat back, clearly impressed. "You’ll turn a public works project into an economic engine."

"That’s the idea."

Alicia smiled faintly. "That’s why they follow you."

He didn’t answer.

He only stood, walked to the window, and looked out over the city—still smoky, still scarred, but no longer stagnant.

A month later, as the new sewers began to break ground beneath Madrid, foreign delegations arrived to observe. From Glanzreich, from Britannia, even from Prussia, architects and sanitation officials walked the scaffolding and marvelled at the plans.

One Glanzreich noble reportedly muttered, "They fight like steel and build like Rome."

And above them all stood Lancelot, sleeves rolled, boots dusty, explaining the angle of the new drainage slope to a bewildered diplomat.

The prince who once marched across Europe had returned home—and began again, one stone at a time.