Chapter 263 — Spies, Excellent Spies
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Hearing Hetty's words, Gao Yang was not the least bit surprised, for everything had been exactly as he had anticipated.
Rising suddenly from the dead, returning suddenly to the Southern Frontier, founding a pioneer territory suddenly, and suddenly beginning to export cheap "secondary alchemical potions" and arcane machinery... The name Gao Yang Cecil was itself an eye-catching marquee, and combined with this string of events, it was impossible for the nobles of the Southern Frontier, great and small, not to grow curious about this rapidly transforming land.
The Ansu nobles of the present age were sluggish and slow. When Gao Yang had first begun his pioneer construction, most Southern Frontier nobles had simply not reacted at all; in their conception, eight hundred people running off to carve out a living at the foot of the Dark Mountains was simply courting death. Even if they survived, achieving self-sufficiency would likely take several years, and until then the entire pioneer territory would probably need to be provisioned by the royal family. So at the outset, they had not invested much effort here.
No one could imagine how those eight hundred people, under the leadership of Gao Yang Cecil, had managed to gain a firm foothold; nor could anyone imagine that in less than a year this land had already swelled to a population of over ten thousand, built towns, established a stable grain base, and even begun exporting goods and seizing profits. The sluggish Southern Frontier nobles had probably only been jolted into realizing the change when the Cecil territory's caravans came pouring into their own domains one after another. They opened their eyes to find merchants bearing the banner of the Cecil Chamber of Commerce already spread across the entire southern region, and only then did they slowly begin to act.
Well—relative to the prevailing noble system, the local nobles' reactions had in fact been quite prompt, but in Gao Yang's eyes they were still rather slow.
Gao Yang listened carefully to Hetty's report to the end, and only after she had finished did she give in to her curiosity and ask, "Ancestor, how did you know in advance that among the refugees who came seeking shelter this winter there would be a large number of spies sent by the nobles of various regions?"
Gao Yang said flatly, "Simple. The very fact that they could make it to the Cecil territory alive—that is the greatest cause for suspicion."
Hetty was briefly taken aback, then suddenly understood Gao Yang's meaning.
It was winter in Ansu, and the Southern Frontier was the most desolate place in Ansu. The wilderness here was far more dangerous and far vaster than the central regions, and especially for Cecil at the foot of the Dark Mountains, the surrounding transport conditions were even more appalling.
Under such circumstances, how had refugees—lacking food, short of warm clothing, frail in constitution, and without any means of transport—managed to walk all the way to the Cecil territory?
Cruel as it was to say, the fact remained: true refugees either would not migrate toward the Cecil territory, or would die along the way.
At this thought, Hetty could only sigh and shake her head slightly, while Gao Yang casually asked her, "The screening didn't cause too much of a stir, did it?"
The territory would suffer a severe shortage of population for a long time to come, and attracting outsiders would be a long-term policy. So even knowing there would be some "impure" fellows among the refugees, Gao Yang did not want the screening work to make too much noise. Once people were thrown into panic, not only would outsiders grow wary, but even the new settlers who had recently joined the territory might become unstable—and that was the last thing he wanted to see.