Chapter 328 — Good News From All Sides
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Ropeni Glan watched the figure of Viscount Carrol disappear through the door leading to the banquet hall, and slowly a cold smile crept onto the corners of her mouth.
She understood perfectly well why Viscount Carrol had said that poison could also be a good medicine for curing illness. It was indeed true, for over the past few decades the Viscount Carrol domain had been the vital thoroughfare from the southern lands to the Holy Spirit Plains. If medicinal herbs from the Kant domain and other parts of the south were to be shipped to the Holy Spirit Plains, they almost invariably had to be gathered in the Viscount Carrol domain, assembled into large caravans, and only then transported north. And beyond medicinal herbs, a considerable portion of the south's various products—ordinary ores, arcane materials, furs, and the like—also passed through the Carrol domain checkpoint. From the very beginning, then, the Carrol family had been adept at the trading business.
They were a family that did not engage in production, yet they seized enormous profits by controlling a vital artery of transport. Thus everyone in the Carrol family shared a habit of thought: they did not care who the goods came from, only whether the goods could be sold through their hands.
They could do business with Count Horsman and eagerly answer Count Horsman's call, because Count Horsman could provide arcane-net technology, and the Carrol family could sell that technology to the great nobles of the Holy Spirit Plains for a hefty sum. But Ropeni firmly believed one thing: if Cecil Territory were willing to hand the Carrol family the alchemical potion trade—a business almost equivalent to flowing gold coins—then Viscount Carrol would appear in Duke Cecil's reception room within four days.
If the roads were a little better, then two days.
Viscount Carrol had a keen enough eye to perceive the current state of Gaoyang Cecil's creations permeating the entire southern lands, and to scent danger in it. But he had misjudged that danger. He believed himself a mere reseller, and so thought he could stand apart from it all. Yet Ropeni Glan knew very well...
What that Duke Gaoyang Cecil was doing was by no means as simple as seizing money, nor merely infiltrating and probing for intelligence on other nobles' domains. Though she could not yet work out the revived duke's precise goal or the means by which he would achieve it, she was well acquainted with this style of operating—openly plotting an overt scheme that left everyone with no choice but to step into the trap.
Her husband, when he was alive, had been much the same sort of man.
And for that very reason, she knew exactly where the most terrifying aspect of such an overt scheme lay.
Viscountess Ropeni Glan turned around, her sunken, cold eyes gazing at the splendid lights in the courtyard and at those Horsman household guards who already carried alchemical potions on their persons as standard supplies.
She knew well that with these alchemical potions, those Horsman soldiers already held an overwhelming advantage when fighting ordinary nobles' private troops.
And once the arcane net was laid and the arcane machinery in the mines installed, these soldiers would be equipped with even more and finer metal blades and armor, and the mage towers on this land could obtain an endless supply of magical power.
And Count Horsman himself would simultaneously gain enormous wealth.
This was the most terrifying part: no one could refuse Gaoyang Cecil's gift. So long as one person accepted this "poison," then all who refused it would only die sooner than those who swallowed it.