Chapter 349 — The Exiled Heretics
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
In the lord's study of the Cecil Territory.
The recent population immigration reports had been delivered to Gao Song's desk. Gao Yang read every figure on them with uncommon concentration.
The situation was much as he had expected. With the arrival of the Month of Revival, a new wave of immigration had begun, and this time the number of refugees entering the Cecil Territory far exceeded the number of purchased farmhands and slaves.
News that the Cecil Territory accepted refugees had spread through the whole of autumn and winter, and by now it had reached every corner of the southern provinces. Even the most poorly informed common folk knew that the frontier territory hard against the Dark Mountains was absorbing outsiders almost unconditionally, and that anyone on that land had a chance to obtain land, a house, and the status of a free citizen. Throughout the Frost Month of the previous year, Gao Heng had pushed this matter forward without stinting any effort, and now at last the results were showing.
Knight Byron had used his old mercenary connections to post a great many hiring notices across the south, and he had honored every single transaction. The merchants who ran ships and caravans had tasted profit in the process and built up sufficient trust in the Cecil Territory, and so the work of ferrying refugees entered a kind of virtuous cycle.
By now there was no longer any need for Knight Byron to send men out himself. Fixed "immigrant caravans" traveled between the various territories conducting this "newly risen trade." Those caravan masters who were bold and careful and on good terms with the mercenaries could find displaced people in all sorts of places, or petitioners who for various reasons wished to go to the Cecil Territory. Carrying permits issued by the Duke of Cecil, these merchants transported such people to the Cecil Territory free of charge, and then collected payment from the civil administration office according to the number delivered. Some mercenaries even laid down their swords, bought a few covered wagons, and began doing similar business, gathering refugees and immigrants and sending them to the Cecil Territory. It had become a regular trade...
And in the course of this, Gao Yang had struck out several times against lawless and reckless behavior, executing in a single batch those criminals who sought to traffic in people or mistreat immigrants. This set the rules for the "trade," and stamped the notion that Cecil's laws were strict into the minds of those merchants and mercenaries.
But what pleased Gao Yang more than the growth in numbers was the improvement in the occupational structure of the new immigrants. In the previous year, those who moved into the Cecil Territory had been almost entirely slaves and vagrants with no skills at all. People like artisans and scholars would under normal circumstances never sink to the point of homelessness and selling themselves into slavery, so such skilled talent had all been "poached" at great expense. But among the most recent batches of arrivals, there had already appeared skilled craftsmen who came of their own free will. The appearance of such people meant one thing: the Cecil Territory's appeal was growing.
People held stubborn suspicions and prejudices about this land at the foot of the Dark Mountains, and that would be hard to change in a short time. But the Cecil Territory had truly established its footing here, and it offered exceptionally generous treatment to skilled talent. Driven by sufficient profit, human suspicion and prejudice would give way.