Chapter 365 — A Commoner's Book
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
In the west of Xuanyao City, where trees grew thick and vegetation flourished, vast, sprawling forests supplied the nascent Cecil Territory with an endless stream of building materials, industrial raw materials, and even food. And north of this forest, hard by the Whitewater River, Frostwood Village was slowly coming to life with the rising sun.
It was a young village, yet orderly and brimming with vitality. Neat rows of wooden cabins stood wreathed in cooking smoke, and "new homes" of concrete and brick dotted the spaces between them. Broad concrete roads linked the village's principal buildings; regularly swept and governed by strict sanitation rules, these roads were clean and tidy, utterly free of the filth so commonly found on the roads of other regions in this age.
Every one of these features was an expression of "Cecil Order."
Bud, a woodcutter, stepped out into the morning sunlight carrying the warmth of a hot meal at home, which would help ward off the early-spring chill of the forest. A man who had felled trees all his life, he walked out onto the street, gave his nose—itching faintly in the cold wind—a vigorous rub, and headed for the reporting station.
Crossing the street, he glanced at the houses on either side, and the way this place had looked last year surfaced dimly in his mind.
He still remembered: when the eight hundred refugees of Cecil had first come to this land, it had been nothing but a pitifully crude logging camp. A few dozen woodcutters and a small squad of soldiers had arrived with axes and blades, pitched tents and thrown up fences. The original camp had not even been as large as the square at the center of today's village—and yet in less than a year it had become a village, and a fine, large village at that. Tents had become woodcutters' cabins; cabins had been expanded and multiplied into streets; supplies from the city poured in ceaselessly, just as the timber felled here poured ceaselessly back into the city. Concrete had appeared, shops had appeared, and this village grown from a logging camp had even been given a name—the lord himself had named it Frostwood Village.
Had he not lived through it all himself, Bud could scarcely have believed it had happened right under his nose.
More woodcutters appeared on the street. Bud greeted these friends, and they walked on together, chatting and laughing, until someone suddenly sighed, "This place has really changed."
"Course it has—we weren't idle over the winter, after all," laughed a big-bearded woodcutter. "We even put up a bell tower."
"Wonder what's changed in the city lately," Bud muttered. "Things move faster there than here."
"Last time I went into the city, they were putting up new houses on the west side. Said another two thousand people in the buffer camp had gotten that thing called—oh, citizen status," said the woodcutter who had spoken first. "But I haven't been into the city lately..."
Frostwood Village and Xuanyao City were linked by convenient roads and river transport, yet the woodcutters here did not often go into the city. Ever since it had become a fixed settlement and various village facilities had been established, Frostwood had gradually gained the ability to sustain itself, and the workers who had come here at the start had settled in as villagers. With so much work to do, and nothing much to do in the city on ordinary days, the people of Frostwood generally went in only once or twice a month. Their knowledge of the changes in Xuanyao City usually came from the accounts of the occasional visitor returning, or from the guards of the supply caravans that ran between village and city.
As they chatted, the talk drifted to guessing what had changed in the city, and whether the lord had come up with something new again. But they did not chat long—the reporting station was already before them.