Chapter 556 — Migrants and Deserters
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Since the end of winter, Rock Fortress had been growing more prosperous by the day.
This new city in the north of Cecil had once been nothing more than a stretch of forts and plains south of the Rock Fortress stronghold. The Cecilites had torn down the walls of the old stronghold, leveled its former towers, and raised a new fortress city from the wartime ruins. Around its outer ring they built new "magic energy barriers," and along the banks of the Dolgon-Whitewater River they laid out a wharf plaza, bringing this land that had known war back to life.
At first, the people living in the city's inner keep were uneasy—they were residents of the old stronghold, who had once served the royal army garrisoned at Rock Fortress, and this awkward identity left them in constant fear of postwar reckoning at the hands of the Cecilites. But as the new fortress commander took office and the administrative office began to function, the Cecilites honored, one by one, the promises they had made when they took over the fortress: no purges, no forced conscription, no demolition of homes, no seizure of fields. Once these promises were fulfilled one after another, order at Rock Fortress gradually stabilized, and that growing order in turn set the newly built city of Rock Fortress running.
As a city designed from the outset to serve as a "window of exchange," Rock Fortress, once it began to run, swiftly turned prosperous.
This was the throat, the vital passage between the Holy Spirit Plain and the Southern Region, the route merchants had to take for north-south trade. To the merchants, the Southern Region seemed to hold an ever-unfillable gap in ores and magical conductive materials, while people everywhere in Ansu welcomed the alchemical potions and magic-net units from Cecil—the Dolgon-Whitewater River practically ran with rolling gold coins, so much so that the merchants doing business in Rock Fortress had coined a new saying: so long as you can haul a sack around Rock Fortress once, even a donkey will come away with pockets bursting.
And recently, the royal house had reached a new agreement with Cecil. Those sluggish nobles of Frostrest finally acknowledged the authority of the Southern Region Duchy, and Cecil opened more trade orders to the Holy Spirit Plain. Rock Fortress grew livelier still; new merchants were drawn here, and new goods began to appear on the cargo boats and wagons—cheap textiles, paper, and liquor from the south were added to Cecil's list of goods, and their low prices left merchants from the Holy Spirit Plain gaping. In a very short time, the goods flowing from Cecil to the Holy Spirit Plain were no longer limited to alchemical potions and magical conductive components—while what Cecil purchased remained, as ever, endless ores and magical materials...
Commercial prosperity made Rock Fortress develop at a breakneck pace. More and more outsiders were drawn here to settle—not only residents of the Southern Region, but also people from the Holy Spirit Plain who had left their homes for one reason or another.
At the entry-exit registration checkpoint on the wharf plaza of Rock Fortress, a line of new immigrants who had just come off the boats was filing through a narrow passage. This narrow passage and the rule of "queuing" were strange novelties to anyone crossing beyond Rock Fortress for the first time; they were not quite used to it, but the fully armed soldiers at the wharf could be relied upon to make them adapt quickly.
A red-haired youth with his head lowered shuffled forward with the line, looking altogether unremarkable. The lanky man ahead of him stumbled through his registration, and then it was his turn to stand before the "registrar."
"Name?" the registrar asked.
The red-haired youth shrank back a little, glanced around in what he believed to be an inconspicuous manner, and said quietly, "Sala. No surname, sir."
"Age? Trade or specialty?"
"Nineteen... eighteen. I've been a carpenter, sir."