After a heavy snowfall, the season of bitter winter arrived.
The earth was blanketed in a thick white carpet.
Logically, in such cold weather that made travel difficult, the best thing to do was stay inside a home with its doors and windows tightly shut, sit by a warm fireplace, warm oneself by the fire, drink a little wine, chat with family and friends, get a good night's sleep, and wait out the harsh winter.
Yet unexpectedly, rows of strangely shaped carriages stood before the gates of Glan Territory Castle.
Each horse-drawn vehicle was pulled by a strong horse and dragged a square cart behind it. Twenty heavy sacks of grain, weighing roughly twenty Taren in total, were loaded into each cart.
The vehicles did not have their original pair of round, symmetrical wooden spoked wheels. Instead, they had two smooth-bottomed wooden boards with both ends curved upward—these were the sleighs invented by Zhou Ming.
There were four hundred grain-laden sleighs outside the castle. In a single trip, they could carry eight thousand Taren of grain to the Trading Post in Patton Territory, over sixty li to the north, at a rate of one trip every two days. Then another group stationed at the Trading Post would use similarly constructed sleighs to transport that grain to all the places where there was demand for it.
From the nearby Merlin Territory to Gagen Territory and Tingen Territory in the west... the final grain sales network spread across nearly all seven northern earldoms.
What surprised Zhou Ming was that the north was impoverished and harsh, with very few traveling merchants passing through. When the earls and barons of those seven earldoms heard that joining the Free Commercial Alliance would allow them to buy the grain they desperately lacked, perhaps driven to seek