Pine Forest Village was the name of this village beside the dense forest, far from any city. The name sounded rather elegant, as if some down-and-out poet passing through had stayed at a roadside inn, lamented through a mouthful of wine about why he'd been demoted again, and casually named the place. But in reality, the villagers had simply smacked their foreheads and come up with it themselves: there was a pine forest behind the village. ※If there had been a rocky slope behind the village, let's see if they could still come up with such an elegant name—I refused to believe they could think of the three characters for Shijiazhuang.
Though remote, this village was not particularly small, nor did it look especially poor. It might have been located right on the border between that Hassad Duchy or whatever it was and this country, so travelers occasionally passed through here from the forest and mountain roads, allowing the little village to maintain just the right degree of prosperity. There seemed to be around a hundred households here, their homes scattered in neat disorder along both sides of a small river running through the village. Before the village was the forest we had just emerged from, while behind it stood an imposing mountain. The terrain on either side of the mountain gradually leveled out before suddenly rising again, so it was probably part of a mountain range. The small river running through the village paralleled the range, curving into the mountains in the distance. It looked like snowmelt flowing down from the peaks. With high mountains at its back, vast woods before it, and even the river through the village descending from the mountains, this was quite an isolated place. From the perspective of large-scale economic development, it was definitely