Julian had long known that the Islanders were "yellow-bearded" and "cunning-faced." They had darker skin and pupils, with more cunning-looking features. Their noses were higher than those of other races; many had hooked noses, more pronounced brow ridges, and relatively small mouths. Moreover, the shape of an Islander's nose was one of their defining traits, commonly called an "Isle Nose"—hooked, with an inward-curving tip, thick nostrils, and a drooping nose tip. In any case, they were no good. They called themselves the Kingdom of Deception; even the king of the island enjoyed deceiving civilians and profiting from war.
Half a month earlier, Julian had discovered a group of such people arriving in the Flame Dragon Empire and beginning to hoard land. But they found that the Flame Dragon Empire had a policy: each person could own only two houses, and those who had made no contribution to the nation were not qualified to live near Flame Dragon Castle.
So these Islanders went overseas to find refugees and use them to obtain houses in the Flame Dragon Empire. Two houses per person meant land. In just half a month, they found more than seven hundred people and bought over fifteen hundred plots of land, all of them extremely large. These Islanders then gathered the land together and built a town, preparing to create a nation within a nation and rule it themselves. Then they began stockpiling goods, viciously disrupting the Flame Dragon Empire's market. A fresh egg that civilians of the Flame Dragon Empire bought in the morning suddenly cost half again as much.
These incidents had long drawn the attention of the Dragon Guards. Out in the northern suburbs, so many houses had appeared for no apparent reason, and they even called themselves the "Isle Branch." Since when had the