While the people of Shanghe Village followed the immigrants in learning how to grow vegetables, several hundred kilometers away, construction was also underway at Dark Bridge in Jiahai Commandery—a project unprecedented in the history of this world.
Tens of thousands of people had gathered along the coast at the northern end of Dark Bridge. Countless rammed-earth huts stretched across the land, their scale no smaller than a county seat of the Han Tribe. On the sea, countless sailboats formed a line, shrouding the entire strait between the mainland and Qiongzhou Island.
On the mainland side, the coastal mountain had already been stripped bare. Every tree had been felled and turned into building materials, along with a temporary wharf by the shore.
With a thunderous boom that shook the heavens, thousands of kilograms of Black Powder blasted the mountain apart, sending earth and stone flying and raising a cloud of smoke that blotted out the sky. Once the smoke cleared, several thousand prisoners of war, carrying Iron Shovels and pickaxes, were driven up the mountain by soldiers as meekly as quails. They filled Hemp Sacks with gravel, soil, and mud, then pushed cartload after cartload down the mountain, finally hauling it to the wharf to be loaded onto ships.
Although there were many of them, although they held pickaxes capable of easily smashing iron armor, and although they also wielded Iron Shovels sharp enough to chop off a head with ease, not a single prisoner of war dared to resist.
It was a joke. Anyone who had witnessed the Han Tribe's demonic art of splitting mountains and cracking rocks would be unable to summon the courage to rebel. Had they not seen those enormous boulders as large as houses blasted into pieces on the mountain?
Resist? With their heads against it?