Standing at the foot of the northern slope, looking at the mighty pass before him, Yang Zhengshan finally understood what it meant for one man to hold the pass against ten thousand.
The damn angle of the climb up the mountain was close to seventy degrees, and the great pass towered atop a ridge a hundred meters high. Let alone riding horses or taking carriages—even a person climbing up would be half-dead from exhaustion halfway.
Of course, that referred to ordinary people, but even martial artists who came here could only obediently climb, unless they were Innate Martial Artists.
This was the official road. Besides the official road, there were also small paths that could bypass Jianxia Pass, but those paths required crossing sheer cliffs and precipices. People could manage, but carts and horses definitely could not.
Fortunately, the Yang Family's guards and servants were all martial artists. Though they had spent quite some effort pushing the carriages up the slope, at least none of them had collapsed from exhaustion.
When they arrived before the gate of the pass city, several soldiers in worn-out armor were on duty, and a few men who seemed to be officials were collecting city-passage tax. Quite a few commoners were lined up, waiting to enter the city.
Yang Zhengshan frowned slightly as he looked at this scene.
Along the way here, he had truly witnessed just how poor the poorest places of Da Rong could be.
In the past, he had also seen impoverished commoners in Liaodong, but Liaodong's poverty was different from Yungui's poverty. Liaodong had vast land and few people, and most commoners had their own fields. Though a small number of tenant farmers lived bitter lives, it was not to the point that they could not go on—of course, that was