Unlike the arrogance and ostentation he had displayed in the Immortal Bastion, Karya kept a very low profile after arriving in Druna.
With the fluent Noxian he had picked up in the Immortal Bastion, along with his extensive knowledge of its business affairs, anyone who met him would have taken him for a Noxian merchant with refined artistic tastes who had come to survey the market.
As it happened, although Noxian merchants were few and far between, Druna had plenty of them. It was the northern trade hub of Noxus. Unlike the Immortal Bastion, thick with political intrigue and tangled webs of influence, Druna lay at the heart of the Dalmo Plains and was one of the few inland commercial cities in Noxus.
Thanks to the shipping advantage of the Dalmo River, goods from different regions were brought here for sale before being sent on to destinations across the empire. The city had the largest grain market in Noxus, where more than two-thirds of the privately owned grain—after taxes and additional levies imposed by the warbands had been paid—was traded wholesale.
That figure had once been a quarter. But after Noxus lost a series of state-owned farms along the Valoran Strait and coastal cities such as Basilich broke away, Druna's trade volume had not increased by much, yet its share of the overall trade had risen significantly.
That alone made it easy to see just how dire Noxus's economy had become after the empire split apart.
Darius had dealt with the old nobility with brutal ruthlessness, not only wiping them out physically but also confiscating all their wealth. Merchants, however, received remarkably lenient treatment from him. Compared with Swin, his commercial policies could even be called permissive.
Admittedly, that was partly because the empire lacked strength and had less control