The frigid wind came howling in, whipping up a blizzard. Every street and alley of New Dunkirk Port lay buried beneath several feet of snow. The old snow had yet to melt when fresh flakes began to fall. Layer upon layer of snow piled together, making the snow on the streets thicker and denser until it gradually compacted into a heavy sheet of ice.
Throughout vast New Dunkirk Port, only along the city's main avenue was there a small group of elderly people struggling to shovel away the snow with iron spades. As for the snow in the other streets, each household could only deal with it themselves.
Ordinarily, snow clearing was handled by large numbers of able-bodied men organized under City Hall's direction, completing the work with maximum efficiency. But this year, because of Arthur's conscription order, every able-bodied man in New Dunkirk Port had been called into the military. Now, there were certainly fewer than a thousand young and middle-aged people in the city between the ages of fifteen and forty.
And those people were basically New Dunkirk Port's wealthy men and nobles. There was no point expecting them to labor bitterly amid a blizzard.
Inside New Dunkirk Port's City Hall, the current mayor and a group of high-born city councilors sat in the conference chamber with furrowed brows, staring blankly through the wide floor-to-ceiling windows at the snowstorm raging outside.
"Firewood—this is a matter of life and death!" The rotund mayor finally spoke. "Without enough firewood, New Dunkirk Port cannot survive this winter. But as everyone knows, all the woodcutters of the five northern provinces have been conscripted into the army, so... there is no firewood for sale on the market anymore!"
An equally rotund councilor tapped the conference table before him in distress. "Even more shamelessly,