--The Eastern sea merchants smoothly passed the plague-detection magic inspection conducted by the priests of the Temple of Life.
--The Eastern sea merchants submitted a manifest of their cargo to Vias Customs and requested that the Vias Mage Corps salvage the goods from the wrecked ship for them. To recover goods worth over ten million gold coins on the Western Continent, their leader, Ximen Feng, had already paid the Vias Mage Corps three million gold coins in labor fees.
--These Eastern sea merchants, who had reached Port Vias in the hurricane, rented out a mid-range hotel in the harbor district to house the several hundred sailors from the wrecked ship. Their lavish spending left the owners of the other sailors' hotels in the harbor district green with envy, for Ximen Feng had paid one hundred thousand gold coins in advance.
--Ximen Feng led a large group of attendants and companions into the Golden Mountain Hotel, which had only been open in Vias for a few days. This hotel was private property of the Longshan Family, an establishment so extravagantly luxurious under Alda's perverse taste that every teacup there was worth over a thousand gold coins. Ximen Feng generously scattered a mountain of blue gold coins and booked out the Golden Mountain Hotel for three months!
Lin Qi sat in a cigar lounge across the street from the Golden Mountain Hotel, smoking a cigar, drinking rum, and leafing through the intelligence reports constantly delivered by his agents. In barely fifteen minutes, another three hundred intelligence agents had been stationed inside the Golden Mountain Hotel, achieving round-the-clock surveillance of Ximen Feng's group without a single blind spot.
In the streets and alleys around the Golden Mountain Hotel, the residents of nearly half the private homes had been replaced by Longshan Family intelligence