Rus Wang promptly visited all the village alliances in the Levant Region, announced how the bloodshed would be dealt with, and told the elders to gather and discuss future trade and clear rules for handling all sorts of matters. At the confluence of several rivers, a huge temple rose from the ground. Even at night, its interior was as bright as day.
The elders and their guards traveled in small boats, carried safely to the gleaming white temple by the currents controlled by Rus Wang. They marveled at his "earth-shattering power," while each had their own plans for the meeting, which would decide the rules governing all matters, great and small, throughout the Levant Region.
At the meeting, Rus Wang described the outcome of the investigation into the bloodshed, an incident that had drawn the attention of elven elders throughout the Levant Region. He announced that the meeting would focus on preventing similar incidents from happening again. The elders from every village would discuss and establish laws that all villages would have to follow.
The first order of business was to standardize the chaotic barter trade that still prevailed throughout the Levant Region. Bartering between village alliances and their methods of pricing goods in copper ingots had to be unified. This disorder had been the cause of the large-scale bloodshed.
Once all the elders had arrived and the meeting began, Rus Wang placed a stone wrapped in copper foil and a solid copper ingot before them. They appeared identical in size to the naked eye. But when Rus Wang set them on an instrument called a balance, one side tipped sharply downward.
Some of the elders among the 439 villages looked uneasy, while those who had been cheated loudly praised Rus Wang's wisdom.
Seeing this, Rus Wang announced his new plan: to establish a trade center near the riverbank where they were meeting. Goods produced by villages across the Levant Region would be brought there by the most convenient means of transport, the river. Each year, every village would choose a Trade Inspector to live there. When a merchant caravan from a village arrived, it would conduct its trade openly and transparently under the inspectors' supervision.
The prices of the many disorderly goods would be set in copper. The 439 elders present would discuss the details and approve them by majority vote. They would also need to agree on laws prescribing punishments for various forms of fraud.
Since so many elves had died in the bloodshed, laws were needed not only for trade but for other matters as well. From then on, on the tenth day of the sixth month and the eleventh month each year, the elders of every village would gather there to ask Rus Wang to arbitrate disputes and to amend the laws they had discussed that year.
The laws were debated fiercely at the Temple Assembly that day. Only after Rus Wang announced that the discussion was over and they should eat and rest did the 439 elders, each with their own arguments, reluctantly disperse.
Rus Wang settled the 439 elders and their guards in 439 Roman-style courtyards that had risen beneath Temple Mountain, and provided each with a protective barrier.
When the sun rose the next day, Rus Wang's roar served as their alarm clock. After eating the breakfast he had prepared, the elders began forming factions, trying to win over more people so that laws favorable to their own village alliances would pass.
Among them were the elders Osuen and Liana, whose villages had been the first to merge. Their villages had been united for six years, and Liana was now pregnant with their second child. She should not have had to attend the Temple Assembly. But Rus Wang had summoned the elders of every village, whether it had merged with another or belonged to a village alliance.
Liana, the last elder of her village before its merger, did not dare defy Rus Wang's summons, so she came with her husband.
Fortunately, Rus Wang had noticed the situation and assigned Liana and Osuen neighboring courtyards instead of separating the young couple.
During the second day's recess from the Temple Assembly, the couple submitted a request to Rus Wang and the elders of the other villages regarding their merger. They asked that Liana's village be considered part of Osuen's village and that, from then on, it no longer send an elder to future Temple Assemblies.
Many elders were glad at the prospect of one fewer person taking part in drafting laws. Once they saw that Rus Wang tacitly approved, most of the elven elders immediately raised their hands in favor. But Rus Wang considered the village formed by the merger of Osuen and Liana's villages and more or less guessed why they had made the request.
It had already transformed from a village into an early city-state. A city-state of more than ten thousand people might have been unimpressive by the standards of Rus Wang's previous life, and the elves living within its walls still had to farm and raise livestock outside them. Even so, its elders, peacekeepers, and Citizens Assembly all hinted at the beginnings of a classical republic.
By the fifth day, the elders could think of no further additions to the first version of the laws governing the Elders' Assembly or to the prices of salt, grain, and copper ingots. Rus Wang announced that the laws would take effect that day. They were inscribed on stone tablets and placed at the trade center beneath Temple Mountain.
After returning to their villages, the elders had ten days to appoint inspectors and send them to live there. From that day on, no village caravan was allowed to trade privately; all trade had to take place there under the inspectors' supervision.
If the trade center proved inconvenient, they could tell Rus Wang at the second Temple Assembly the following year.
When the temple gates closed, the strange complex that had risen from the ground stood like a ghost town, with no elven elders or guards remaining in residence. But the next day, as caravans and inspectors from village after village arrived at the courtyards and trade center beneath Temple Mountain, the elves' torches lit the ghost town once more. More inspectors arrived, along with village caravans formed under the new laws and privately organized caravans, all gathering there to trade.
As more and more elven merchants gathered there, some elves who had formed private caravans chose to settle in the area with the craftsmen traveling alongside them. Gradually, the trade center, once merely a gathering place for caravans, became a settlement. Temple City was born. As the population grew, so did the disorder. Just as in the early city-state governed by Osuen, a Merchants Assembly and a police force emerged in the settlement beneath the mountain before the second Temple Assembly.
But the wealth the trade center brought to the city also drew the envy of nearby village alliances. Claiming that Rus Wang had failed to establish the legal status of Temple City's residents, they subjected them to arbitrary, coercive levies.
This enraged the elven settlers and prompted the market inspectors living in Temple City to report the matter to the elders of their respective villages. Tensions among the village alliances did not ease. Instead, they grew more intense as the villages closest to Temple City developed faster while those farther away fell behind.
At times, the conflict even crossed several red lines Rus Wang had once drawn for the elves.
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