Waves rolled across the sea, and shoals of fish gathered by the lakeshore. From the Kingdom's West Mountain Port on Golden Bay—that is, San Francisco Bay in later generations—another eight or nine hundred li north brought one to the bay where the Wiyot lived, to the Kingdom's Lake Bay Port.
This Kingdom port, founded after the young Priest Xi Feng heroically devoted himself to the cause and married the Wiyot woman chief, absorbing hundreds of tribes, now already had fifteen hundred people!
In barely a year, Lake Bay Port's population had grown by seven hundred. Among those seven hundred were more than sixty of the core people replenished by the Longship, four or five hundred local Wiyot assimilated through marriage... and more than two hundred able-bodied Miwok men, deliberately transferred from West Mountain Port with a year's stored grain to migrate there as reinforcements.
Such preferential treatment had never been seen before among the Kingdom's many strongholds on the West Coast, leaving priests everywhere red-eyed with envy. And the reason Lake Bay Port received such favor was precisely because of the iron-ore mountain range in the eastern mountains, because before leaving, the blacksmith Ootani had led his apprentices in building a Vertical Furnace for Iron Smelting! Now, this two-meter Iron Smelting Vertical Furnace had finally accumulated another seven or eight thousand jin of pyrite ore, enough to light the fire and open the furnace!
"Blessings of the Main God! Light the fire, open the furnace! Produce more iron!..."
At Priest Xi Feng's shout, the furnace fire flared up with a whoosh. Charcoal burned rapidly, the bellows continuously pumped in air, and black-gray smoke kept rising, gradually turning acrid.
The Kingdom's blacksmith apprentices all lowered their heads and busied themselves, almost everyone wrapping a crude, damp cloth around their faces to