"Guards, out of the city! Send word south..."
"Let them pass!"
After Yunzhong's messenger delivered the letter, by that very evening, another line of messengers rushed out of the Artisan Camp, following the straight, broad stone road as they sped south.
South from the Royal Capital of Tzintzuntzan, for more than a hundred li along the way, all was the heartland of the Capital Region. Prosperous farmland, manors, villages, and market towns lay everywhere. Thousands of Military Nobility and veteran samurai—or rather, the newly risen Military Landlords—had been enfeoffed here in concentration as the foundation of the kingdom's rule, continuously opening up vast stretches of new fields.
"Make way! Make way! The kingdom's transport convoy!..."
The roads of the Capital Region were all well maintained, with great numbers of merchants and travelers coming and going. Among the convoys along the route, the most distinctive was the transport convoy from the Black Stone City Mining Area.
A full squadron of more than a hundred samurai, each fully armed, led several times their number of cargo-hauling laborers toward the capital city. The laborers panted for breath as they pushed row after row of loaded wheelbarrows. Most of the carts in the front rows were covered with waterproof reed mats, but from the faintly revealed golden sheen, and from the heavy wheel ruts pressed into the road, one could tell that these carts were all fully loaded with valuable goods, equal in worth to one-third their weight in gold... bronze wares!
Yes. After several years of copper liao extraction and bronze smelting, the price of bronze ware in the Capital Region had finally fallen to one-third that of gold, clearly lower than among the surrounding states and tribes, yet still enough to drive the nations of the Old Continent mad. As for the