(A passage was added to the previous chapter. If the chapter you read was around two thousand characters long, you might want to go back and take another look...)
Pan Long followed the main road and reached the county seat of South Five-Finger Mountain County in just two days.
Yun Province had been the last of the Nine Provinces to be established. Its mountains were high and its roads treacherous, with range after range carving the land into scattered fragments. It was said that in the early years of Great Xia, the entire population of Yun Province had been smaller than that of a single prefecture in wealthy Yang Province.
The Great Xia Dynasty was powerful and had masters as numerous as clouds, but even it had no answer to Yun Province's terrain. Elsewhere, one mountain range could be called a natural barrier. Here, one barrier ran straight into the next, while the arable land between the mountains was usually too small and barren to support many people.
Di Jiazi, a ruler of grand ambition, had once tried to develop Yun Province. The Great Xia Dynasty had masters capable of transporting vast quantities of supplies into it. He had even enlisted True Person Grandmasters from every quarter, and Demon Gods as well, to carve through the mountains by force and open a road among the peaks.
But that was as far as he could go.
Even masters could carry only so many supplies. For Yun Province to develop fully, the masters of nearly half the Nine Provinces would have had to become porters. And Yun Province's mountains were linked to the earth's veins. Cutting through one or two was one thing, but cutting through too many would shake the earth's veins across the Nine Provinces and bring catastrophe.
Di Jiazi