"...She cursed for two or three pages?"
"Not entirely. I saw charts below..." Hesta had not finished speaking when another email from Pakart appeared at the top of the inbox.
The three immediately huddled together.
"Dear Jane," Hesta read softly. "Your letter has been received. We will discuss it in detail when you return."
They fell silent.
"...What was that old woman thinking?"
Just then, someone knocked on the door. Several local young women invited them outside but would not say what for. After a few rounds of stalling and refusal, Zoe went out on behalf of the three of them, leaving only Hesta and Victoria in the room. Hesta closed her computer and relayed Vilsin's words exactly as she had heard them.
The smile on Victoria's face vanished almost at once. Then she asked the same question Hesta had—how exactly could this data be verified? Neither of them had an answer for the moment.
"If the data is real, Deep Anchor definitely would not let this place go... Who wouldn't want a stable source of Quicksilver Needles?" Victoria said. "Two to three hundred Quicksilver Needles would be enough to form a complete regional combat unit. Applied here, if four to six thousand pregnant women gave birth every year, the Quicksilver Needles born here annually would be enough to form a remarkably formidable fighting force."
Hesta returned to the computer and tapped at the keyboard. District 12's population data quickly appeared on the screen.
Over the past decade, the population figures released by District 12 had all been sourced from Emangria and the surrounding regions. The southern areas were basically excluded from the statistics. Of Northern District 12's roughly fifty million people, Emangria accounted for twenty-three million, sixteen million of whom lived in the urban area—and those sixteen million urban