His Majesty the Candel Emperor stared silently at a document on the desk before him.
It was merely an intelligence report, yet it sat atop all the other documents, marking it as the most important matter he had to address that day.
The report was thick, running to nearly ten thousand words, but in essence, it described just one thing.
Xu Yi had returned.
"That fellow... why couldn't he simply stay on the Demoncloud Continent and never come back? Or... wouldn't it have been better if he'd just died there?" A bitter smile tugged at the Candel Emperor's lips.
In truth, his feelings toward Xu Yi, the Xinfei Merchant Guild President, had always been complicated.
Purely from the Candel Empire's perspective, he ought to have been deeply grateful to Xu Yi and the Xinfei Merchant Guild he represented.
First, the Xinfei Merchant Guild had brought farmland magic machinery. It had also worked with the Elf Race, obtaining the plant-growing abilities they had always refused to share with other races and using them to develop fertilizer.
With the help of these two things, grain production in the Candel Empire had soared, increasing nearly tenfold compared with thirty years earlier, before the Xinfei Merchant Guild had appeared.
Such an astonishing increase in production meant the Candel Empire no longer had to worry about famine. Its rule naturally became far more stable, with no need to fear unrest caused by disaster-stricken refugees.
Even if disaster struck a vast area, the Candel Empire's annual grain reserves would ensure that it caused no problems.
In the past, this would have been unimaginable.
Of course, there were many more things that would once have been unimaginable.
In His Majesty the Candel Emperor's view, the improvement in transportation ranked second only to the increase in grain production.