The opening ceremony for the Bangka Highway offered little to draw much attention. Its only highlight was probably the brief speech Princess Royal Servini gave after Count Samo finished speaking.
Although the Princess Royal said little, and most of her speech consisted of congratulations on the highway's opening, her words clearly conveyed one very important message.
His Majesty the King wholeheartedly approved of private merchant guilds investing in highway construction and had explicitly expressed his support.
The representatives of the major merchant guilds present immediately grew excited.
With the Kingdom's royal family expressly supporting the idea, it clearly held great promise.
All that remained to be seen was whether the Xinfei Merchant Guild could make money from this highway.
That question vanished the moment a carriage from the Feilson Carriage Company returned to Bunta City.
The carriage had left Bunta City when the ceremony began, and it had now completed a round trip in less than a single morning!
Every merchant understood one principle: time was money.
Before the Bangka Highway was built, although Karma City was less than sixty kilometers from Bunta City, even the fastest carriage needed the better part of a day to get there.
Now that the Bangka Highway was open, the round trip took less than a morning. That meant a one-way journey took less than two hours!
Compared with before, this undoubtedly saved an enormous amount of time.
Not to mention that racing sixty kilometers in a carriage over those dirt and gravel roads used to jolt a person nearly to pieces. When carrying goods, carriages had to slow to a crawl to keep their cargo intact, and a single trip could easily take an entire day.
Now, however, the Bangka Highway's smooth cement-concrete surface meant carriages could travel along it with barely a