The consequences Xu Yi and the Xinfei Merchant Guild had to bear for cooperating with other races went far beyond the sensation it caused.
Unlike the publicity generated by that sensation, which raised the Xinfei Merchant Guild's profile, many of the other consequences could easily harm the guild.
One problem that had long troubled the Xinfei Merchant Guild, for example, was its employment of so many members of other races. Although they gave the guild enormous advantages that other merchant guilds could not match, they also made management considerably more difficult.
Even humans divided themselves into groups, let alone people who did not even belong to the same race.
When the Xinfei Merchant Guild had still been relatively small, this problem had not been particularly noticeable. But now it operated more than three hundred factories producing various kinds of magic machinery, and its total workforce had surpassed a staggering hundred thousand. With both human employees and employees of other races increasing dramatically, the problem had grown more serious by the day.
Among the Xinfei Merchant Guild's hundred thousand-plus employees, humans still formed an overwhelming majority, numbering more than eighty thousand.
As for the other races, there were more than eight thousand dwarves and fifteen thousand orcs, but only a little over three thousand elves. In practice, most of those elves were not directly under the Xinfei Merchant Guild's management.
Judged purely by numbers, then, human employees vastly outnumbered employees of other races.
Among the employees of other races, only a small number of elves were directly employed by the Xinfei Merchant Guild, so they could be disregarded. The dwarven employees, however, occupied a large number of positions as highly skilled technical workers and even mechanical engineers thanks to their talent for forging and smelting. Their standing was considerably higher than