As it turned out, what Hafra and his two companions had experienced in Lalu City was not an isolated case.
After the Lampari Kingdom and the Candel Empire signed their new mutual trade agreement, Hafra was naturally far from the only merchant who saw the opportunity in it.
Over the past few months, large numbers of merchants from the Lampari Kingdom had poured into the Candel Empire, bringing vast quantities of goods with them.
With these useful, inexpensive goods from the Lampari Kingdom, the merchants had all made a fortune in the Candel Empire.
Normally, this situation would have continued. Since the beginning of May, however, more than a dozen incidents had occurred in the Southern Province of the Candel Empire in which merchants from the Lampari Kingdom were arrested, their goods confiscated, and then expelled from the country. This had drawn considerable attention.
The officials of the Southern Province explained these incidents by claiming that the merchants from the Lampari Kingdom had violated certain Candel Empire administrative regulations, or even imperial law, and provided various pieces of evidence to support their claims.
But anyone with a discerning eye could easily see that the Southern Province was deliberately targeting these merchants from the Lampari Kingdom.
Similar incidents targeting Lampari Kingdom merchants occasionally occurred elsewhere in the Candel Empire, but nowhere else were they so frequent or concentrated as in the Southern Province.
Moreover, the involvement of the Southern Province's authorities was obvious in these incidents, making it difficult to see them as anything other than deliberate targeting.
The question was, why was the Southern Province specifically targeting merchants from the Lampari Kingdom?
This was something the Lampari Kingdom very much wanted to understand. Queen Servini even went so far as to write a letter herself and send it directly to