By early autumn, the winds of the Northern Frontier already carried a biting chill.
In the northern district of Red Tide City, a cordon of solemn, red-armored knights surrounded the newly built freight platform.
Few people had been allowed into the inner cordon. Apart from the black-robed clerks of the Interior Office and the gray-uniformed surveyors of the Roads Office, there were only a dozen invited caravan representatives and several veteran craftsmen granted special permission to attend.
A ring of residents watched from the distant slopes outside.
Their faces were red with cold, but their eyes remained fixed on the parallel rails stretching into the gray-white mist.
"Damned weather..." Reto hunched his shoulders, trying to tuck his frozen chin into the fox fur lining his collar.
He looked barely past twenty, dressed in a well-tailored but rather thin silk formal suit from the South that made him stand out among the fur-clad northerners.
This was his first time accompanying his father to Red Tide City.
"I don't understand why we have to stand here swallowing cold wind," Reto complained to an unremarkable, scrawny man beside him, stamping his feet.
He had no idea what the man's name was, only that he, too, had been invited by Lord Bradley, the chief administrator of the interior.
"Hey, listen." Reto sniffed, his tone full of the arrogance of a major trading house's young heir. "My father is the chairman of the Golden Wheat Trading House. He only sent me to fill his place because he had urgent business to handle.
"The Interior Office called this some kind of epoch-making moment? Hah! All because of two iron bars laid in the mud?"
The scrawny man beside him was named House, and Reto's arrogance did not anger him.
He wore coal-dusted work clothes-the uniform of