Two days later.
The Goddess of Flowers' Birthday finally arrived on schedule, without any strange signs.
Compared with its usual solemn academic atmosphere, Sumeru City had a little more of the relaxation unique to festivals that day.
Although the Goddess of Flowers' Birthday had failed to secure the Akademiya's support, with Dunyarzad's help, many enthusiastic merchants volunteered to set up stalls at the Sabzeruz Festival and refused her subsidies.
As they put it, opportunities to celebrate Lesser Lord Kusanali's birthday were rare, and the atmosphere mattered more than money.
In fact, thanks to the festivities, stalls at a celebration could often bring in three or four times their usual sales. The merchants added to the festive atmosphere while making a little money themselves. It was a win-win business proposition, so why not?
Although the Akademiya's higher-ups looked down on commerce as a lowly occupation, disdain was one thing; they still had to hold their noses and admit that Sumeru City needed merchants at present. Otherwise, who would supply the enormous daily needs for food, clothing, housing, and transportation of all those Akademiya scholars and the city's ordinary residents?
Thus, however overbearing the Akademiya was, it could hardly explicitly forbid these merchants from setting up stalls.
All they could do was crack down on those who stood out during the Goddess of Flowers' Birthday, such as the Zubayr Theater, which spread the arts.
This time, however, the Akademiya's tactics fell flat. Although they timed their intervention to halt the Zubayr Theater's performance and announced a ban on the arts,
with the Inazuma delegation's help, the troupe moved its performance venue from the Grand Bazaar to the Inazuma delegation's compound, escaping punishment under Sumeru's laws.
Perhaps the people of the Zubayr Theater realized that this might be their last public performance in