Cargo ships at the port have resumed loading and unloading, market stalls have been set up again, and patrolling soldiers patrolled along the city walls and streets repeatedly, maintaining a seemingly calm order.
Just because the problem has been suppressed does not mean that the problem no longer exists.
The belief system maintained by the church is actually one of the cornerstones for the rule to maintain stability and appease the people at the bottom.
Its function is actually a kind of spiritual opium. When a large number of bishops, church members and fanatic believers were executed in various ways, during this process, some people voluntarily gave up their faith in order to survive, while others had their faith collapse.
As a result, a large number of people have experienced extreme emotions, and many have even committed suicide.
In the slums of Pentos, those who used to go to the Red God church to pray every week lost their spiritual sustenance and began to drink and fight. Some people sat motionless on the streets all day long, losing response to everything around them;
Some people end their lives in various ways - hanging, drowning, taking poison, and even smashing their heads with rocks.
Bodies often floated on the river on the outskirts of the city, and soldiers patrolling the river would salvage them every few days.
In Lys, the low-level clerks and craftsmen who were originally responsible for maintaining the daily operations of City-States began to refuse to work for various reasons.
Some of them left City-States directly and fled to the countryside or further remote areas;
Although others stayed at home, they no longer completed any of the tasks assigned to them. The workshops stopped working, the docks were idle, and no one answered the door when the tax collectors came.
In Braavos, after those who once held low-level clergy positions in the Red God church were eliminated, no one took over the poverty relief and medical affairs originally undertaken by the church. As a result, the poor in City-States fell into deeper difficulties.
The result is that productivity at the bottom level has dropped sharply, and the economy and taxes have all dropped off a cliff.
The entire Free Cities economy has become a backwater.
The port's throughput dropped by nearly half in the first month after the cleanup operation ended, and merchants who were originally engaged in trade and transportation began to transfer goods to farther ports to avoid the Free Cities sea area.
Tax revenue subsequently plummeted, and the financial reserves of each City-States were depleted within a few months.
The mint stopped minting copper coins, the amount of currency circulating in the market continued to decrease, and prices continued to rise due to shortages of materials.
The poor people who were originally provided with soup kitchens by the church began to gather in the public square of City-States. Although they did not express any clear acts of resistance, they expressed their despair about the current situation with a silent presence.
These problems did not appear at the beginning, but occurred step by step.
It was already several months later when Douglas, Theora and Marcus noticed it.
At first, when the taxes they received dropped, the three of them didn't take it too seriously.
After all, just after three months of purges and turmoil, it is normal for tax revenue to be affected.
They feel that as long as some time passes, everything will slowly get back on track.
Douglas flipped through the tax reports from each City-States in Volantis's command headquarters, classified those declining figures as temporary fluctuations, then filed the reports and continued processing the next batch of documents.
Theora held a meeting in the governor's palace of Lys, requesting the governors of each City-States to strengthen tax collection, blacklist merchants and landowners who owe taxes, and restrict their trade activities.
Marcus at Braavos's Iron Bank headquarters adjusted its lending policy in an attempt to stabilize the market and prevent capital outflows by tightening money.
All three believed that these measures would gradually take effect.
It was only when all kinds of taxes and commerce fell but did not rise for a long time that they reacted.
Douglas saw lower numbers than last month in third consecutive month of tax report, Theora heard bad news from various City-Statess at Governor's meeting,
Marcus discovered in Iron Bank's account book that the lending business has experienced negative growth for two consecutive months.
The three began to search for the cause, and found that the problem was more serious than they thought.
There is indeed a problem with the mood of the people at the bottom, but the bigger problem is that with the newly appointed governor, the problems in the operation of the administrative system below are even more serious.
Frequent purges made everyone feel insecure, many people were inactive, and even a large amount of tax revenue was not collected.
The newly promoted governors and officials lacked experience and did not know how to handle the daily affairs of City-States. No one took over the social functions originally undertaken by the church, and the vacancies left by the executed old officials could not be filled quickly.
What's more serious is that many people choose not to act because they are afraid of being implicated. They would rather do nothing than take any risks, because if they make a mistake, they may be treated as dissidents.
Even the army has problems. A large number of slave troops even disobey orders.
Those slave soldiers recruited from Dothraki, prisoners of war, and City-States's lower classes were used as tools to suppress their compatriots in the clearing operations that lasted for several months.
They were ordered to kill those who shared their origins, those who believed in the same gods as they did, and those who, like them, struggled under the Redd taxes.
After continuous accumulation, this pressure began to erupt in the form of inactivity and refusal to carry out orders.
Some slave soldiers deliberately let go of civilians being searched during patrols, some delayed the execution of execution orders when they received them, and some even expressed their dissatisfaction with Redd's rule in private conversations at night.
Douglas personally dealt with some thorns, but the effect was not good.
Douglas knows that the army must not cause problems. This kind of resistance must be curbed.
He mobilized his personal bodyguards, plus the garrison in Pentos City-States, and ruthlessly killed slaves who dared to resist orders.
When nearly 20,000 corpses were buried in large pits, the remaining hundreds of thousands of slave soldiers no longer dared to disobey orders.
The reason why Douglas dared to do this was because he had already made plans to suppress the army forcefully after the chaos, and was even ready to use the fifty articles Demon Dragon at any time.
Demon Dragon took care of the entire process of trapping and killing slaves. In the end, the worst-case scenario did not occur, and the result was good.
Douglas made the right bet, taking advantage of people's fear of Demon Dragon, and successfully eliminated the signs of uneasiness.
Hundreds of thousands of slave soldiers with weapons finally did not dare to resist the dozens of behemoths Demon Dragon.
While Douglas is maintaining the stability of the army, he constantly replaces key positions in the army and installs his own cronies to ensure that there are no more problems in the army.
He promoted officers who performed well in the suppression operations to more critical command positions, and dispersed soldiers whose loyalty was questionable into different units to prevent them from forming a centralized resistance force.
He established a new military intelligence reporting system in the Volantis headquarters, requiring the garrison commanders of each City-States to report directly to him regularly, bypassing those intermediate levels that may be unreliable.