Changning Guard, Ping'an Town, Dingpu Ferry.
The ferry road paved with cement looked especially clean after the spring rain.
All the buildings at the harbor had gradually been replaced by cement-brick-and-tile structures, their storefronts lined up neat and orderly, as if one had stepped into some harbor town on modern Earth.
After expansion and renovation again and again, the current Dingpu Ferry was less a "ferry" than an inland river port.
Cargo ships docked one after another at the ferry, transporting all kinds of mid- to high-grade daily goods required by the Wang Clan: salt, crude iron, refined copper, porcelain, cooking oil, and various special materials, and so on.
Today, the small Ping'an Town already had a permanent population of 110,000, with a transient population of no fewer than 20,000. Its land development and population density were both extremely high.
Moreover, the people of Ping'an Town were quite wealthy, with extremely strong spending power. This also attracted frequent visits from merchant firms large and small, as well as traveling merchants.
Compared to more than twenty years ago, when Wang Shouzhe had first taken charge of the Ping'an Wang Clan, the atmosphere could no longer be spoken of in the same breath.
In addition, quite a few Rogue Cultivators came to Ping'an Town every day to try their luck, either taking on some of the Wang Clan's externally contracted tasks, or heading beyond the domain in groups of three to five for a bit of adventure.
For several hundred li outside Zhouxuan Pass, the area had been swept clean again and again by the Wang Clan and some of their in-law clans. Fierce Beasts had already become "rare materials." As a result, the level of danger for Rogue Cultivators had become very low.
They scoured everything in the Outer Domain that