The morning sun rose over the three western provinces, casting long golden shadows across a sea of dust and ruins.
For three hundred years, the western borderlands had been treated like a penal colony by the Imperial Court. Corrupt governors sucked out copper, silver, and spirit grains, leaving behind crumbling mud huts, poisoned wells, and abandoned strip mines. When the monster tides surged from the western wastes, the governors packed their gold into carriages and ran, leaving three million honest folk to fend for themselves.
Now, those three million people stood along the ridge lines, gazing into the valley below in stunned silence.
Lin Mo stood on the hood of an all-terrain spirit transport, holding a steaming metal mug of black tea.
Beside him, Master Lu Jian unrolled a massive golden projection scroll. Tang Xiaomi rapidly calculated geological coordinates on her brass jade computer, while Chief Magistrate Han Yu led three thousand young Taichu civic officials dressed in crisp dark grey tunics.
Every single young magistrate under Han Yu carried a bright green moral score above eighty-five out of one hundred. They carried surveyor levels, legal boundary stones, and ledgers for distributing land rights, rather than tax whips and iron chains.
