Three days after the peaceful takeover of Frost-Gate Fortress, the cold northern border looked like it had entered a completely different century.
Along the newly extended Northern Trunk Highway—sliced flat through the rocky mountain passes by Sword Genius Ye Guhan (who had been promised an unlimited lifetime pass for Old Guo’s spicy beef-tendon noodles) and paved smooth by the territory’s gravel rollers—a constant stream of emerald-green Dry-Well Express Vans and chugging Scorpion-Track Cargo Trains rolled back and forth day and night.
Trains heading north carried thousands of tons of cheap Red-Sand coal, coarse salt, giant Meat-Potatoes, and purple spirit-rice from the Southern Black-Soil Granary. Trains and Express Vans heading south carried northern wool, fine furs, mountain iron ore, and fresh butter!
Even better, Pei Xuan spent 2,000,000 LP in the Fusion Cube to connect the Five Northern Fortresses to a newly fused Spirit-Coal Central Floor-Heating Pipe Network, modeled after Dry-Well City’s dragon-heated floors!
Inside Frost-Gate Fortress, the three hundred thousand border citizens and soldiers who used to lose fingers and toes to frostbite every winter now walked around indoors in thin cotton shirts, drinking hot mung-bean tea while their children practiced the comic-strip Furnace-Blood Scripture in warm, bright public classrooms!
