The next morning, the sun rose over a completely transformed Three-River Province.
Along the wide, freshly paved Eight-Lane Spirit-Asphalt Highway leading from the interior of the Central Continent into Great Yan’s new eastern border, Ye Guhan stood on top of a roadside milestone wearing his yellow construction hard-hat and leaning on his heavy steel shovel.
“Not bad,” Ye Guhan nodded with a serious expression on his handsome face as he checked the flatness of the road with a wooden spirit-level. “Zero bumps for forty miles. Even if a merchant wagon carries ten thousand porcelain soup bowls at full gallop, not a single drop of broth will spill. My Highway Sword Intent has clearly advanced another step.”
Stretching as far as the eye could see toward the eastern horizon was a breathtaking sight:
An endless, ten-mile-long tide of merchant caravans, silk-draped noble carriages, ox-carts piled high with household furniture, and tens of thousands of independent wandering cultivators walking shoulder to shoulder toward Dry-Well territory!
For a thousand years, the Myriad-Pill Pavilion had held every mortal kingdom and independent cultivator on the Central Continent by the throat.
If a wandering swordsman got injured hunting monster beasts, he had to hand over five years of savings for one dirty, 40%-poison Rank 4 pill—and then spend the next ten years working like a dog to buy a five-hundred-stone detox pill so his meridians wouldn’t rot. If a mortal duke’s old mother caught a winter lung fever, he had to kneel on cold jade steps…
