By the tenth morning of the Great Border Job Fair, the dust cloud rising from the eastern highways of the Central Continent was so wide that it looked like a golden mountain range moving west.
Pei Xuan stood on the top balcony of the newly expanded Eastern Border Customs Gate, holding his brass spyglass and watching eight parallel lanes of traffic roll non-stop into Great Yan.
When the hundred thousand Outer Disciples walked out of the Four Great Sects on the first night, they hadn’t forgotten their families.
Over the next nine days, every single miner, herb-grower, sword-polisher, and courtyard servant who received their ten-silver advance pay and moved into the heated red-brick apartments sent word back to their home villages in the valleys below the Four Immortal Mountains.
For a thousand years, the mortal blacksmith towns, silk-weaving villages, spirit-rice tenant farms, and carpenter guilds at the foot of the Four Sects had been squeezed dry by seventy-percent sect harvest taxes. Now, hearing that their sons and daughters had become respected salaried workers in Great Yan—and that Lord Pei Xuan offered ten-percent flat farm tax, free public cultivation schools for children, Two-Copper healing clinics, and zero kneeling laws—entire counties packed up and moved overnight!
