For the past one thousand years across the Central Continent, sending a message to someone in another city was a luxury only kings, sect elders, and rich merchants could afford.
If a poor mother in the south wanted to know if her son guarding the northern border was still alive, she had to pay five silver coins to a caravan courier and wait three months for a crumpled paper letter. If a merchant wanted to send an urgent price update across five hundred miles using a Heavenly-Lock Communication Jade Slip, the Array Sect charged ten Spirit Stones per sentence to relay the signal through their mountain repeater arrays!
Even worse, if you accidentally wrote twenty-one words instead of twenty, the Heavenly-Lock relay array would cut off the last word until you inserted another ten Spirit Stones!
That afternoon, in the central square of Dry-Well Capital, Pei Xuan stood beside a mountain of five hundred thousand unbaked red clay roof tiles, ten crates of Thousand-Mile Sound Conch Shells, and fifty Enlightenment Bell Towers.
“Ten Spirit Stones just to send twenty words?” Pei Xuan shook his head as he looked at an old Heavenly-Lock communication receipt Abacus Su had found in the bank files. “No wonder half the merchants in the continent used to get cheated by middlemen! A farmer in the west sells his carrots for one copper a pound because he doesn’t know that three hundred miles east, carrots are selling for ten coppers!”
