"Wings broader than the heavens; a back mightier than the earth; a tail longer than the mountain ranges..."
"All peoples worship together, the great Red Dragon in the heavens!"
"Fire is His Majesty's robe; the firmament is His Majesty's veil. Dark tempests and stormy rains bow to His Majesty's path; the earth is suspended in the void, filled with wonders and treasures..."
"How can such grace be repaid? His Majesty bids mountain springs flow down across the plains, and timely rains nourish every land..."
Seated on a wooden bench, a bard deftly plucked his lute. He opened his mouth to sing softly, his melodious music and voice echoing through the air.
People encircled the bard with clasped hands and closed eyes, chanting along in devout reverence.
They were singing the Hymn of Cassius, a piece widely popular throughout the empire. It was said to have been composed by a fanatical dragonblood bard, boasting an exceptionally sacred melody.
Meanwhile, the Song of Cinders of old had become a forbidden ballad, its very mention banned by imperial officials.
This was the most bustling and vibrant district in all of Isdalia—Emperor Square.
Centered around a vast stone-paved plaza stood several of Isdalia's most iconic landmarks—the Grand Coliseum, the Imperial Assembly Hall, the Empire Building...
All these structures encircled the plaza with magnificent grandeur.
Fountains, gilded cast-iron gates, and all manner of splendid architecture adorned the perimeter.
At the center of the square, a colossal statue of the red dragon loomed tall and imposing. Its pale golden eyes were deep and majestic, as if gazing down and inspecting everything around it.
Several gilded fountains jetted clear water, their crisp, splashing sounds blending harmoniously with the melodious music.
Emperor Square teemed with bustling crowds. People of all walks of life gathered here: Starfallen searching everywhere for quests, peddlers hawking their wares, bards performing in the streets, and drunken citizens stumbling about.
The choir was merely one small corner of this prosperous square; their singing could not even drown out the merchants' cries, let alone rise above the boisterous clamor of drunks in the taverns.
"Drink the strongest liquor! Be the strongest man!"
"Finest rye bread here!"
A tall, drunken man hoisted his mug. "The Redscale Conquerors are the mightiest legion in the empire! Mounted on wyverns, they're invincible! I'm going to the Garrison Post to sign up for trials too!"
"Bullshit!"
Another drunk sprawled flat across a wooden table, mumbling incoherently:
"The Dra—Dragon Oath Paladins are the strongest! Lord An—Anthony of the Dragon Oath Sanctuary once took on three foes alone and defeated the Lion Knights of House Bosque!"
*Smack!*
Another man slammed his hand on the table and rose, glaring disdainfully at the two drunks before splashing his ale in their faces.
"Shut the fuck up, both of you!"
"You think a pair of drunken heaps like you could ever become His Majesty's kin? You wouldn't even pass recruit screening!"
Such was the spirit of the empire.
Confident, martial, given to bold talk, and filled with boundless reverence for His Majesty.
Unlike the despairing hierarchy and stifling stagnation of the former Northern Kingdom, the empire provided channels for upward mobility, invigorating the populace with relentless vitality.
Nearly every imperial citizen harbored, to some degree, the ambition of becoming someone important.
A tall man cloaked in a gray robe sat in a corner. He leaned the greatsword from his back against his side and sipped his wine.
"To think Anzeta has become like this."
"Truly... incredible."
The man looked young, merely in his twenties, yet his eyes reflected a world-weariness incongruous with his age. Even his hood could not completely conceal his golden hair and pale violet eyes.
Blond hair and violet eyes had once signified noble blood in the Northlands, the hallmark of the scions of House Bosque, the Lion of the North.
Today, times had changed; those features had become a badge of guilt and villainy, prompting people to report them as remnants of the Northlands' old regime.
Indeed, he was Andre Bosque, the second son of Grand Duke Leo and the first noble to voluntarily betray the Northlands.
After the War of Northern Unification concluded, Andre had chosen not to remain in the military. Instead, he became an ordinary adventurer, taking on bounties to make a living.
Andre turned his head, watching the drunken brawl growing more heated by the second.
"What did you say?"
"I said—you pieces of trash aren't fit to be His Majesty's kin, spit!"
"You son of a bitch, you're worse than those cowardly northern nobles who pissed their pants!"
The verbal spat quickly escalated into physical shoving, fueled by alcohol until it flared out of control—the drunks were about to come to blows.
"Brawling is forbidden within city limits!"
Before they could exchange punches, however, a peace officer mounted on a wyvern descended from the sky, cheerfully pocketing this easy contribution reward.
The wyvern snatched one man in its left talon and two in its right, taking off toward the nearby security office.
A yuan-ti attendant inside the tavern deftly began straightening the overturned tables, chairs, and bottles, entirely unfazed by the scene.
Andre was rather amazed by this sheer efficiency. Back in the old Northlands...
A raspy male voice interrupted his train of thought.
"Little Andre, long time no see."
Andre looked up to see a familiar, wrinkle-lined face. Delighted and surprised, he rose to greet him.
"You are—Mr. Guges?"
The old man smoothed the lapels of his worn robe and laughed heartily. "Hahaha, Little Andre, the Northlands fell long ago. There's no need for such ceremony between us."
He pulled up a wooden chair, poured himself a cup, and raised it.
"Come, sit, have a drink."
"All right."
Andre clinked cups with Guges and drained the sweet wine in one gulp.
Mr. Guges was a scholar of great renown in the Northlands. Immensely erudite, he was said to have memorized the Northlands' entire thousand-year history, earning him the title of the 'Walking Stravburg Library.'
He had also been born of noble stock, but after the Grand Requisition, he had grown thoroughly disillusioned with the Northern Kingdom's corrupt rule, fleeing to Northwind Keep with what little wealth he possessed.
In fact, Andre's defection had been partly spurred by the old scholar's persuasion.
"Little Andre, go do what you believe is right."
"The Northlands is beyond saving. It is rotten from head to toe, foul pus seeping into its very marrow."
—Those had been Guges's exact words.
"All peoples worship together, the great Red Dragon in the heavens..."
The bard's melodic singing drifted in from outside the tavern.
Andre quietly watched the bustling Emperor Square, then turned to the elder with a serious expression. "Mr. Guges, you've lived in the Cinder Empire for several years now, haven't you?"
"What do you think... what kind of country is this?"
Guges brought the cup to his lips again, nearly soaking his bushy beard.
Hearing Andre's question, he chuckled and shook his head, then lowered his voice. "Just like its supreme ruler—a greedy, insatiable behemoth."
"Yet compared to those parasites of the Northlands, it is centuries, millennia ahead. It practically qualifies as a utopia," Guges made sure to add.
Andre's brow furrowed slightly as he sank into thought.
He had studied the empire's system in detail. Aside from the supreme imperial authority, the terms that appeared most frequently were 'freedom' and 'equality,' concepts that permeated the entire realm.
Yet he always felt something was amiss—this was not true equality.
It seemed this nation treated everyone as nourishment for its own growth, multiplying and expanding at an unimaginable speed.
In plain terms—the empire oppressed everyone equally.
"Mr. Guges, there is still one thing I don't understand. Why do they..."
As they chatted, Guges had polished off an entire bottle of wine, a slight flush creeping over his wrinkled old face.
"Right now, it hasn't reached its limits yet."
"If one day this empire ceases to be as advanced as it is now and is about to be swept away by the tide of history, I too will do everything in my power to..."
"Mr. Guges..."
Andre glanced warily around the room and clamped his hand over the old man's mouth.
Fortunately, the patrons nearby merely dismissed it as the ramblings of a drunkard and paid it no heed.
A smile appeared on Guges's face. Slumping onto the wooden table, he mumbled on:
"Little Andre, I... I've found the direction. Those Starfallen! They are an undiscovered treasure trove. Inside their heads lies knowledge that reveals the very nature of society..."
"I... I've already written it all down in my manuscript..."
...
A year passed in a flash. The snow across the northern wasteland melted for several months, only to pile up once more with the arrival of biting, freezing winds.
Yet the lives of the people here had undergone earth-shaking changes.
The Matra Farmland developed on an industrial scale. Imperial agricultural officers directed legions of skeletons to toil night after night, eventually even operating combine harvesters.
The organic fusion of magic, machinery, and labor unleashed unprecedented leaps in productivity.
Consequently, after the historic bumper harvest in September, the ruthless north wind brought no famine. People could purchase grain at fair prices, or at worst, sustain themselves on cheap canned goods from food processing plants.
According to official imperial statistics, this was the first winter in Anzeta's thousand-year history where virtually no one starved to death.
Furthermore, thanks to the development of light industry, cheap and warm cotton clothing became standard attire. People no longer had to huddle shivering before hearths; they could don their outerwear and head out to work.
It was also the first winter in Anzeta where fewer than five hundred people froze to death.
Everything appeared so wondrous on the surface, yet beneath that brilliance lay a profound amount of blood and tears.
The most dramatic transformations took place in the cities.
Factories sprang up one after another, forming cold forests of steel. Modern buildings lined the streets, and massive populations flooded into every city.
Most of them became diligent workers—cogs in the machine of urban industrial development, or rather, fuel and consumables.
Although imperial regulations provided basic protections for laborers, incomplete imperial statistics revealed that tens of thousands still suffered unnatural deaths—most perishing within factory walls, their records concealed from the public eye.
The empire maintained relatively strict oversight over key cities such as Isdalia and Northwind Keep, but its grip was far weaker in remote cities throughout the former Northern Kingdom.
Moreover, the empire's regulatory frameworks were still rudimentary at the time.
Darkness and disorder naturally festered as a result.
Immediately after the empire conquered the Northlands, dragonblood nobles and emerging merchants answered the official call to develop industry, pouring investments into factories across various cities.
In the period preceding the promulgation of the Imperial Labor Act, regulations remained patchy.
With the widespread adoption of steam engines and textile machinery, mill work was easy to learn and required minimal physical strength. Consequently, factory owners hired women and, above all, children in large numbers.
Owners preferred child laborers primarily for their docility and submissiveness, whereas adults were far less compliant. Moreover, child wages were extremely low, amounting to less than a third of an adult's pay.
To maximize profit, machines operated twenty-four hours a day without pause, and laborers worked continuous day-and-night shifts.
They rested in shifts. Under these grueling conditions, industrial accidents became commonplace—fingers severed by belts and limbs crushed in gears occurred with horrifying frequency.
Yet when workers sought compensation, they lacked the courage even to file a grievance against the dragonblood nobility, who wielded both raw power and political authority.
These inexpensive daily necessities were mass-produced. While most were shipped through the Imperial South Continent Company to the Fadlan region, a portion was sold domestically.
Even that modest fraction completely overwhelmed the traditional market. The Northlands' old artisan workshops and manufactories collapsed into bankruptcy one after another.
Craftsmen whose skills had been handed down through generations went broke, their shops bought out by factory owners. In the end, they were left with no choice but to enter the factories themselves, reduced to fuel for the engine of industrial progress.
With the abolition of slavery, the people were indeed free, yet invisible chains gradually wrapped around their bodies.
Where there is oppression, there is resistance.
Amidst the frenzied wave of industrial development, a small-scale uprising erupted in Rostin City on the empire's northeastern frontier. Workers smashed machinery and fled outside the walls.
Several sporadic rebellions followed in its wake, only to be ruthlessly suppressed.
Only then did the imperial authorities realize the gravity of the situation. Chief Minister Trump was utterly furious, publishing the far-reaching treatise *Vigilance Against Barbaric Development*.
His fury stemmed not from sympathy for the workers, but because this unrest harmed the empire's growth—and more importantly, violated the will of Cassius.
Thus, through the tireless day-and-night efforts of the Ministry of Justice, a succession of relevant laws and decrees were enacted, including the Imperial Labor Act and the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act.
Imperial judicial inspection squads conducted sweeps across various cities, throwing numerous offenders into prison and even dragging some of the overly oppressive nouveau riche responsible for triggering riots to the guillotine.
This crackdown, together with the earlier enforcement of the Imperial Company Law, was collectively known as the 'Great Clean-up Campaign.' It seared an indelible mark into the hearts of the people: imperial law was not to be trifled with.
It might not have been sacred, but the gleaming, blood-dripping guillotine proved beyond doubt that it could not be defied with impunity.
Yet light industries like spinning, ceramics, and leather processing were not the fastest-growing sectors in the empire. Only one industry yielded the greatest returns for the realm—the military industry!
In the south, the War of the Three Emperors raged with mounting savagery. Millions were ground to dust on brutal battlefields, while former mainstays of Fadlan power—godbloods, archmages, and construct golems—wreaked wanton destruction across the continent.
For the local populace, it was an unmitigated catastrophe.
Yet the worse it became, the better the empire's armaments sold. Business boomed for the Imperial South Continent Company, funneling immense profits to the conglomerates behind it.
Eventually, people began looking forward to war, praying for it to turn even more violent, and even actively instigating conflict—for only then would the gold flow in ever-greater abundance.
Nourished by blood and fire, a terrifying monster was steadily growing to its full, formidable stature.
Chapter 472