A full month had passed since Lo Quen's victory over the Others and the Ice Dragons at Moat Cailin.
Though the bitter cold of winter still lingered across Westeros, the vitality of a rising dynasty had already swept away much of the shadow left behind by war.
Over the course of this month, Lo Quen had been occupied not only with governing the realm, urging nobles in every region to return to their lands and restore production, but also with arranging Yi Ti settlements and overseeing the crossing of the Lysene to immigrate to Westeros.
An unprecedented mass migration was underway.
On the Narrow Sea, a colossal fleet of hundreds of vessels, large and small, cut steadily through the gray, rolling waves, heading toward the Land of the Setting Sun.
These ships flew Lo Quen's dragon banner. Their holds were not filled with exotic treasures or luxury goods, but with living people.
Immigrants from the continent of Essos.
Over the past several years, thanks to the immense transport capacity of the Asabhad and Qarth merchants, combined with Lo Quen's policies that encouraged childbirth and provided settlement funds, the number of immigrants gathered in the Yi Ti settlements of the Third Daughter had reached a staggering seven to eight hundred thousand.
After the Battle of Moat Cailin ended, Meizo, who was stationed at the Third Daughter, received the king's latest orders.
All available merchant sailing vessels were to be mobilized to transport, in successive waves, two hundred thousand civilians converted from Lysene slaves and five hundred thousand Yi Ti civilians. A total of seven hundred thousand people were to be sent to Westeros.
The primary landing sites were designated around King's Landing and Duskendale in the Crownlands, near Lannisport and Casterly Rock in the Westerlands, as well as in the southern regions around Oldtown and Highgarden.
This immense flow of migrants was divided into multiple batches, each setting sail one after another.
Backed by Braavos's enormous reparations, the settlers received sufficient supplies and settlement funds. Carrying both unease toward the unknown and hope for a new life, they stepped onto unfamiliar shores.
All two hundred thousand Lysene settlers were to be resettled entirely within the Crownlands.
With King's Landing and Duskendale reduced to ruins by war, vast stretches of land in the Crownlands lay abandoned.
These newcomers could only disperse among shattered villages, reclaiming wasteland and rebuilding their homes from the ground up.
As for the five hundred thousand Yi Ti immigrants, plans were made to settle three hundred thousand in the Crownlands, one hundred thousand in the Westerlands, and another one hundred thousand in the Reach.
They brought with them cold-resistant wheat seeds cultivated in the Third Daughter.
These crops offered higher yields and greater resilience, giving them a clear advantage during the long winter.
When the fleet carrying settlers bound for the Westerlands slowly sailed into Lannisport Harbor, gasps rippled across the decks, followed by a silence as heavy as death.
The scene before them bore little resemblance to the "greatest port of the Westerlands" they had imagined.
Lannisport's former prosperity had long since vanished without a trace. What greeted their eyes was an endless expanse of ruins.
Crumbling walls stood everywhere, charred beams jutted toward the overcast sky, weeds choked the streets, and cold wind howled through empty window frames like a mournful lament.
The entire port city looked like an abandoned corpse, devoid of any sign of life.
Among the migrants, a middle-aged man named Mollen tightly gripped his wife's calloused hand, while his other arm held their young son close.
Mollen had once been an ordinary farmer from a village near the ancient capital of Tiqui, his family farming barren land there for generations.
But the chaos of warlord conflicts led by figures such as Pol Qo had ravaged his homeland.
His village was burned to the ground. His relatives were scattered and lost.
Forced onto the road as a refugee, he begged his way through hardship after hardship, until he was finally "recruited" by a Qarth merchant and brought to the Third Daughter by sheer luck.
In the Third Daughter, he met his wife, who had also fled from Yi Ti. The two depended on each other to survive, and in the immigrant settlement, they had a son together.
Life was still hard, but at least they were far from the flames of war and had a place they could call home.
When he heard that the great "God-Emperor," His Grace Lo Quen—also from the East, and now ruler of the Seven Kingdoms—was calling for settlers to travel to Westeros and reclaim new lands, Mollen did not hesitate for even a moment.
He felt an almost deified sense of gratitude and reverence toward this legendary king.
It was the order and hope brought by Your Grace that had allowed an ant like him to survive, even to have a family of his own.
"Is this where we'll live from now on?" his wife asked softly, unease in her voice.
Mollen took a deep breath and nodded firmly, a steady light shining in his eyes. "Don't be afraid. His Grace brought us here. This is a land of hope. No matter how barren it looks, could it really be worse than the flight and famine we endured? We have our hands and our feet, and we have the seeds bestowed by Your Grace. We can rebuild our home."
After disembarking, the settlers immediately threw themselves into clearing Lannisport.
They hauled away rubble, leveled the ground, and repaired whatever houses could still be lived in.
Like many of the men, Mollen worked tirelessly, sweat soaking his clothes as he labored day after day.
Within a few days, the harbor district had begun to take shape.
Soon after, an even larger expansion plan began.
Hardworking Yi Ti settlers formed small teams and followed broken roads inland, heading toward the ruins of villages in the Westerlands that had already been trampled into nothing by the horsemen and the Ironborn.
Mollen's family was assigned to a place called Stone Raven Town.
It was said that this had once been a small town famous for its fine stone and gold.
After several days of hard travel, when they finally reached the ruins of Stone Raven Town, the sight before them was even more desolate than Lannisport.
Aside from a few smoke-blackened walls and debris scattered across the ground, there was almost no sign that people had ever lived there.
The winter wilderness was a withered yellow, dead leaves covering scorched earth, the whole place steeped in bleak silence.
They did not lose heart. They set up crude shelters, cut down dead trees, and began clearing the land.
"Here," the official leading the group said, pointing at the ruins. "Clear it out. The land will be yours. By His Grace's decree, any land you reclaim will be exempt from taxes for the first ten years."
Mollen did not complain. Together with the other families assigned here, he immediately set to work.
The men felled dead trees and built rough huts, while the women cleared small patches of land and prepared places to cook.
Mollen chose a spot sheltered from the wind and close to a stream that had not yet frozen solid as his family's homestead.
With tools in hand, he and his wife worked side by side, clearing the ruins brick by brick and leveling the ground.
Mollen carefully sowed the cold-resistant wheat seeds he had brought with him into the freshly turned soil.
Each day after the labor was done, he would walk to the edge of that small patch of farmland, press his hands into the cold, damp earth, and silently pray that the seeds would take root in this unfamiliar land and grow into grain that could feed his family.
At night, the family huddled together inside the newly built shack, drafty on all sides, gathered around a small fire pit.
Dry branches they had collected crackled in the flames, offering a bit of precious warmth.
His wife stirred a thin wheat porridge in an iron pot, adding a little salted fish and wild greens they had dug up nearby.
Their son lay nestled against Mollen's chest, already asleep, a trace of exhaustion still lingering on his small face.
"Once the wheat is planted, we'll have a harvest in a few months,"
Mollen said softly to his wife, his eyes shining with quiet hope. "They say the Westerlands used to be rich, with gold beneath the ground. We don't want gold. We just want land that can grow crops, enough to keep our son fed and warm. In the future… maybe we can even send him to Lannisport, let him learn a few letters from educated folk, and one day serve the God-Emperor."
As he spoke, his eyes held the simplest, most sincere loyalty and faith toward that king he had never once met.
To him, it was Lo Quen who had led people as lowly as them toward a new life, not that Azure God-Emperor Bu Gai, cowering in the Yi capital.
In Mollen's simple yet steadfast worldview, Lo Quen was the light that pierced through the darkness of a chaotic age.
He might not understand courtly intrigue, nor the magic of dragons.
But he understood gratitude. He knew who had given him, and countless others like him—mere ants in the world—a chance to stand upright and live as human beings once more.
His wife lifted her head and looked at her husband's resolute profile, lit by the flickering firelight, and nodded gently.
For her, learning to read was something impossibly distant.
All she knew was that this man, and that God-Emperor, had led her out of a nightmarish past and brought her here, giving her and her child a home that was harsh, yet filled with hope.