Year 15, Month 7
The Great Market Field outside Calder's Ford (now officially renamed Caer Veldris)
The gates opened at dawn.
For fifteen years the roads of Valdria had carried only internal traffic:
grain wagons rolling from the four farming villages to the forges,
timber and charcoal from Oakrest to the brick kilns,
children walking to teaching houses and back.
Today the roads carried strangers.
Hundreds of them.
Merchants from NPC tribes to the north who had heard rumors of a land where no one starved.
Scouts sent by Player #044 (a dwarf-obsessed German who called himself "Thane Ironvein").
Refugees who had walked for months after KaiserDrache's latest conquest.
Even a delegation from Player #004's "Greater Yamato Empire – Reiwa Edition," wearing silk robes and trying to look dignified while openly gawking.
They came expecting a cluster of big villages.
They found a nation.
A triple ring of red-brick walls surrounded Caer Veldris.
The outermost wall was still only waist-high (construction never stopped), but inside it the city already held thirty thousand souls.
Wide, straight, gravel roads divided the city into perfect squares.
Every intersection had a public well with a bronze pump.
Every block had a teaching house flying the black banner of the Empty Circle.
And today, for the first time, the great market field outside the eastern gate was open to outsiders.
Rows of covered stalls stretched for half a mile.
One section: grain so plentiful it was sold by volume, not weight.
One section: bronze tools sharper and cheaper than anything the dwarven player produced.
One section: bolts of fine wool cloth dyed in colors no one else had mastered yet.
One section: shelves of clay tablets and wax notebooks (children's schoolwork from last year, sold as scratch paper for a copper each).
At the very center stood a raised wooden platform.
Harlan Calder (now fifty-one, hair completely silver) climbed the steps flanked by two guards in bronze scale and red cloaks.
Behind him walked Elyse (twenty, tall, calm, wearing the first set of scholar's robes ever made in Valdria).
In her hands she carried a cedar box.
The foreigners pressed forward.
Harlan raised a hand.
Silence fell like a blade.
"By command of the Faceless One," he declared, "this market is open to all who come in peace.
Prices are fixed and written.
Weights are standard and sealed.
Any man who cheats will lose his Wooden Circle for ten years and work the quarries."
A ripple went through the crowd when they saw the Wooden Circles:
every citizen over twelve wore one around their neck on a leather cord.
Even the children selling apples wore smaller versions.
Then Elyse opened the cedar box.
Inside lay twenty perfect ingots of a strange, pale metal no one recognized.
She lifted one high.
"This," she said, voice carrying without effort, "is tin-copper bronze, hardened with a new method.
One of these ingots will buy ten wagons of grain from any other land.
We have two thousand more ready."
A collective gasp.
The dwarf player's scout went pale.
Tin and copper in perfect ratio, hardened to near-iron strength, and they had two thousand ingots?
The Yamato delegation started whispering furiously about "unfair starting bonuses."
A merchant from the northern NPC tribes dropped to his knees and began praying to the Empty Circle on the spot.
Global voice chat detonated.
#044 (Thane Ironvein):
"HE HAS HARDENED BRONZE AND 2000 INGOTS?!
MY FORGES HAVE MADE 47 IN FIFTEEN YEARS."
#008 (KaiserDrache):
"Population 82k now.
Still using soft bronze.
I'm going to cry."
#004 (weeb):
"My merchants just sent a message: 'Their children are doing arithmetic in their heads faster than our accountants.'
I quit."
#189 (island guy, laughing through tears):
"My eleven citizens just received their Wooden Circles.
They're carving a teaching house out of driftwood right now.
Thank you, Valdria."
Hyun-woo watched from above as the market counters ticked insane numbers.
Trade Income Turn 4: +1 847 %
Foreign Opinion: Awe → Fear → Greed
New Resource Discovered by Outsiders: "Veldrian Efficiency"
He allowed himself one private smile.
Then he opened the decree window for Turn 5.
The world was about to learn that schools were only the beginning.