Chapter 454: A New Era of Bells

4018 A.D., April 20.

Today is the day when the Black Wind Knights officially audition for the Thousand Riders, but for the vast majority of the participants, they have been eliminated from the competition at the beginning.

The audition is mainly divided into two processes, the first is to submit a resume to the Viscount Palace. The resume is issued by the Viscount's Palace, and the content includes basic personal information, strength, experience, specialties, etc., among which the strength and specialty are marked in red letters, showing that these two sections are very important;

Of course, although the contestants are all awakened, and there should be no such thing as illiteracy, the Viscount's Court still fully considered this and deliberately recruited the bards in the city to write resumes for the participants in need.

It has to be said that this is undoubtedly a very novel experience for all participants, so it is not difficult to imagine that the nearly 10,000 resumes that were finally handed in to the Viscount Mansion can be described as strange, and there are all kinds of things.

The start date for the submission of resumes is seven days ago, on the day Conrad was officially elected as the 2,000th Captain of the Knights of the Black Wind Order, and the deadline is 5 p.m. yesterday at the Clock Square.

To be honest, when I first heard five o'clock and the clock, whether it was the nearly 10,000 awakened people who were interested in participating in the Thousands of Cavalry Commanders' auditions, or the hundreds of thousands of citizens in the Heavenly Lyra Holy City, they were all confused.

Prior to this, not only the Dawson Free Federation, but also the entire Valley of the Dawn, and even the entire continent of Blanca, used various hourglasses to keep time. These hourglasses are large and small, the average small hourglass, a complete sand leak is a quarter of an hour, a medium one is half an hour, and a large one hour. The time of day is defined as 24 medium-sized hourglass time differences. So before that, the humans of the Valley of the Dawn generally used the term "XX Sand Point" to describe a certain moment of the day.

Seven days ago, in the Tiannu Square in the Eagle Claw District of Tianqin Holy City, the stone statue of the lucky Tiannu placed in the center of the square was replaced by a strange pyramidal building, which immediately caused a huge repercussion in the entire Tianqin Holy City!

It is worth mentioning that Leitch's first fiefdom, located in the Black Wind City in the rhinoceros horn sea, also has a statue of the Lucky Celestial Maiden in the commercial street of the city!

But in fact, before the rise of the Red Demon Empire, the Holy City of Tianqin belonged to the original Abidjan Kingdom, and the official belief of the Abidjan Kingdom was those powerful ancient gods in the abyss, so nearly half a year ago, the Celestial Maiden Square was also called the Flame Weaving Square, and the stone statue of the Flame Weaver Witch stood on the square where the lord of the eighty-first layer of the abyss, the Flame Weaving Witch.

Later, after Leitch resisted the Holy City of Lyra and married the Antonia family, and Starfog Valley was officially incorporated into the Dawson Federation, the elder group of the Antonia family replaced the stone statue of the Flame Weaver Witch in the square with the stone statue of the lucky goddess to show their determination to make a complete break with the past.

Surprisingly, a few months later, the stone statues in the square were replaced again!At this time, a large number of Awakened Ones gathered in the Holy City of Lyra to participate in the audition of the Thousand Horsemen of the Black Wind Knights, so it is not difficult to imagine how much repercussions this caused!

Fortunately, not long after the Holy City of Lyra was included in the Dawson Federation, the influence of the Five Holy Spirits has not yet penetrated into the hearts of the people, and the belief of the Five Holy Spirits is relatively peaceful, so it has not caused a riot or anything like that;

But what really puzzled people was the pyramidal structure that had just appeared in the middle of the square in the middle of the square and stood in the magic fountain - below this building was a rectangular shape with a spire, which looked like a miniature stone building, and on all four sides of the upper part of the stone tower was a round metal plate, on which there were some lines of different lengths and thicknesses, and strangely the most slender of them was actually turning all the time!

However, it soon became clear that this strange stone tower was called the Bell Tower, and that the strange round metal plates in the upper part of the bell tower were called clocks. The role of the clock is for timing!

That's right, it's timekeeping, and it's a whole new way of timekeeping that no one has ever seen before!

Some people were initially skeptical of this method of timekeeping, but soon their suspicions were dispelled by the fact that they had seen it with their own eyes—several hourglasses of various sizes were placed under the bell tower, and after a comparison with those who were curious or skeptical, they came to a shocking conclusion: the clock in the bell tower was exactly as it was clocked by an hourglass!

However, in the eyes of those who are observant, clocks appear to be much more than just timekeepers, and they will even replace the existence of hourglasses, which are more elaborate than hourglasses, and that alone is enough!

The vast majority of the people in the city now know that this object, called the clock, was invented by the Viscount, and that the three hands on the clock that could be turned were called the second hand, the minute hand, and the hour hand, the second hand rotated for one minute, the minute hand for one hour, that is, half an hour, and the hour hand for twelve hours, that is, six hours, half a day!

After verifying the accuracy of the clock, some troubadours in the city called the appearance of the clock an inter-epochal alchemical achievement, and Viscount Blackwind would become one of the greatest alchemists in the history of the Federation and the entire Dawn Valley!

However, the poems written by these troubadours did not arouse much repercussions, not because the content of those psalms was exaggerated, but on the contrary, they described real facts, and the reason why they did not arouse a wide resonance was because they could be seen by anyone with a discerning eye! Of course, there was no lack of fame among these troubadours themselves, and if the author were to replace them with those hymns who moved the continent, the reaction would naturally be different.

On the first day of the appearance of the bell tower, the shops in the Eagle Claw area with the Black Wind sign also launched a new product - pocket watches.

There are two types of pocket watches: silver pocket watches and gold pocket watches, with silver pocket watches selling for one gold coin and gold pocket watches for fifteen gold coins. In the first six days since the watch went on sale, it can be said that it has been sold out every day, and now 30,000 silver and 10,000 gold pocket watches have been sold!

Of course, these 40,000 gold and silver pocket watches add up to 180,000 gold coins, which is not even a drizzle for the Antonia family, which has huge assets. But the guardians of the Black Wind are aware that in fact, the cost of a silver pocket watch is only about five silver coins, and the cost of a gold pocket watch is five gold coins, but now these two are sold for a gold coin and fifteen gold coins respectively, which is twenty times and three times the profit!

In addition, the Black Wind Chamber of Commerce has also received a large number of orders from many chambers of commerce to order pocket watches, and the number has exceeded 100,000!

In this regard, the high-ranking officials of the Viscount Mansion and the guardians of the Black Wind did not worry at all about the situation of not being able to deliver the goods. Although they didn't know how the pocket watches were made, one thing they could be sure of was that making them wasn't actually complicated, and they didn't even require blacksmiths, alchemists, etc., just a sufficient number of ordinary people!

Because the people who made these gold and silver pocket watches were actually slaves drawn from various estates under the name of the Antonia family!

It was about a month ago, not long after the Kuroshio Tide, and Starmist Valley was still busy resettling the displaced people and rebuilding, but it was at this time that Leitch issued an order to transfer a large number of slaves from the various estates under the name of the Antonia family, which was estimated to be three or four thousand in total.

When asked why, Leitch didn't answer, and simply gave a need. This undoubtedly caused many members of the Antonia family to be dissatisfied with Leitch, or rather, they secretly felt quite dissatisfied with Leitch's accession, but they also understood that this was a choice forced by the situation and had to be made. However, this does not mean that Starfog Valley has to change its surname to Alec!

However, at that time, Leitch had just successfully ended the Black Tide and won an incomparably huge reputation in the entire Starmist Valley, so no matter how dissatisfied some people were with Leitch in their hearts, they didn't dare to openly provoke Leitch's majesty, but secretly they were holding back their strength, as long as Leitch couldn't give a reasonable explanation for his behavior in the future, they had enough reasons to make Leitch look good!

But now it seems that those people's plans are undoubtedly going to fail, and even some of the guardians of the Black Wind Guardian who were secretly quite critical of Leqi are now shocked by the powerful potential shown by Leqi - not to mention, the Black Wind Chamber of Commerce is under Leqi's hands, and there is definitely a considerable hope of stepping into the ranks of the top chambers of commerce in the mainland in the future, just with the endless strong creativity of Viscount Black Wind himself!

"Bell—"

At this time, a crisp and loud tapping sound suddenly came from the eagle's talon area, and everyone who heard this sound knew that this sound must have come from the clock square, which meant that it was six o'clock in the morning.

The bell tower in Clock Square is struck three times a day, at 6 a.m., 12 p.m., and 6 p.m., and by now, the vast majority of the citizens of the Holy City of Lyra have become accustomed to this sound.