"Shouldn't we talk to Thorin and learn more about the situation in Mochizuki City, Roland will also be interested in these things." Tonya asked Lyudmila.

"That's what I thought, let's go meet Mr. Spy and see what valuable information he can provide." Lyudmila and Tonya got up one after another, giving up the airship pilot's seat to Jacqueline and Eleanor. The two female rangers had long been looking forward to the opportunity to practice, and they rushed over to take over.

Lyudmila and Tonya exited the cockpit and entered the airship's middle deck through a shaft-like gangway to a cabin door. Lyudmila nodded to the guards standing guard outside the door, who bowed in return, and then took out the key to open the hatch.

Inside the cabin, a young halfling wanderer in leather armor was lying on his bed in a bored daze, when he heard movement outside the door and hurriedly got up. Seeing Lyudmila and Tonya walking in, he hurriedly bowed and greeted, but there was a trace of uneasiness in his eyes, and he seemed to be suffering from gains and losses.

Seeing this halfling, Lyudmila couldn't help but think of the encounter in the morning.

At that time, the "Dawn" was flying to Mochizuki City, the capital of southern Xinjiang, according to the scheduled route, on the way to rescue a group of fugitive slaves, and clashed with the slave catchers who followed after them.

After a fierce battle, the slave trappers retreated, leaving a few wounded mercenaries as prisoners, and if Tonya hadn't intervened to stop them, the hapless ones would have been nearly killed red-handed by the angry slaves. Thorin the Halfling was the leader of the mercenaries who hunted down the fugitive slaves, and during the battle, Jacqueline was kicked off his horse with a flying kick, and passed out on the spot, escaping a violent beating. Later, when Lyudmila ordered the prisoners to be disarmed and dismissed on the spot, the halfling man lay on the ground and pretended to be dead, and did not get up until his companions had left, claiming that he had important information to report to the commander of the airship unit.

Jacqueline explained to him that the airship and its crew were not regular troops from the Korras government, but the census team. The halflings didn't seem to understand, and insisted on meeting their leader anyway.

Jacqueline brought him to Lyudmila and Tonya, and after some questioning, the halfling Thorin finally confided in him, claiming to have been hired by Joseph Davidovich, the former mayor of Mochizuki City, to be precise, to go undercover in a slave hunting squad to gather information about the illegal organization. By "illegal", I mean that it violated the "abolition decree" issued by the Kolas government, but as far as Mochizuki Castle and the entire territory are concerned, the central government has not been seriously implemented so far. The slave exchange in Mochizuki's central market continued to thrive, and Baron Hurd's cotton plantations and lapis lazuli mines continued to force shackled slave labor. With the Governor as an example, the local lord of the manor did not take the "grass platform" of the new government of Krasburg seriously, and it was fashionable in the local social circles to ridicule the unrealistic decrees of the Kolas government after the banquet, and rumors of the Imperial army to conquer the lost lands were rife.

It is not true to say that the radical independence movement in the Far East and the new government established after the revolution did not touch the lives of the inhabitants of the frontier, and the changes that took place in the interior spread like waves to the frontier, although their influence was weakened by the distance and the lack of transportation, but after all, they still caused some repercussions in the local area.

This year, many local businessmen who engaged in small businesses made a pilgrimage to the capital Korrasburg two months in advance, participated in the National Day procession and the sanctification festival held by Sindra Church, and returned to southern Xinjiang with excitement to convey to their neighbors and villagers the new atmosphere they had seen and heard along the way, and to describe the economic construction that the country is carrying out in an all-round way. From the unprecedented harvest of state-owned farms to the roar of machines in the Karon industrial area; From the ever-changing construction of transportation to the public primary schools scattered throughout towns and villages; From the sacred and solemn sanctification ceremony of Krasbourg to the many decrees issued by the government to benefit the people, the two policies of reducing agricultural taxes and abolishing slavery have attracted the most attention from the people of southern Xinjiang.

After all, the slave owners who owned 10,000 acres of fertile land were very few, and there were still tens of thousands of homesteaders struggling on the poverty line. Running a small piece of farmland, even if the wind and rain are good, he can only barely support his family, and he has to endure the oppression of large landlords, and every year when the harvest is bad, countless families are on the verge of bankruptcy, forced to sell their fields or even sell themselves into slavery. These poor people in the border were shocked and angry when they learned that the government of Kolas had announced a fifty percent reduction in agricultural taxes, because they did not enjoy the benefits of the tax cut, and the grain collection team sent by Mochizuki Castle still collected grain at the rate of the imperial provinces, and the grain that was illegally taken away was not handed over to the national treasury, but was all divided and swallowed by the officials and lords of the city.

What makes people even more deeply indignant is that the bureaucrats in southern Xinjiang collectively disobeyed the central government's decrees, openly refused to implement the "Abolition Act" to release those slaves who were illegally plundered and forced to work, and intensified their collusion with sand bandits to ransack villages in various places, kidnap free people and send them to the slave market in Mochizuki City to sell them openly!

The merchants who returned from the pilgrimage to Krasbourg brought new ideas and new ethos to the dreary and repressive strata of the Krai, and they brought back from the capital newspapers and periodicals promoting the policies of the new government. The people of Krai were waiting for a storm from Krasbourg to blow away the dark clouds hanging over their heads, and before that, they had fought with real actions.

From the Crescent Valley to Mount Mochizuki, the sickles and pitchforks of every household have been sharpened, and violent incidents against illegal grain requisitions have emerged, and the tax collectors of Mochizuki Castle would not dare to set foot in the countryside without the protection of mercenaries. This spirit of rebellion also spread to the plantations, where the new slaves stopped working and spread news from Krasbourg in the slave camps, promoting the abolition of slavery by the new government, encouraging the victims to break the shackles and flee the estates to embrace their rightful personal freedom. Influenced by this ideology, the estates in the region became restless, and the slaves united against the overseers and fled the estates at every opportunity.

In order to suppress the growing slave rebellion and fugitive movement, Baron Hurd and the slave owners who owned large tracts of land in the territory jointly financed the formation of a well-equipped "slave hunting team", which included Baron Hurd's private soldiers, as well as mercenaries, bounty hunters, and even sand bandits.