After handing over the checker to Leo and leaving their contact information, Ciri and Kayla leave.

Although the Miracle Festival has only just passed, the new year has just begun, many shops have opened on the streets, and most of the public services have begun to work.

The Miracle Festival is a common celebration of mankind, people will have a holiday, but on the first day of the new year, many people will start working, which symbolizes that the new year can be as diligent and rewarding as the first day.

When Ciri and the others returned to the tavern, they found that the number of mercenaries in the tavern had also begun to increase, and some of them had already prepared things to venture into the Noras Forest. Back at the tavern, the two helped the family with another busy meal.

Since Kayla still has a job at the Whispering Chamber of Commerce, Ciri and the others leave Craya's house the next day, and although the family is good, they can't stay here forever.

Before leaving, Xi Rui gave the emergency teleportation scroll of the Flower Academy that he applied for to the second elder and taught them how to use it, so that Xi Rui was basically relieved about the safety of the two. Ciri originally wanted to leave some money for the family, but Nishizawa didn't want them to live or die, they didn't need any money at all, and Ciri didn't insist anymore.

When Ciri and Kayla arrived in Joseph, they hired a carriage to take them to Black Mountain.

Montenegro City was founded by complexing this energy ore and belongs to the northern mining city. The whole city is not as gentle and full of flowers as the college city of Flowers, which belongs to the south. The city of Montenegro has the rugged feeling shared by northern cities, especially in this cold period before and after the New Year, the vast and desolate color of the north is particularly prominent.

However, in recent years, the northern cities have not developed very well, especially the mineral cities like Montenegro.

Cities that started with mineral deposits will develop very quickly in the early days, and the whole city will seem to rise overnight. However, unlike this kind of rapid development in the early stage, mineral cities generally do not develop very much, because after rapid development, the whole city has to face an unavoidable problem--- mineral deposits will always be excavated.

Mineral deposits in the city are also minerals, and losses are also minerals. Rapid development brings prosperity but also many hidden dangers. Although cities like Montenegro have developed rapidly, they have attracted mostly investment businessmen and manual laborers who sell their labor, and have not attracted a large number of other talents, and the upper class of the city will only emerge from these people. As the upper class, they in turn defend the interests of their own group and further exclude the promotion of other categories of personnel, thus further worsening the city's talent attractiveness.

In this way, a vicious circle has led to the city having to go one way in the direction of mineral deposits. Then you will face the ultimate problem of that mining city--- the mineral deposits will always be dug up.

In fact, it is impossible to reach the point where the mineral deposits are about to be excavated, and such a city will decline. After the initial success, as the number of easily mined deposits decreases, investors have to dig for the hard-to-mine deposits at a higher cost, and the process becomes harder and more expensive. Until one day, no new investors will come here, and only a group of vested interests will use the remaining resources to survive here.

It's not that managers don't have vision, it's just that there are more opponents of change, and it's hard to make real changes. In the end, the visionary will either go away, or they can only compromise and seek satisfaction. By the time most people realize that they have to change, they don't have the ability or the conditions to do so.

This is the sadness of the mineral city, and it is also the current situation of the city of Montenegro. The city of Montenegro also once had its own glory, and it was once the star city of the Serge Kingdom, and it also changed with each passing day, changing greatly every year. But after the initial glory, urban development fell into trouble and stagnation. Now, with the increasing difficulty of mining complex ore, the cost of mining is also increasing, and the benefits of mining on the contrary are decreasing, and the entire Black Mountain City has been going downhill, like a monster that has begun to shed hair, cloudy eyes, and slow to move.

Benson's family was one of the few visionaries in the city, or rather his father was a visionary. Benson's family originally only ran a carriage shop in a small town, and later after Montenegro City was found to have a large number of complex minerals, the leader at that time resolutely gave up the original family business and devoted himself to the development of Montenegro City without hesitation.

Benson's ancestors did just that, and their family quickly transformed from a small town carriage shop to a thriving upstart in Montenegro, and as Montenegro grew, so did Benson's family, eventually becoming one of the most powerful families in the city. However, before his death, the ancestor asked his descendants not to care too much about the most important and profitable mineral mining investment at that time, but to keep their old business as a carriage business.

After all, the successors did not resist the temptation of the huge profit of mineral investment, although because of the advice of the ancestors, did not give up the business of the carriage dealership, but the focus of the whole family was completely shifted to mineral development. Since then, generations of family members have devoted themselves to mineral mining, but the carriage shop, which had developed well during the lifetime of the ancestors, has become less and less popular, and gradually declined, only barely surviving by transporting complex mines within the family.

Mineral mining has indeed brought great benefits to the whole family, but it has also consumed the enterprising spirit of the real family, the family more and more like the kind of business that can sit and wait for the money for a lifetime as long as they invest a sum of money, and the family members themselves are becoming more and more lazy, they no longer want to learn new knowledge, no longer willing to bother to contact customers in other cities, and even no longer willing to bother to manage the business operation, they prefer to spend money to ask others to help them deal with these things, they just need to collect money and enjoy.

Gradually, these people changed from a despised minority to the norm of family members, and those who were diligent and idealistic became fools in the eyes of these people, and the family would not listen to any opinions of such "fools", and the whole family became a pool of stagnant water, lifeless and without any fluctuations. The whole family, like the whole city, opposed change and innovation, and became a small "Black Mountain City".

And Benson's father is such a "fool" in the eyes of the other members of the family, a "fool" who puts simple and easy money and does not make money, but has to do everything himself, and does not make much money despite his hard work.