Old Course, pp. 300–309On the fifth day, the Child led back to the riverbank the people who had gone into town to donate their steel. The situation turned out to be just as had been reported, and as long as one group of people after another sent their black sand steel to Beijing, a group from the ninety-ninth would be pardoned and allowed to return home. But who would be pardoned? Naturally, it would be those people who had been on good behavior and who had received the most red blossoms. Accordingly, everyone proceeded to frantically collect black sand, chop down trees, and smelt steel. The most important thing was that it was not merely a question of the ninety-ninth collecting black sand and smelting steel, but rather that by this point the steel-smelting technology had already spread throughout the entire Re-Ed region, and within half a month the riverbank was full of people collecting black sand. As the New Year’s festival was approaching, not only were there thousands of people throughout Re-Ed collecting black sand and smelting steel, but for several hundred li in either direction you could see peasants walking up and down the riverbank pulling ropes tied to magnets.
