Huck returned to Li Lin and walked towards the dark space on the other side without stopping.

"Mr. Li Lin, this way!"

…

…

Before coming to the ditch, Li Lin thought he was mentally prepared.

But the environment and people's lives here still caused him a great psychological shock.

There were pits everywhere filled with green, bubbling alchemical poison. There were homeless people in the middle of winter, with no clothes to cover their bodies and pale skin. There were even some orphans fighting over the remains of stale black bread they had dug out from the garbage dump...

There are not even many small metal houses that can shelter from the wind like the ones in the middle square. If someone has a tattered tent, it is considered a luxury residence.

Not only that, there are dark corners everywhere, and rotten corpses that no one has collected are being eaten by a group of shadow rabbits, plague rats and various mosquitoes, flies and maggots.

Li Lin could not see any hope, not even despair, on these people's faces.

The only thing left, besides numbness... is still numbness.

Even when Li Lin, who was wearing power armor, passed by these people, they just looked up with lifeless eyes and then lowered their heads again.

Or, they would reach out to block the light from the armor, which would be very irritating to their dark-adapted eyes.

Li Lin was in a very heavy mood.

The situation in the ditch was much more serious than he had imagined.

Even Hake, who was leading the way, could sense Li Lin's suppressed emotions through his armor. "Is this... your first time here?"

He nodded without saying a word.

"Actually, hehe, this place we passed by is considered a slum in the gutter area. Other places are much better than this, hehe..."

Huck was not very confident, he just wanted to comfort Li Lin.

As a person born in the gutter, if Vandel and Hilko had not led them in the uprising, he would have starved to death in some corner and been eaten by various creatures.

Although other places are indeed slightly better than here, compared with the middle-level square, they are nothing but worse.

There are only four types of people living in the gutter: miners, scavengers, vagrants and gutter orphans.

And these people have one thing in common - they are desperate.

Unless they really couldn't make a living there, who would be willing to come to the gutter, a dark place with such a bad environment that it is almost impossible for people to survive normally?

Once a person falls into poverty and ends up living in a ditch, his life begins to count down.

In addition to lacking food, water and fresh air, they are also corroded by various alchemical toxic substances.

Except in mines or some shops, alchemical technology lighting is a complete luxury here.

It was pitch black everywhere, even time had lost its meaning, and almost everyone suffered from both physical and mental stress.

A homeless man whose body was already weak and had not yet been enhanced and transformed by alchemical technology could only survive here for half a year.

If those orphans had stayed in such an environment instead of being adopted by an orphanage in the upper-middle class of Zaun, they would probably not have survived their childhood.

However, some less cruel alchemist barons would install a few low-power alchemy-tech air filters found in garbage dumps in the mines.

Of course, most of the time it was just to comfort the miners...

After an unknown amount of time, the two of them finally walked out of the slum.

Li Lin took a deep breath. Even the armor mask with a breathing filter could not completely dispel the smell of the haze he inhaled.

I must speed up the construction of Zaun...