Chapter 655: Candlelight Society’s Relief
What kind of place is the Rhine?
Frey had no answer. When he first stepped into this city, he just felt curious.
The crowded streets and dilapidated buildings all felt somewhat familiar to him. He had lived in Baishibao for more than ten years and was very familiar with such slums.
But why are there slums in the Rhine?
Never mind, the slums don’t matter. At least I’m familiar with them, Frey comforted himself.
So according to his own experience, Frey planned to find some places where people gathered to get some information and confront the local gangs.
This kind of slum is usually under the control of various gangs, and government orders are not effective here - if the city managers can establish order here, it will not be a slum.
But Frey soon sensed something was wrong.
He walked around the lower area for a long time and found that the only place where people gathered seemed to be the church.
No, not the church. There is no church in the lower class area, and it seems that the church is unwilling to open its doors to these people in the mud.
Instead, there are points where churches distribute meals.
Yes, the church distributes food in the lower areas, and anyone who is a Candlelight believer can come and receive it. The church calls it relief.
There are always many people queuing up at each relief point. They look hungry and their clothes are ragged, but they all chant devoutly in front of the candlelight.
This really shocked Frey.
After he spent a whole day exploring the lower town, this feeling of shock reached its peak: there were no gangs in the entire Lower Rhine, and the public security was extremely good. Although people had no clothes or food, they all had peaceful faces and were extremely devout in their faith.
Even the corpses that died of starvation on the roadside had smiles on their faces.
Frey shuddered, and suddenly he remembered the believers queuing at the city gate to be whipped by machines. They seemed to be carved from the same mold, reminding Frey of the Lambs on the Wall of Despair.
The lambs in Whitestone Castle are extremely docile and will not resist even if whipped. Frey once saw a wolf sneak into the sheepfold and eat a living sheep bite by bite.
The sheep was eaten alive without any resistance or wailing, as if it was not its body that was being gnawed.
It didn't let out a long breath until the moment it fell to the ground and died.
The sheep nearby just watched, neither bleating nor leaving, as if this was the most normal thing.
After the wolf had eaten its fill, it leisurely left. After the wolf left, the sheep finally reacted.
They gathered around and scrambled to eat the remains of their own kind left by the wolves.
Frey looked at the believers kneeling on the ground praying in front of him, and felt that they seemed to have grown square pupils and hooves, chewing the grass in their mouths, and turned into silent lambs.
But if believers are the lambs, who are the wolves?
Frey raised his head and looked at the sky - of course, the sky could not be seen in the lower area. He only saw the churches above, one after another, densely packed together, blocking out the sun.
This is the Rhine.
After walking for a whole day and getting nothing, Frey touched his empty stomach and went to the food distribution point to line up.
If he could be given something to eat, he wouldn't mind praising the candlelight.
But gradually, his brows furrowed.
There was a strong aroma in the food distributed, and Frey started swallowing his saliva just by smelling it.
But the believers who received the food had strange reactions after eating it.
After taking two bites of food, they would immediately kneel down and pray, not even bothering to swallow it. Sometimes they would kneel in the mud, with mud splashing all over their faces and mouths.
His expression when praying was extremely fanatical, as if he had seen a miracle.
It takes a long time of prayer before I can recover a little and eat a few bites of food, and then I immediately start praying desperately again.
Some people happened to be standing among the rocks and knelt directly on the sharp stones. When they raised their heads, their faces were covered in blood, but even so, they would not move.
Frey even saw a man with a sharp branch sticking out in front of him. He knelt down and kowtowed, and the branch pierced his eyes straight.
He was completely unaware and kept bowing his head. Every time he lowered his head, he was stabbed once. When he stood up, his face was completely rotten. He staggered a few steps and fell to the ground again.
This time he didn't stand up again.
Frey looked at him from a distance and found that the rotten flesh on his face was twisted into a slight arc.
He died with a smile on his face.
The scenes in his memories gradually became blurred. After Frey finished describing what he had seen and heard, he took a deep breath and looked at the untouchables around him.
There was silence all around, and these people were frightened. They stood there blankly, unable to understand what they had heard.
But Frey ignored them. He took two skewers of roasted rats from the fire in the settlement, one in each hand, and began to eat them with big mouthfuls.
Rat meat is not tasty, it has a strange smell and fishy taste, and there is no seasoning here, so you can only swallow it along with the stench from the garbage dump next to it.
But even so, Frey was unwilling to rely on the church's charity.
He now thought of the candlelight painted on the dome of the lower wing, and this time he felt only a chill in his heart.
The untouchables nearby started arguing.
"How is that possible! The church isn't like that!"
"Then tell me what a church is like? Have you ever seen a church?"
"I haven't seen a church, have you?"
"Lord Frey saw it with his own eyes, how could it be false?"
"But that's a church, that's candlelight. If that's the case, then, then..."
Frey was eating with his mouth full of oil, not saying a word, just watching coldly.
While the noise was going on over there, Xiaobu came over timidly. He first looked at Frey's face, then spoke cautiously: "Brother Frey, is it really like what you said it is?"
"Not necessarily. I haven't been here long, and I might be lying. Why don't you go out and take a look yourself?"
"I, I dare not." Xiaobu said in a low voice. She glanced at her crude prosthesis and then looked away as if she had been electrocuted.
Her hand was broken by the people on the surface. If she hadn't escaped quickly, she would have lost her life.
"Xiao Bu, if you drive that 'big guy' out, no one will dare to bully you, right?"
Xiaobu was startled, and her already big eyes widened. She looked at the "big guy" who was using a robotic arm to load garbage into the incinerator not far away, and didn't know how to start for a moment.
"I heard them say that the 'Big Guy' was assembled by you yourself. If you had gone to the surface, you wouldn't have had to go through the trouble of collecting these parts." Frey pointed to the discarded parts that she was holding in her arms like a treasure.
"With this 'big guy', you can even tear a hole in the sky and drag down those high-ranking guys in the Upper Rhine to make them suffer."
(End of this chapter)
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