"Sometimes I really envy the residents of Utopia City... They were born with silver spoons in their mouths, with plenty of time to do nothing, while it felt like I'd been moving from one task to the next ever since I was born."
Evening, at the Road Town inn.
Watching the tourists from Utopia City, Zhou Nan took a sip of rich beer and sighed wistfully.
He could tell at a glance where those people came from.
The distinctive air about them was even easier to recognize than blue coats and synths.
Sun Shiqi, seated across from him, smiled.
"What's so special about that? Instead of envying them, you might as well envy the people from two hundred years ago. Not only did they have time to loaf around, they even had the leisure to make up stories about us."
"Make up stories about us?"
"Put another way, they imagined the future."
"Hahaha."
The laughter washed away some of the melancholy.
Sun Shiqi clinked glasses with his drinking companion across the table.
Having made a small fortune in the steel trade, he could no longer really be considered a traveling merchant. He ought to be called an Alliance factory owner now, with most of his wealth invested in Alliance industries.
If not for his former identity as a traveling merchant making him untrusted by the Frost Spear Tribe, who had once been refugees, and if a certain someone had not kept refusing his courtship, he might have tied even his family to the Alliance by now.
That said, although he was optimistic about the Alliance's future, it had taken him some resolve to do all this.
For a long time, he had carried an uneasy sense of some kind of "original sin"—namely, the fear that the Alliance's administrators would send