Just as Miss Bella had said, the situation in Mammoth City proper was completely different from the "concession" of the Silver Moon sect followers. It could even be said that they were two worlds, clearly divided from one another.
The latter had beautiful marble buildings and clean, orderly streets. Most pedestrians were well dressed, making it almost no different from neighboring Silver Moon Bay.
The former, however, was a complete mess. Never mind stone buildings—there was not even anything that could truly be called a street.
Most of the dirt paths had been trampled out by countless feet, with only two open drainage ditches dug along the roadside.
On either side of those paths stood crude shacks temporarily built from wood, branches, or plastic sheets.
The locals called them row houses. Two or three families were often crammed into a single one, packed so tightly there was barely room to set foot, yet they still had to squeeze in.
After all, many families here were like the slums of Golden Gallon Port during Nihack's era. An entire household could not scrape together even two sets of clothes. They could hardly stand naked in the streets.
As for privacy between families, they could only make do by putting up partitions inside the row houses.
Furthermore, there were hardly any young men to be seen here.
The local able-bodied men had either enlisted, gone to nearby factories or concessions to help out, or boarded labor-export ships bound for the North Island, which was still being rebuilt.
As for the elderly, weak, women, and children left behind, those with clothes to wear sat outside their doors working. Those without clothes sat at home in a daze, waiting for the relief stations to begin serving porridge.
If one had to speak of hardship, the