Backlund afternoons always carried a subtle sense of leisure—not because life here moved slowly enough, but because those who could not afford leisure simply could not appear on the streets at this hour.
Workers were either putting in overtime or seizing brief gaps to take a nap. Unemployed poor people and vagrants were either lining up outside relief stations or finding somewhere warm to conserve their strength, praying they could find new work afterward.
However, things had clearly been different these past few days. As Sno enjoyed Backlund's rare sunny warmth, a clamor drifted over from afar.
Slightly disordered slogans, constantly bobbing placards, and a long procession—it was like an impassioned march abruptly intruding upon a pastoral tune, instantly washing away all the peace and tranquility.
Those who could live in the West Borough were not the high-income proletarians crowned with the title of "middle class," but the true wealthy class. They possessed vast fortunes, land, estates, chambers of commerce, stocks, and quite a few of them were directly the owners of those factories in the factory districts.
It could be said that if demonstrations in other districts were meant to win sympathy and draw attention, then here, the workers were demonstrating.
The factory owners had likely not yet recovered from their shock. They might even have wondered why strikes that had previously involved no more than a few hundred people had grown to such numbers, and why the buyout tactics that had always worked in the past had proven completely ineffective this time.
But they knew that with such numbers, whether it was the churches or the nobility, they would probably react very soon.
Backlund was the capital, but it was also Rune's largest industrial city. Of its millions of residents, how many belonged to worker families? There were