The factories of Black Street ran day and night. The thick black smoke pouring from their towering chimneys shrouded the entire district in a haze that never dispersed. From high above the city, one could even see the hazy, black-veil-like clouds slowly drifting down from the sky. The smoke and dust stained everything in the district a filthy gray-black, and this was one of the origins of Black Street's name. In this modern age, with nanomachine swarms spread across the globe, many heavy industries still could not escape traditional factory production lines due to technological limitations. Large machinery and weapons factories were the two most important examples.
In Black Street, these were by far the most numerous kinds of factories.
Hao Ren emerged from the cramped, narrow slum and saw towering factory buildings at the end of the broad, filthy street. Enormous reaction towers and pressure vessels of unknown purpose had been built directly in the urban district, and the roar of machinery could be heard from the factories as he walked along the street. Hurrying pedestrians could be seen on both sides of the road, most of them impoverished people in worn-out clothes with numb expressions. They had just finished eating their inadequate portions of synthetic food at home, and now they surged toward the factories like a swarm of ants: mechanical beasts that devoured their lives while also keeping them alive. Some covered their faces with scraps of cloth, filtering the dust and haze in the air by a method that was better than nothing, but those blackened scraps were hardly any cleaner than the surrounding air. Their lungs continued to deteriorate irreversibly, corroding and becoming contaminated, until after the age of thirty or forty they were forced to rely on nanomachine swarms to barely stay alive, after