July, Flame Moon.
On a road outside Xia Ya, South Capital of the Soma Alliance, Richard walked toward the much-praised city.
From within a few miles, he could already see the city clearly.
The instant he saw it clearly, Richard looked somewhat surprised. It was not its prosperity that surprised him—after all, he had seen metropolises on Earth far beyond this era—but its decay.
He had not expected the place known as the "City of Glory" and the "Golden City" to look worse than Faro, a second-rate city.
The walls protecting the city were indeed majestic, like an unbroken mountain range stretching across the land. Their height and thickness were enough to make an ordinary army despair. Even some Wizard Apprentices and Three-rune Magic-armored Knights could not forcibly scale them; only Wizards could ignore them.
But considering the soldiers patrolling the walls, the Magic-armored Knights wielding Magic Rune Javelins, and the massive ballistae, even Wizards generally would not dare openly challenge this city's authority. After all, this was where the Alliance Emperor resided.
Yet aside from that, the rest of Xia Ya made people frown.
Clearly visible about two hundred meters beyond the city walls were ramshackle wooden shacks, built without any planning in clusters and rows. Trash covered the ground around them, sewage flowed everywhere, and the sanitation conditions were atrocious—even worse than in some villages.
All kinds of people lived in the shacks: good people, bad people, men, women, children, elderly people, merchants, thieves...
Their only common trait was poverty, which was why they could only live here.
But compared with poor people elsewhere, there was a trace of pride in all their eyes. It was as though, even if they were so poor they went hungry, having a place outside Xia Ya City still made them more