Dim, damp, and abandoned, the area was filled with the stench of mold and decay. The air seemed to have turned into some sort of filthy, heavy "gel," its viscous texture settling at the bottom of the Abyss of Forgetting. Industrial exhaust discharged from the layers upon layers of city factories above, toxic gases seeping from abandoned mine tunnels underground, and the "decayed psionic energy" released by the planet itself as its ley lines dried up—all of it had accumulated in the lower levels of the city, eventually turning this place into some sort of... alienated zone.
It was not the Otherworld, but in some ways, it was every bit as dangerous.
No matter how one looked at it, the lower levels of the cities on Grey Dwarf Star were no longer fit for habitation. Luo led her personal guards through those rotten, dark streets. At times, she even wondered whether the "bottom-dwellers" mentioned in the reports truly existed, but the captain of the guards told her that there really were people on this level.
The "abandoned people" cast aside by the giant walls, the wanderers and scavengers who could no longer survive above, as well as the criminals exiled by gangs or sentenced to "execution by exile" by local warlords—all of them would sink lower and lower through the giant-walled cities, eventually reaching this dark district and becoming its "residents."
Most of them gathered near abandoned drilling sites or ancient factories. They lived in shopping malls and residential buildings that looked almost entirely reduced to ruins. They generated electricity with scrap-fueled furnaces or stole it directly from the floors above. They hunted in polluted-water rivers or cavernous areas, and occasionally raided biopharmaceutical farms or automated factories on slightly higher floors. Some people living in the lower levels beneath the