After leaving the church and stepping onto the street, Shade saw that gray snowflakes had already blanketed the roads. Along the entire Cherry Leaf Street, fewer than a quarter of the shops were actually open for business.
Continuing toward the intersection, Shade saw no Four-wheeled Rental Carriages waiting for passengers in the places that had once been bustling.
Instead, a policeman hurrying past with a Kerosene Lamp in hand loudly warned Shade that Randall River Valley had encountered a once-in-a-century abnormal negative-pressure vortex. The toxic substances in the air throughout the city were now settling, so it was best not to remain outdoors today. Even indoors, people had to pay attention to city hall's earthquake warning: a major earthquake would strike outside the city tonight.
Shade walked an entire street through the city, which seemed like a dying patient, before finally finding a rental carriage. From the coachman, he also learned that the earthquake during last night's banquet had merely been the beginning of a chain of quakes.
Over the course of the night, more than eight earthquakes strong enough to be clearly felt had struck Randall River Valley City, to the extent that almost no local resident had managed to sleep well.
At the same time, the earthquakes had caused widespread fires in the Old Town slums, as well as severe landslides in the rural villages of the eastern mountains of Randall River Valley. Based on what the coachman had heard alone, the number of people killed by the earthquake's subsequent effects last night had already reached three digits.
Therefore, since this morning, unless they had contracted a serious illness such as the Petrification Plague, people stayed home whenever possible. As gray snow drifted through the city in the season before early spring, the ordinary coachman, who had lived