Summer's brief daylight quickly faded with the passage of time.
After another shower, night climbed into the sky. Darkness surged forth like a spring, shrouding the world, and then, one by one, lights that did not belong in the Wilderness lit up.
The lights blazed brightly.
Unlike other settlements, New Spring only grew busier and noisier after nightfall. Since the night market had opened on a proper scale, many people from other settlements had come to spend money, and the food stalls beneath the sheds were nearly full.
Even more people had just received temporary residence permits from the management team and found somewhere to settle down in the pigeonholes. Seeing all the bustle, they wandered through it curiously.
They squatted beside street stalls, pointing at pots, bowls, ladles, seasonings, or even porn magazines as they haggled with the vendors.
Garbage Collectors who had just been paid drove their empty Small Three-Wheelers to the food stalls and splurged extravagantly—stir-fried rice noodles with meat and pork liver, plus two extra eggs if they dared. Steam rose from the affordable food stalls. Amid the scrape of wok spatulas, meals were served immediately, along with two cups of watered-down draft beer, all for a single Coast cafeteria meal ticket.
That was right, meal tickets.
Since checking placer gold was troublesome and inconvenient for small transactions, no one knew which clever little rascal at some stall had first slapped their forehead and introduced a service that accepted the Coast's internal employee vouchers and meal tickets as payment. From then on, it instantly caught on... and became unstoppable.
Besides, placer gold could be faked. If you accepted counterfeit gold, people could just say you deserved it for having bad eyesight. But if one of the company's vouchers was fake... heh heh, someone would be in