Three minutes later, the chevaux de frise were moved aside, the barriers drawn back, and the gates opened.
Amid countless astonished gazes, the battered truck drove into New Spring and rolled down the main road. For a moment, neither the driver, the bearded man, nor their companions could hide their shock and disbelief.
They felt as though they had taken a wrong turn and somehow entered a city.
The still-noisy, bustling night market was nothing unusual—at most, it was simply a large marketplace.
But everything else...
The asphalt roads had already been laid during the first expansion phase. Even the alleyways had compacted ground covered in gravel.
The streetlights were crude and rough, yet lines had even been painted onto the road.
Nor did the streets have any of the chaos or filth typical of settlements. They could not be called spotless, but there was no sewage or waste being dumped everywhere, either.
The bluestone slabs lining both sides of the road had been deliberately spaced apart. After a rainstorm, the water could be seen draining away through them. In other words, this place had sewers.
Not just sewers—battered trash bins stood at intervals along both sides of the road, and they were not even full. This place even had sanitation workers.
The brightly lit streetlamps and the crisscrossing yet utterly orderly power cables all displayed a kind of "luxury" utterly different from other settlements.
It was not unusual for settlement leaders to have gilded mansions. Some places were even more extravagant than cities... Underground boxing matches, casinos, and all manner of dens of debauchery—in the Wilderness without Celestial Origin, indulgence could become even more outrageous. Otherwise, why would the wealthy people in the cities flock there?
Yet here, this wealth and these assets had been spread out in the