A few days later, on the streets of Backlund, a car painted a deep, inky green glided soundlessly over the asphalt, like a giant python lurking beneath the water.
It lacked the roar of an ordinary car's engine, for this was the limited-edition Pioneer released by Edwin Automotive Industries. Only thirty had been sold throughout the Loen Kingdom.
Its streamlined design looked strikingly futuristic on the streets of the Loen Kingdom, every curve like a meticulously calculated work of art.
The windows had a light amber tint. From outside, people could make out only vague silhouettes, never the faces within.
Its price—fifty thousand pounds—was enough to buy a villa with a garden in Backlund's most prosperous district, or let an ordinary family live in luxury for decades.
Even so, countless members of the rich and powerful flocked to it.
For it was more than a means of transportation. It was a banner, a declaration proclaiming the pinnacle of wealth and status.
People on the street, whether porters in coarse work clothes or well-dressed gentlemen carrying walking sticks, instinctively stopped in their tracks.
Their eyes followed the car, holding neither envy nor anger, only a mixture of curiosity and some other, indescribable emotion.
A man who had just finished his shift at a textile mill, dirty bandages still wrapped around his fingers, stopped and removed his faded flat cap.
Just last year, he had lost two fingers in a workplace accident. In the past, his employer would have dismissed him without mercy, and, unable to afford treatment, he would have died miserably from the agony of an infected wound.
But thanks to the implementation of the workers' injury compensation act, his employer had paid his medical expenses, and he had received compensation as well.
The man who had proposed that act