As mentioned before, anyone with taste and a sense of status had a manor house on the outskirts of the city for leisure, as well as a place to host events and gatherings.
It was easy to understand why this arrangement had become so popular. Dunling had expanded without limit, and no matter how advanced its underground drainage network was, it could never fully process the waste produced by such a colossal city.
And aside from the old district, painstakingly built in the city's early days, space was tight everywhere else. There was nowhere for a manor to take root.
Leaving behind the crowded low-rise buildings huddled beneath the Church and the Clock Tower did wonders for one's mood. They always brought to mind densely packed crowds, a promised land for infectious diseases, as vast waters were for fish.
Greenery swept toward him, easing the oppression that had built up over days spent shuttling between clinic wards and tunnel tombs. Sometimes he felt those places were like pen tips driven into the skin's outer layer, leaving behind stubborn pigment that couldn't be scrubbed away until it became part of him; at other times, he felt himself gradually merging with them, becoming part of them.
The weather was pleasant enough. After days of blazing sun, a brief shower had finally fallen on the outskirts, leaving the air wonderfully fresh. Kraft had specifically chosen an open carriage so he could be closer to nature.
Though it could hardly be called natural. Most of the trees around the city had been cut down, and overgrown shrubs and grasses had reclaimed some field boundaries, whether abandoned or merely left fallow between rotations, creating a lush display of summer's vitality.
Kraft felt a sense of distance from the past two weeks. The mystery of the