When Ye Chen opened the door, what met his eyes was a narrow, dim alleyway.
The ground was strewn with every kind of garbage and debris.
Rats and insects could be seen everywhere.
The sanitary conditions were atrocious beyond words.
On both sides of the alley stood cramped, ramshackle shacks like the Daig Family's.
Poor people in tattered clothes came and went, each one gaunt-faced and listless, like rotten, withered wood that could snap at the slightest touch.
Only the filthy young children could still occasionally reveal innocent, carefree smiles as they rummaged through heaps of garbage in search of toys.
The air everywhere reeked of poverty, destitution, and despair.
Ye Chen silently observed it all, unable to hide the surprise in his expression.
In the prosperous Holy Light Pure Land, such a sight would have been virtually impossible.
After all, the Holy Light Church, which held "people first" as one of its doctrines, would never permit the existence of places like slums.
Within Holy Light Society, anyone down on their luck could go to the local church and apply for basic living assistance.
And no matter how humble their origins, young children would have the chance to be taken in by humanitarian organizations such as orphanages and monasteries, rather than being forced to seek traces of happiness in garbage heaps as they did now.
Looking at the poor people in all their varied forms, Ye Chen pondered grimly to himself:
(The people here have human faces like mine, and they speak the Holy Light language like I do.)
(Yet they use currency from more than a century ago in the Holy Light Pure Land. And they do not even know what the Holy God is, what the Church is, what the Hunter Corps is, or what Hunters are.)
*(Everything