Each player carried a lantern as the scholar led them out of West Town Residence's grounds.
Their footsteps pattered rhythmically, and the dark mass of wooden houses drifted away behind them.
The vast shadows cast by the buildings silently receded like storm clouds scattered by the wind. Pale daylight poured down from overhead, making the ground gleam.
Poplar Blossom Town was extraordinarily lively during the day. The wooden buildings lining both sides of the road housed all manner of shops—clothing stores, rouge shops, curio shops, pawnshops—everything one could imagine.
A faint incense fragrance hung in the air, reminiscent of bamboo leaves or wildflowers. Carried by the breeze, it seeped into the Players' clothes.
Townspeople dressed in all colors moved between the storefronts—blue, green, white, yellow, gray—a dazzling array.
Lin Chen remembered Qi Si's earlier claim that different trades wore different clothes. Now, he deliberately studied every townsperson's attire and face from the corner of his eye.
Those dressed in blue were children of wealthy families, followed by male and female attendants in yellow and gray. Those in green were scholars, while those in white were beggars...
Sure enough, people of different identities or genders dressed differently, while people in the same "trade" were generally dressed alike.
It was as though they had deliberately been sorted into distinct categories.
For no apparent reason, Lin Chen thought of the NPCs in those low-budget games on the market, where the developers had been too lazy to create new models and simply copied and pasted the existing ones.
The arrangement of people in Poplar Blossom Town carried the same deliberately shoddy quality. In an instant, the bustle of mortal life became distorted and false, like flowers obscured behind thick fog—only when one drew close did one discover they were festering sores on a rotting