Glaston.
Leaving the dock district, one could see a railway line running straight toward the enormous walled city not far away.
"It feels like... the military pressure in this colony is pretty intense."
Aaron raised a hand to shield himself from the fierce sunlight.
Once he got a clear look at the streets, the sense of an era caught between old and new came rushing at him.
Blond, blue-eyed gentlemen in tailcoats and bowler hats, and ladies in dresses...
Brown-skinned native people wearing headdresses made from vividly colored feathers, with very little cloth on their bodies...
Dark-skinned black slaves with faces painted white, their bodies covered in all manner of bizarre patterns...
And mixed-blood guards with deep-set features and blended traits, dressed in red uniforms and white trousers...
Ignorant old shamans hawked all sorts of miraculous potions along the streets.
Railways crisscrossed the area. Steam locomotives billowed clouds of white smoke as they endlessly hauled cargo from the docks.
Backwardness and ignorance, mystery and science, savagery and capital... all had melded together organically, making Aaron feel for a moment as though he had arrived in the foreign concessions of his previous life's old era.
He glanced at the skin-and-bones old shaman and began pondering inwardly.
'South Innis has distinctive mystical traditions. They use feathers, gemstones, and bones as materials to perform witchcraft with strange effects... Their beliefs are chaotic too—natural spirits, totems, evil gods... a dazzling assortment, everything under the sun.'
'The main language here is Voodoo, which at least the local Beyonders and native upper class can speak. As for the local dialects of the various native states, there are at least a hundred of them. Learning every one would be too much of a waste of time.'
As he walked through the far-from-clean streets, Aaron's upper-class attire drew