Blood Alley Tax? Pay with Your Life!

Entering Slaughter City.

Su Chen's first reaction was not awe.

It was noise.

Voices, curses, the dying screams of the nearly dead, the sharp crash of shattering bottles, and the brief, piercing shrieks of living creatures being butchered... Every sound had been violently stirred into a pot of boiling soup and poured straight into everyone's ears.

Before them lay a completely unplanned slum.

Sheets of iron, wooden boards, animal hides, even sun-dried human bones—everything that could be found had been used to build these crooked shacks.

They were like ugly, poisonous ringworm clinging to the canyon walls, layered upon layer as they spread upward.

The streets were pitifully narrow; even two people walking side by side would feel cramped.

The ground was always wet, sticky beneath their shoes, impossible to tell whether it was sewage or blood.

The stench in the air was a hundred times stronger than in the passageway.

The sourness of alcohol, the rancid stink of sweat, the rust of iron, all mixed with a sickeningly sweet odor.

"The smell of rotting flesh fermenting in a damp environment."

Chu Yao explained calmly, as if she were discussing an overlooked medicinal herb in class.

Jiang Tieyi's face had already turned an extremely unhealthy shade of green.

"This damned place..." he muttered through clenched teeth. "Doesn't even have a sewer?"

"It does."

Chu Yao glanced at his feet.

"You're standing in it."

Jiang Tieyi abruptly looked down. His boot was sunk in a shallow ditch, where thick black-red liquid was slowly washing over the top of his shoe.

As if stung by a scorpion, he sprang away.

Before the seven of them had crossed two streets, countless gazes had already stuck to them.

They silently emerged from the shadows of shacks, from behind drunks leaning against walls, from the