Bernia's capital-Silver City. Seen from three thousand meters above, the city resembled an intricate painting: cranes crowded the port district, where freighters came and went as orderly as ants; six alloy highways, each thirty meters wide, spread like silver-gray arteries from the port toward the city center, then stretched onward to the golden Harvest Plains; the steelworks in the east belched white steam, while rows of salt refineries in the west glittered in the sunlight like snowbound mountain ranges; glass curtain walls in the economic district refracted a kaleidoscope of colors, while the red-tiled roofs of the residential district formed a warm sea.
Boer had played a part in every brick, every tile, every production line here. He hovered beneath the clouds, his electromagnetic extrasensory perception spreading in invisible ripples-every life magnetic field reflected clearly in his consciousness.
Workers sweated before furnaces, fishermen unloaded cargo at the docks, vendors hawked their wares in the streets, and children ran across the squares. The world would not stop turning for anyone. Everything in Bernia continued along the tracks he had laid, as though he had never left.
"A well-chosen location," Boer murmured to himself.
"At least here... I really can't use any abilities that cause mass casualties."
The commercial district's main street.
The paving stones baked under the midday sun, but now people knelt across them-a dense mass stretching from one end of the street to the other. Commoners bowed their heads, foreheads pressed against the ground. No one dared look up. Fear hung in the air, mingling with sweat and stifled sobs.
At the front of the crowd, an obese figure sat on a "human chair"-a muscular male slave over two and a half meters tall, his skin covered in whip scars and brands, a heavy iron collar around his neck.