Chapter 278: The King Descends from the Sky
Outside Gold Lionheart Fortress, pressed right up against the tall, cold granite city wall, was a sprawling, chaotic shantytown.
Most of the structures here were crude huts cobbled together from scavenged, rotten planks, rusted sheet metal, even abandoned carriage bodies—low, dark, and drafty on all sides.
The cold was the deadliest enemy here.
Sleet fell incessantly, building up layers of snow on the flimsy hut roofs, while the biting wind, like a ghost seeping through every crack, wormed its way inside to steal the pitifully scarce warmth within.
The people living here came from complex backgrounds. Some were refugees who had fled north with their families to escape the civil war and conflict within the White Horse Kingdom.
But more were the poor who had been attached to this fortress for generations, struggling to survive here. They had no fixed professions, relying on carrying goods for passing merchant caravans, repairing vehicles, providing crude food and lodging, or other odd jobs to earn meager copper coins and barely scrape by.
Their greatest "dream" was perhaps to save up an unimaginably large sum of money, buy a pass from the Trade Alliance, and gain entry into the safe, prosperous interior of the Alliance to find stable work, even if it was the lowest-level dock laborer or ship cabin cleaner.
But as the White Horse Kingdom's civil war intensified, the main trade routes north were almost completely sealed off. Work opportunities had dwindled significantly, and no large merchant caravans had passed through here for a long time.
Coupled with this sudden winter blizzard... who knew how many more people would quietly fall to hunger and cold this winter, never to see the spring of the coming year.