Chapter 359
Lin Hui’s approach to learning martial arts was simple. He only needed a pretext, a foundation to explain why he would suddenly become skilled with weapons in the future. More importantly, he wanted to see what the basic martial arts system in this world was really like.
After he agreed, Lin Xiangnan and Fu Yunxin immediately packed his things and took him to enroll the very next day. The weather was dry. Once they left the house, Lin Xiangnan led Lin Hui along the roadside, the two of them walking single file toward the sword hall.
Xidong City’s infrastructure was atrocious. Its streets and alleys were little more than packed yellow mud. Whenever a horse cart, ox cart, or passing car rolled by, it kicked up choking clouds of dust.
Sparse little shops and open-air stalls lined both sides of the road. More jarringly, emaciated men and women knelt in the dirt, gray cloths draped around their necks. They wore filthy rags, patched so many times their original colors were long gone. Their hair was matted with grime. As Lin Hui passed by, a heavy stench of sweat and wet earth struck his nose.
Lin Xiangnan did his best to shield his son with his body, blocking Lin Hui’s view of the kneeling figures.
“Who are they?” Lin Hui asked.
Lin Xiangnan was silent for a moment. “People selling themselves. All of them.”
Selling themselves? In the few years since arriving in this world, Lin Hui had lived in a decent residential neighborhood and rarely gone far from home. He usually focused on strange supernatural news. Hearing something as archaic and visceral as “selling themselves” left him stunned for a moment.
“There’s been a drought recently,” Lin Xiangnan said in a low voice with a heavy sigh. “The fields are bone-dry, and most of the crops have died. Many peasant families can’t survive any other way.”