Chapter 46: Black Market
The three largest buttons inside the elevator were labeled B1, B2, and B3, which would let a user access the entrances of any of the Underground's three basement floors.
Despite having some previous experience here, Alexandre only had limited knowledge of exactly what lay on each of these floors.
B1 was infamously known as the "Pleasure Palace" and was home to all manner of sexual services. Despite the very dark nature of some of its services, the prices were considerably lower than what one could attain deeper into the Underground.
B2 was the "House of Dreams," where every drug imaginable could be obtained. Supposedly, there was room upon room upon room specially outfitted for various kinds of addicts to indulge themselves as they wished.
B3 borrowed a nickname from the United States itself and was known as the "Land of the Free." This was Alexandre's stop.
Alexandre got out of the elevator and found himself in a chamber that would have stunned anyone who hadn't been aware of exactly how vast the Underground truly was.
The Land of the Free was a concrete cavern at least 10,000 square meters in area and with a ceiling twenty meters in height. This chamber was home to a bazaar where hundreds of people had set up displays, tables, and even small trailers and concrete buildings from which all manner of goods were sold, regardless of any kind of laws. As a result, most of the objects were likely simple junk intended to rip people off, but there were also surely a few pieces of quality merchandise here or there if one knew where to look.
"I wonder how they got all this down here," Alexandre muttered as he stepped out of the elevator. "Surely they didn't all bring it down the same way I came." There were, of course, many paths to the Underground from the surface, but Alexandre assumed many of them weren't even available to people like him. "Perhaps that'll change once I become a proper Hunter..."
But he'd worry about that in the future. For now, Alexandre needed to weave his way through the bazaar until he reached his destination in the area's thirty-eighth sectioned zone.