Chapter 691: The Secret to Making Money
A convoy moved slowly along the bumpy roads of Amellia. The people’s faces were blank and numb, devoid of hope. They stood on the roadside in lines, like walking corpses, holding broken bowls, cups, or any container they could find.
From a distance, they looked lifeless—like the living dead, unsettling to the eye.
The chaos had gone on for so long that it wasn’t just the Gephrans in the imperial district who were affected. The locals suffered deeply as well.
Every time anti-government forces attacked Gephrans, bloody retaliation followed. The Gephrans would sweep the city, dragging out anyone suspected of being connected to the resistance for execution or forced labor camps.
While people hated the Gephrans, they were also tormented by their own. Many broke down, or simply went numb.
A woman stood by the road, about thirty or forty years old, holding hands with two children wearing only shorts, their long hair hanging down their backs, making it hard to tell if they were boys or girls. Her face, too, was expressionless.
All three were filthy. The woman’s clothes couldn’t even be called clothes—just a bedsheet with a hole cut in the middle for her head.
Soon, a short, filthy old man around fifty or sixty approached, carrying a metal cup filled with something like wheat porridge. He spoke with the woman for a moment. After telling the children something, she followed the man into an empty house by the road.
A few minutes later, they came out. The man poured some of his food into the woman’s broken bowl, licked the remaining bits on the rim with satisfaction, and staggered off.