The slums of Lower Saffron at the edge of the capital city were not built—they were spat out, stitched from rotwood and despair, shacks leaning like drunks after dusk, roofs patchy with dried leaves, ragged cloth, or simply open to the whims of the sky.
Smoke curled from broken chimneys, not from firewood, but from burnt trash and old spirit talismans repurposed by the desperate.
The ground was mud—always—and every step was a gamble between solid earth and sucking mire.
In these rundown alleys, where even Qi refused to linger, they had gathered.
Old men with eyes like cloudy glass, women with children wrapped in strips of bloodied linen, coughing until their ribs rattled.
A one-armed beggar scratched at the stump, the skin cracked like dried earth.
An emaciated boy, bald from sickness, sat on a wooden cart wheeled by a sister with more bandages than fingers.
The air reeked—not of death, no, that was too clean—but of festering hope and meat gone sour.
