Rosemary is a town with a flavor, just like the other large and small stone buildings of the Southern City-State Alliance. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info

This so-called "taste" does not refer to the ancient customs and charm that have been polished and preserved by the time of history, as we use this word to describe a city or town at other times, but as it literally, it has a taste.

And it's a very strong taste.

The northern and western parts of the town, near the forests leading to the west coast, are residential quarters and shopping streets, which are wide, clean and tidy, as any newcomer to the south would feel, and symbolize all civilization and beauty, wealth and well-being—but there is one thing that the vast majority of travelers and mercenaries who walk here rarely notice.

As we have said before, the southern city-states used slaves far more harshly than any other country in the world, and if we followed this line of thought, it would be self-evident what was missing in the streets where the clean and tidy people were happy and laughing and peaceful.

Almost two centuries ago, when Avenella on the west coast was founded, the Southern City-State Confederation was, like many other places, with streets filled with stinking slaves and livestock excrement and urine, and people dumped kitchen waste and other debris into nearby ditches and rivers, which flowed down the Mobigas Sea. The night lasted so long that it eventually turned the main city of Ella into a "stinking city" surrounded by stinking black waters.

Today's Southern slang still retains a word that satirizes the other party's Jin Yu and its external defeat, and the pronunciation is Ella's inflection, but to master it, you have to learn the vast amount of southern slang that has evolved over the centuries to become very different from the traditional Lamanic language.

All in all, the nobles of the time, who found that they could not continue like this, united and spent a great deal of money to relocate the inhabitants of the villages and towns, tear down all the houses, and bring in powerful architects from the Dwarven Mountains in the far east to guide them, and use a large number of slaves to build these extremely beautiful towns and fortresses in the course of twenty-three years.

But there is one thing that even the dwarven sewer system cannot dispose of, the south is a commercial land, and they produce far more than the combined needs of all the people here, and this situation naturally produces a lot of waste, and the presence of slaves for labor - the settlements can easily be kept tidy, but the much larger industrial area, which is constantly producing garbage, is a place that even the dwarven masters are afraid of.

Of course, there are some arguments that the dwarves refuse to use because they are not used to the practice of human beings enslaving their own kind, but in any case, the nobles of the southern realm, who cannot achieve all this with the help of the power of the dwarves, according to the only way that the human nobles can come up with the lofty idea, naturally choose to simply and rudely isolate those dirty guys from themselves again.

So, unlike the high-end streets, where there are all master-level craftsmen, either elite shops opened by top blacksmiths like Mike, or jewelry merchants, goldsmiths, silversmiths, in short, are top-level rare elites, an industrial area that gathers a large number of cheap and mass-produced bargain manufacturing points that are used to sell to ordinary people and low-level mercenaries everywhere with the help of the powerful sea transportation capacity, and is planned in this way.

The lowest-class slaves who are responsible for production here, even if they have basic artisan knowledge, they will never be treated as craftsmen, and the goods made by cheap labor costs are sold at a level of price compared to what craftsmen make, and the merchants in the south make a lot of money, but no one cares about the life and death of these slaves.

The processing of leather and the sale of finished leather products is a major output for Rosemary, and the processing of leather goods requires soaking in water for cooked skinning, as well as shaving off the rotten flesh, hair and fat, all of which add up to the water, which naturally makes the water deliberately separated from the residential area full of foul odors and all kinds of flies.

Mira had just come here and couldn't help but reach out and cover her mouth and nose, the ground here was all slimy and wet, stained with a black dirt that had accumulated over an unknown number of years, and the air was mixed with the stench of dead bodies and excrement, mixed with the smell of blood and sweat and a whole bunch of other things, making people feel a bitter pain in their nostrils when they smelled it - Henry handed her a piece of cotton cloth, which was given to her by the Ferex Chamber of Commerce who led the way, and Mira tied it.

It was hard for the white-haired Luoan maiden to imagine anyone living in such an environment, but it was true—most of the slaves were still working at this time, and only a very small number of them were wandering outside, leaning their dirty bodies against the pillars of the equally dirty wooden houses, and casting a somewhat gloomy gaze in this direction.

Mira stared at them, many of them were skinny, she felt a little unbearable, her steps slowed down, the sage in front of her and the middle-aged man who led the way both stopped and looked at her: "Miss, I advise you not to take too much care of these people, most of them have fallen into this virtue of their own doing, and they have no regrets about it. ”

Noticing the girl's gaze, the middle-aged man said this, Mira could roughly understand what he was saying, although she didn't know if it was true that she was defending herself because she was a Southerner, and he continued: "If they have the chance, they will pounce on you like a wolf lizard and tear you apart, there have been many cases of young ladies and ladies going to the industrial area and disappearing, so let's move on." ”

"......" Mira paused for a moment, turned her head to look at the men again, and then quickly followed the two in front of her out of the outermost part of the leather workshop in the southern district, and continued deeper into the interior.

Now she is no longer the simple girl who only feels sad when she sees something bad and tries to help the other person, and some of the things about the history of Sivalier that Mira has learned are usually like the Lamanites, the source of this culture, who consciously or unconsciously promote a theory of fate, cause and effect, and reward, and nothing impresses her more than the fact that many families and even empires have perished because of their own shortcomings.

The wretched will have something to hate. Henry had long ago told her about not helping others casually when she didn't have enough ability, and after she learned to read and began to read books, good intentions did bad things or good people were killed by the people they helped.

Human nature is a very complex thing, and many people who have lost their lives for some reason are overestimating their control over all this. They generalize and feel that their thoughts are also the thoughts of the majority, so they start to do what they think is a good thing - the vast majority of them are self-satisfied, even if there is really a part of the existence of the good for the other party from the bottom of their hearts, ignoring the gap between their background and growth environment and status, often, but they will not end well.

"Man is meant to be enslaved, conquered, and disciplined. This statement from the great emperor of the Lamanite Empire, Cesario I, that slavery was the right way to go, is still controversial to this day, with most of the nobles, commoners, and merchants supporting its existence, and some leading scholars and magicians often denouncing it - after all, it is only humans who do this kind of behavior among the five major races that exist on the continent of Rigal.

But there is a necessity for anything to exist, and there is a proverb on the West Coast that says, "If you give a man a dan a day and one day you don't give it, he will hate you, and if you slap a man every day, one day you won't give it, he will be grateful to you." ”

People are never born equal, and it is precisely because of the fear of those ordinary people that they dare not offend, and once a nobleman or a wealthy merchant who is overly loving gets too close to those poor people who have not experienced any cultural influence and have struggled to make ends meet all their lives, they lose this veil of mystery and distance, and when the other party finds out that they have the ability to touch you, greed will begin to move, and they want more, a decent life like yours, and a delicious meal like yours。

Even if you're a woman, they'll want to get you.

The aristocracy, the meritocracy, the slaves, the rewards and the punishments - all these things are born out of the endless greed and lust, the class divisions and all kinds of corresponding rights that have evolved from generation to generation in order to maintain their own lives and lives - just because they came here and saw how miserable the living conditions of these people were, and tried to change all this?

Today's Mira is no longer so naïve.

If you want to change an entire system that has been in place for thousands of years, then you must first invent a system that can replace it, otherwise it will only be a matter of time before you overthrow the seemingly evil slave owners and completely wipe out all the dark things in the entire southern city-state alliance. Even if they really have the ability to do all this, when the position of the person in power who holds the most interests is vacated, in order to compete for this position, this interest will inevitably be exchanged for greater bloodshed and social unrest.

The white-haired girl of Luo An understood not only the way that a person with power like the Sage dealt with many things, but she was now more or less able to understand why he had the ability, the ability to change everything, but often turned a blind eye to something and did not take action.

"If a monkey puts on armor and rides on a warhorse, it will not become a knight, and neither will a commoner. This phrase, written in the Sivalyan books on horsemanship, can also be used to explain many situations, where the training and knowledge of the noble knights in martial arts is their greatest strength, and a person who suddenly acquires great strength rather than training it from a young age usually takes it to the wrong place, and because they do not have a strong heart and a cool head commensurate with force, they are very apt to make wrong judgments and things get out of hand.

A truly strong person cannot only be strong by force, like Henry, who has a heart commensurate with it in order to exert exactly 100% of his ability, and will not do the stupid act of trying to change everything by force.

There is no shortcut to this path, and the combat power that is suddenly obtained by relying on some mysterious alien treasures is not really strong, and the strength formed by the accumulation of hard and diligent practice is the real sense of strength - the white-haired girl has become more and more aware of what she should do now as time goes by studying seriously, and before her, there have been many people who have followed this path and gone further.

Henry must be the best in this ranks, and the person they have been together for more than a month is also the person they are going to find at this time, and the deputy leader of the mercenary group of the Felex family, Juan, is another typical example.

"Beware of an old man, especially when he is in a profession where many people die at a young age. "The experience that comes with time is terrifying, and it is better to be wary of mercenaries who have never been able to rise to a high level in a lifetime in a profession that is associated with death, and who have seen the battlefield, whether hunting or war, and survived.

Walking on the dark, dirty planks and dirt of the road, there was a pungent smell of smoke in front of me, even the wet cotton cloth that covered my face was still heard, crackling and thick black smoke rose into the sky, and the nearby water had the same rancid smell and cloudy color as the previous leather workshop, and a layer of black soot floated in addition to the same rancid and cloudy color as the previous leather workshop—it was making soap.

This kind of personal hygiene product made from animal oil and plant ash is very popular in a wealthy area like the South, and although it requires a lot of plant ash to make it, so the price remains high, but fortunately, a bar of soap is usually enough for many people to use for a long time, so most people are still willing to spend this amount of money to make sure that their bodies do not smell like those slaves.

"Ahem-a-cough-a-" The billowing black smoke blew towards them because of the change in the direction of the wind, and the girl and the middle-aged man in front of them were coughing for a while, because the road was slippery, Mira almost slipped and fell into the smelly ditch, but fortunately Henry pulled her, and then the three of them continued to walk forward together.

As the road progressed, the air began to get better a little better, and after walking for so long in a filthy industrial area where there was little one but slaves, they finally reached the destination of their trip.

Hidden in an alley on the east side of the industrial area, at the end of the walk, climb to the top of the hill on the east slope, knock on a hidden door, pick up a torch and walk down the stairs to the end, where there is a huge hidden mansion of the Ferex family.

"Welcome, my friend. Tucked away in the midst of a stinking industrial area, this mansion faces the residential area to the north, and its façade hidden in the woods, with its large windows offering a high view of Rosemary, is clearly befitting the town's greatest aristocratic status.

"Looks like you've already met your insider. Still squinting with a goatee, but carefully groomed with his hair, old Juan, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt of a Southern aristocrat with a dark blue snake-dragon skin vest, and in bloomers, looked completely different from before, holding a glass of red wine, and then reached out to signal for Henry and Mira to sit on the wicker chair opposite.

"Find me something, I've learned a little bit through the raven, you Jill and I are not people who like to beat around the bush, although I have been paid, but the grace of saving lives is not something that can be compensated by some reward, so this favor, I will help." He put down the red wine, then crossed his hands and bent down, his eyes slowly opened, his expression serious and sharp.

"But I must warn you, friend, that if you do this, you will be in great trouble. ”

"I mean—even for you, it's going to be a big problem. ”

He said this, and Henry shrugged his shoulders and smiled slightly.

"I want to hear about it. (To be continued.) )