It was eerily quiet. The Slums did not have the kind of clamor the outside world imagined; instead, it was terrifyingly silent.
The dilapidated wooden houses on both sides of the street still huddled tightly together, like elderly people in their twilight years holding each other up, refusing to fall.
The ground was covered with traces left by flowing sewage, but at this moment, the children who usually ran around here covered in mud were nowhere to be seen.
Helos tightened the coarse cloth robe around her. The chilling sensation did not come merely from the temperature; it was more like some sticky malice was worming its way into her body through her pores.
“This smell is truly disgusting.”
With a slight snort of disdain, Sylvia’s semi-transparent figure slowly floated out of the ring.
She did not fully materialize, maintaining only a spectral state visible solely to Helos and Julius, hovering in midair.
The former Great Slayer of Mages frowned, waving her illusory fingers in front of her nose as if trying to dispel some invisible dust in the air.
Helos lowered her voice and asked, “Teacher, did you notice something?”
“Dead and lifeless.”
Sylvia floated under the eaves, her gaze scanning the rows of tightly closed doors around her.
“This place is filled with a chaotic and murky magic residue, like a pile of moldy bread and rotting innards thrown into a pot and boiled for a day and a night. It is very faint, but to me it is unbearably pungent.”
Julius walked at the very front, his hand never leaving the hilt of his sword.
Hearing Sylvia’s words, his steps paused slightly, and his gaze turned to a pile of junk stacked in the corner of the street.
It was a worn-out cloth doll lying alone in the muddy water, half its head already crushed, revealing the blackened cotton inside.
“Something is indeed wrong,” Julius said in a low voice, his voice unusually clear on the empty street.
“It is too quiet. The Slums is the most densely populated area in the Imperial Capital. Even if it has been locked down, we should not be unable to hear a single human voice.”
Helos nodded, the unease in her heart growing stronger.
Although this area was called the Slums, it actually housed no fewer than tens of thousands of people, and not all of them were poor.
Normally this was the noisiest place in the Imperial Capital, with peddlers’ cries, quarrels, and children’s wails interwoven, full of the bustling breath of everyday life. But now, it was like a dead city that had just been abandoned.
Apart from the occasional glimpse of one or two fully armed, hurried patrol soldiers in the distance, they had not seen a single ordinary Commoner along the way.
“Could they have already been evacuated?”
Helos tentatively offered a hypothesis, but as soon as the words left her mouth, she shook her head herself.
If a large-scale evacuation had really been carried out, then the movement of tens of thousands of people would absolutely cause a huge commotion, and other areas of the Imperial Capital could not have been completely without rumors.
And where would the evacuation point be set? A refugee camp outside the city? Or some temporary settlement area? Either way, it would require a massive amount of manpower and resources to maintain, and it could never be as silent as this.
“I will go take a look.”
Julius gestured to Helos, signaling her to stay where she was and keep watch, while he quickly walked to a low wooden house by the roadside.
The door of the house was half-closed and not locked. Julius gently pushed it open with his Scabbard, producing a grating creak.
Inside, the light was dim, with only a faint glimmer coming through the broken window.
Helos stood at the doorway, peering inside.
The room’s furnishings were simple: a table missing a leg, several broken chairs, and a large communal bed against the wall.
On the table were several clay bowls, still containing oatmeal that had long since spoiled and blackened, and even half a piece of bitten Black Bread thrown on the ground.
Although the ashes under the stove had gone completely cold, the firewood beside it was still scattered in a pile, clearly indicating that they had suddenly stopped while preparing to light a fire and cook.
“No one is here,” Julius said after checking around the cramped room, his expression turning even uglier. “There are no signs of struggle, nor any sign that they packed their valuables and left… It is as if the people here evaporated into thin air in an instant.”
Helos entered the house and bent down to pick up the half piece of Black Bread on the ground. The bread was already as hard as stone, with several ants crawling on it.
“If it were an official evacuation, the residents would definitely have taken their valuables and clothing,” Helos said, tossing the bread away and patting the dust off her hands, her tone grave. “They left in a great hurry, or rather, they were forced to leave.”
She thought of the expression Christ had worn in the duke’s study, that look of wanting to speak but holding back, full of agony.
At the time, her brother had tried desperately to stop them from coming in. If it were simply a matter of fighting Chaos Believers, he could have just said so. But his despairing attitude seemed to hint at some crueler truth.
A terrifying conjecture gradually took shape in Helos’s mind.
What if these Commoners had not been evacuated at all? What if this massive lockdown barrier was not meant to prevent outsiders from entering, but to prevent the people inside from escaping?
“Damn it,” Helos cursed under her breath, feeling her blood run cold.
If her conjecture was true, then what exactly had happened to these tens of thousands of innocent Commoners at this very moment?
Sylvia floated in, looked at the expressions on the two faces, and seemed to guess something as well.
She rarely refrained from teasing, but this time she silently floated to the window, looked at the dead silent street outside, and said in a low voice, “It seems this muddy water is deeper than we imagined.”
Just as the three of them fell into silence–
“Aah–!!”
A shrill, agonized scream suddenly tore through the deathly silence.
The voice was sharp and high-pitched, filled with extreme fear and despair, like the final cry squeezed from the depths of someone’s throat as they witnessed an incomprehensible horror just before death.
Helos shuddered all over and jerked her head up. The sound had come from the street block not far ahead!
“Go!”
Julius reacted the fastest, rushing out of the house almost the instant the sound came. Helos did not hesitate at all, lifting the hem of her robe and charging out right behind Julius.
The two of them sprinted through the intricate network of alleys. The terrain here was complex, filled with illegally built shacks and mountains of garbage.
Julius was like a nimble cheetah, agilely avoiding obstacles while staying alert for possible ambushes. Although Helos was not as physically strong as Julius, she did not fall behind.
After that scream, no further sound came. This sudden silence was even more unsettling than continued cries for help.
“Just around that corner ahead!”
Julius let out a low shout, suddenly putting force into his feet, and his whole body shot past the alley entrance like an afterimage.
Helos followed close behind, bursting out of the alley, and her field of vision suddenly opened up.
It was a small open-air Square, normally probably a place where people dried clothes or held gatherings.
But the scene that met her eyes at this moment made Helos abruptly stop in her tracks, her pupils contracting violently, as if she had seen a nightmare.