October 9th, Red Tide Territory.
The morning mist had not yet dissipated, but the sky over the Red Tide Territory was more silent than usual.
There was no hustling sound of the markets, nor the laughter of children or the rumbling of carriages and horses.
There were only families, one after another, dragging luggage, carrying babies in swaddles, silently entering those few Earth Towers.
"Go inside, this is the Lord's arrangement." A gray-haired old woman murmured as if reciting an oracle, "Great Lord Louis... would not harm us."
No one refused, and no one complained.
Even though the space in the Earth Towers was cramped and the crowd was dense, they still queued up orderly to enter.
Because it was Louis's command.
They remembered clearly, more than a year ago, they were still curling up in the icy wind and mud, sleeping in tents with cracks, eating porridge mixed with grass roots and bone shards.
