The Mysterious World Under Steampunk

If you ask the French people, where is the most beautiful city in the French Empire?

Some people may choose Miria City because it is the headquarters of the Continental Congress, and the congressmen stationed by various countries also live there. They not only brought the living habits of various countries, but also brought food, architecture and art from various countries. Wait, it’s okay to call Miria the capital of all nations.

However, some people will express disdain for this, thinking that Leon is the most beautiful city in the French Empire.

Although the city of Miria is beautiful, it does not belong to the Faran Empire, and only Leon, the capital of the Seven Dynasties, can truly represent the beauty of the Faran Empire. It has thousands of years of history, cultural heritage, and the most beautiful sky garden. A scholar once said that even a brick on the ground of Leon can write a great book about his experience.

However, some people still disagree with this statement. They will think that Leon is the decayed corpse of the past. The city is full of corpses. Only the city of Winterrin, which represents iron and blood and solemnity, can be regarded as the modern French Empire. the most beautiful city of

It is difficult to have a final conclusion on the ownership of the most beautiful city in the French Empire. Once it is discussed, there will be no results. Everyone will choose the city in their minds, and there is no public opinion.

However, if the question is changed to where is the largest city in the French Empire? Then everyone will choose Lanxi without hesitation.

Lanxi was the largest slave city in France hundreds of years ago. Thousands of slaves fight each other every day in the Lanxi Arena. This is also the starting point of the slave uprising that almost wiped out the French royal family. Later, the capital of the slave kingdom was located.

Later, the entire city of Lanxi was destroyed in the war, and the sole survivor of the French royal family completely razed the city, destroying all the buildings, including the magnificent arena.

After more than two hundred years, Lanxi was uninhabited, and the stone left over from the destroyed buildings became the cornerstone of other urban buildings. It was not until the emergence of industry that Lanxi, a wasteland that had been vacant for a hundred years, was reused.

Although the royal family of France hated the land of Lanxi extremely and wanted to permanently abandon it, when faced with the need for a large amount of land to build factories, their minds could not help but think of Lanxi.

The geographical advantages of the land of Lanxi are too great. This is the intersection of the four plains of the western continent, and the ancient marching roads on the four plains will meet here. It is absolutely connected in all directions. Even when the railway tracks were built later, there was no need for additional surveys, and they could be built directly along the ancient marching road, and a railway network covering the entire western continent could be easily built.

In addition, the water system here is also very developed. The icy water left from the Rhodes Mountain, the highest mountain in the Western Continent, converged into the Rhodes River to Lanxi, and was divided into two in Lanxi. A tributary that went south and finally flowed into the Falling Star Sea was still preserved. The name of the Rhodes River, and another tributary going north was renamed the Rhodeland River, and finally merged with the Verente River and flowed into the Endless Sea.

With the water network constructed by these two big rivers and their tributaries, cargo ships on the water can easily send Lanxi's goods to any place.

It is precisely because of such a huge geographical advantage that the French royal family eventually built a large number of factories here, and it became the largest industrial city in the French Empire.

With the continuous development of nearly a hundred years, there are more and more factories in Lanxi, coupled with the living area of ​​factory workers, the urban area of ​​Lanxi continues to expand, from the old Lanxi City to the new Lanxi City, and then to the new Lanxi City. Expansion to the outer plains has finally expanded Lanxi into the largest city in the French Empire until now.

Some good people have carefully measured the coverage area of ​​Lanxi City. After calculation, they found that it takes four Leons to piece together, which is equivalent to the area of ​​one Lanxi, and Miria is slightly better, requiring two and a half .

Although Lanxi City is recognized as the largest city in the French Empire and the crown of world industry that the French people are proud of, no literati would be willing to write articles praising such a great city, because in the eyes of those people, this Cities are very ugly.

Countless monster-like factories crawled within sight of the horizon, and chimneys as high as 100 meters rose from the ground, just like mature trees, but these trees did not grow leaves, only Spit thick smoke, covering the entire sky, so that Lanxi City will always be in a dim and dark environment, so some people call Lanxi City the City of Eternal Darkness.

If it's just a factory with no aesthetic feeling, it's fine, even the houses where the workers live are so strange and unsightly.

I don't know what the people who built the apartment dormitories for the factory workers thought. They built each apartment so close to each other, and the roads between the apartments were so narrow that three people had to stick to the wall to walk side by side.

If the people living here are compared with the dormitory apartments built, although it is a bit crowded, it is not particularly difficult to live in.

But the problem is that as a large number of factories are stationed in Lanxi, the number of workers accompanying the factories has also increased rapidly. From more than 50,000 people a hundred years ago, it has now almost exceeded the huge population of 3 million people.

Since so many people have entered the city, it is natural that housing must be built.

But with the completion of the railway network, Lanxi's land has become very expensive, and it doubles every year.

It is a good deal to buy land, whether it is to sell the land at a higher price in the future, or directly use it to build factories, but it is definitely a loss-making business to build workers' apartments, and it is a huge loss. No chamber of commerce can bear such a huge loss.

So those factory owners started to use their brains, and they don't know who started it first. He didn't tear down his worker's apartment building and rebuild it, but directly built floors and rooms like building blocks. .

In order to save costs, the architects who first built these apartment buildings directly moved stone materials from the ancient city of Lanxi to build foundations, walls, load-bearing columns, etc. These stones are the best granite stones in the world, and their strength is self-evident .

It is precisely because of such a solid foundation that the factory owner used this opportunistic method to build the house, and the house did not collapse.

Because there was an example as a demonstration, other factory owners followed suit. The house was built layer by layer, and the floors were increased layer by layer. When the height was finally increased to more than 30 floors, the builder found that the structure of the house was tilted. signs, if not dealt with, the house is bound to collapse.

For this reason, these factory owners who were not originally architects once again thought of a bad idea. They connected all the worker apartment buildings together with beams and columns like steel rails, connected all the apartment buildings into a whole, and forcibly reinforced the apartment buildings. The foundation of the building.

Although the method was a bad idea, the effect was unexpectedly good, so the factory owner continued to build additional buildings, and then connected and reinforced them when they couldn't support them, and finally formed the current building with a height of two hundred floors and occupying six points. One of Lanxi City, a monster-like apartment city.

Because the roads are narrow, it is impossible for the workers living in these houses to walk from the bottom road, so the workers living here spontaneously used the scrap iron picked up from the factory, and used the steel beams and columns connecting the apartment buildings to build An air bridge that can pass to any apartment building.

And some highly skilled workers made some steam engines by themselves, installed them on the outermost side of the apartment city, connected them with steel cables and iron cages, and made a rough steam automatic elevator, which was specially used for workers to travel.

It is precisely because of these steel frames that the entire apartment city looks like a huge cage from a distance, so some people jokingly call it the cage city.

In addition, due to the random expansion and construction of the cage city, the terrain inside is like a maze. Even workers who have lived in the cage city for a long time may get lost if they leave the familiar living area. Therefore, the workers living inside the Cage City were a little bored, and dubbed it a black forest made of steel, cement, and granite according to the dark environment and labyrinth-like roads inside.

Whether it is Cage City or Steel Black Forest, these two names are not good names in Lanxi. The Lanxi City Council even regards Cage City as a cancer, but they also know that this cancer cannot be moved, because the entire Lanxi All factories need this cancer to supply enough labor, so they simply ignore this cancer.

As a result, an interesting scene appeared in Lanxi. The huge cage city is a landmark building in Lanxi, just like the triumphal arch of Winterrin City and Miria's statue of peace. Anyone who enters the urban area You can see such buildings.

However, any newspapers, magazines and other publications in Lanxi City will not write anything related to this place, and even people in other residential areas in the city are reluctant to mention this place under the influence of the city council. Even if you want to mention it, you will only use pronouns like "that place" to describe it. A few years ago, a separation wall was built between the cage city and ordinary residential areas to completely isolate the cage city from Lanxi. .

Now, Leo, Nelson, and Jason are standing in front of this huge building complex that they don't want to be mentioned by ordinary Lanxi citizens, looking for the entrance to the city.

In fact, an hour ago, the moment the train entered Lanxi City, Leo saw such a striking cage city at a glance.

Unlike Nelson and Jason who couldn't help being amazed when they saw the huge and weird building, he looked very calm and didn't hide the disgust in his heart. He said directly to the two companions, "I hate this place, Especially those factories, it's really uncomfortable here!"

Leo expressed his views so bluntly that both of them were a little surprised. They couldn't help asking Leo curiously why? Because in their view, the factories all over the land represent the degree of development of human industry, and also represent the highest power that human beings can master today, which is something to be proud of.

However, Leo did not answer their inquiries, but just silently looked at the gray air outside the car window.

The reason why Leo was so disgusted was because what he saw now reminded him of some bad experiences in the past.

Although the economists of the Earth Federation tried their best to whitewash the prosperity of the Federation's economy, anyone with a discerning eye knew that the Federation's prosperity was entirely based on the plundering and squeezing of the resource stars on the Federation's borders.

For the vast majority of federal citizens, they have never been to Resource Star. Resource Star is just a concept and a name in their minds. They are not interested in what kind of environment there is or how the people live there.

However, Leo, who is a federal biological weapon, has been to these resource stars more than once because of mission needs. He is very clear about how harsh the environment is and how desolate the people there are.

As a cyborg at that time, he had no extra emotions, and he couldn't feel any sympathy for the people there, so he didn't have any feelings.

But it’s different now, as he gets more and more used to this body, the fused memory has truly turned into his own memory, and because of this, he has feelings that he didn’t have before, and when he recalls that memory, he also feels extremely It's uncomfortable, even if the harsh environment in Lanxi is far from being comparable to the hellish situation in Resource Star.

He hated this uncomfortable feeling that he had never experienced before, which also affected his emotions, giving him the urge to destroy everything in front of him, and this emotion was brought down from the train all the way to the cage city.

The freight train center stands at the northeast corner of Lanxi City, while the passenger train center stands at the northwest corner, which needs to cross the Rodland River. Nelson, who had never been to Lanxi City, was not clear about this, so after they got on the train, they had been looking for the ticket office for the train to Miria City at the freight train central station, and it took half an hour to figure it out. Condition.

After that, under the guidance of others, they took the urban steam rail car to the passenger transport center station on the other side of the river. It was only after they got there and found the ticket office of the Miria special train that they realized that it was just ten minutes before they came. , the train has already left, and the next train will not leave until two o'clock tomorrow afternoon.

At this time, there was still nearly a day and a half before two o'clock in the afternoon tomorrow. The three felt that waiting at the station was not an option, so they went to find a hotel to stay for the day. However, Nelson suddenly proposed to take advantage of this time to go to Cage City and pay a visit to an old classmate of his many years ago. Leo and Jason did not object, and returned to the east bank by steam rail car.

It was only after arriving at the place that Leo knew that Nelson and this old classmate had only communicated through several letters in the years of graduation, and that the old classmate had opened a private clinic in the worker's apartment city of Lanxi to treat the workers here. , but I don't know where the clinic is.

"Ask someone!" Leo saw that Nelson was looking for the door to enter the cage city on the iron wall in front like a headless chicken, so he said impatiently: "By the way, ask The location of your old classmate's clinic, if your old classmate is not a quack doctor and was not beaten to death, he should have some reputation here."