The Mysterious World Under Steampunk

After carefully reading these newspapers, Leo couldn't help but have a doubt in his heart, that is, all the reports in the newspapers are all concentrated in various countries and regions in the Minsk continent, and there is almost no news about the other two continents, even if there is. Also old news.

Just when Leo was extremely puzzled, a piece of news from the Kingdom of Marris answered the doubt. A thick fog rose from the Sea of ​​Falling Stars that had not cleared for a long time. Ships would get lost after entering the dense fog. Contact is temporarily blocked.

This news also made Leo feel a little uneasy, because he is very aware of the situation of Falling Star Sea, and the energy cycle of Velen World has changed. Falling Star Sea must have been affected, and it has been greatly affected. The current thick fog may be just the beginning. There may be more unusual changes in the future.

Leo wants to contact Sylvia at this time to see how her situation is and if there is any other news, but although he knows that Sylvia has left some power on him that can only be used by witches , but he still couldn't find out where this power was, and naturally he couldn't take the initiative to get in touch with Sylvia.

Therefore, after the Church of the Lord of All Things Birth and Death lifted the ban on cities and railways, Leo decided to make a steam train to the border between the Kingdom of Seville and the Kingdom of Maris, and then try to cross the border to Maris. The Kingdom will see if they can find Sylvia.

After making a decision, Leo immediately hired the waiter of the hotel to go to the station to buy a train ticket for the western terminal of the Savile Canyon Railway.

The waiter who went out in the morning didn’t come back until the afternoon. When he came back, his face was very ugly. He didn’t say why when he asked, but he just told Leo that it’s hard to get a train ticket on the Canyon Railway now. He bought a first-class ticket through his relationship. , and its potential meaning is naturally the need to add money, whether it is the ticket price or the employment fee.

Leo didn't bother with this trivial matter, and took the first-class ticket from the waiter after taking out an extra commission.

The time of the ticket is the train number in the early morning of tomorrow. Leo didn't intend to seize the time and go to the station. Instead, after finishing dinner, he turned down the room, left the hotel, and went to the station.

The railway station of Ethiopian City is located in the northern part of the urban area. It was originally built on the edge of the urban area, mainly for the convenience of loading goods. Those merchant tribes can directly load and unload goods outside the city without entering the urban area, which can reduce the pressure on the roads in the urban area. It can also avoid causing unnecessary trouble to the citizens in the urban area.

It has to be said that the city lord of Ethiopian City planned the railway station very well at the beginning, and he also expected the impact of the railway station on the city, but he did not predict that the city would develop so fast after the railway was opened. Far exceeded everyone's expectations.

The opening of the steam train brought huge benefits to this small city located in the middle of the two deserts, and merchants and people from the kingdom flocked to see these benefits.

The influx of a large number of people caused the urban area to expand rapidly to the surrounding area. The railway station, which was originally located on the edge of the city, gradually became an urban area, and as the area of ​​the urban area increased, it gradually became a part of the urban center.

However, the later rulers of Ethiopia City were far less talented than the original city lord. What they focused on was the immediate benefits. Roads and public facilities were not what they considered at all. They just wanted to build more houses and build more houses. Collect rent and tax.

So when the railway station became the center of the city, other urban planning did not keep up, and even the road originally planned for the entry and exit of goods was occupied. The daily congestion around the railway station has become a daily routine in Ethiopia. Over time, it became the most chaotic place in Ethiopia.

Before arriving at the train station, Leo had already prepared himself mentally and thought of a way to squeeze through the crowd, but when he arrived at the train station, he found that instead of being crowded and chaotic, it was very deserted. Looking around, there were less than a hundred people in the Qianping square of the railway station, and there were no vendors around, which was completely different from the rumored situation.

The reason for this abnormal situation is right in front of you. The front square of the railway station, which is paved with yellow sandstone that is common in deserts, has turned dark red at this moment. The dark red is not paint, but dried blood. .

Although the manager of the train station has hired a large number of poor people to clean up the blood in front of the square in the past two days, many of these bloods have penetrated into the sandstone and cannot be cleaned up at all. Under the sun's exposure, the blood quickly dried up and merged with the sandstone, turning into a blood rock. A strong bloody smell continued to emanate from the blood rock, lingering over the square for a long time.

This is Leo's expression when he thought of the waiter in the hotel after he bought a ticket from the train station. The scene in front of him, let alone an ordinary person, would make even a battle-tested soldier feel horrified when he saw it. The church scriptures of the Lord of Birth and Death once mentioned a place to punish the wicked in the world. That place was built with blood-stained sandstone, and it was shrouded in blood all year round. It was very similar to the scene in front of us. So here you can also see some priests performing some kind of ceremony of the Lord Church of the Birth and Death of All Things.

Leo made a little estimate based on his own experience, and quickly calculated from the amount of blood that melted into the sandstone on the ground. When the incident happened a few days ago, at least hundreds of people died here, or even more, because if the train station If it was really as crowded as in the rumors, the stampede caused by the panicked escape would definitely cause a large number of casualties, and the number of casualties would even be more than those caused by the out-of-control family members.

After only staying outside the train station for a while, Leo directly bypassed a group of locals who were kneeling on the ground praying at the gate of the train station, and entered the train station.

Compared to the situation outside, the interior of the train station was not much better. It was also sandstone soaked in blood, and the same or even stronger bloody smell lingered in the empty hall.

In addition, it can be seen that many facilities in the hall have been damaged, such as walls, columns, and some simple shops that were added later. Fights can be between out-of-control Familia, but they can also be fought against someone with superhuman strength.

Like the square outside, inside the train station, there are also a large number of poor people hired by the management to clean the blood on the ground. In addition, some craftsmen are repairing damaged columns, walls and other facilities.

After Leo entered the train station, he showed the first-class ticket in his hand to a staff member, and the staff member immediately and respectfully led Leo to a waiting room near the edge of the canyon cliff, where he could see the canyon railway. .

The waiting room was sprinkled with natural essence by the manager. Although it was a bit pungent, it could keep the bloody smell out and make the people in the room feel a little better.

At the moment, there are more than a dozen people sitting in the room, three foreign couples who should be traveling here, three explorers with distinctive clothes, an old man with two children and his bodyguard.

These people are all doing their own things, there is no communication, and the room seems very quiet.

The three foreign couples should be ordinary people, with expressions of shock still written on their faces. The couple kept holding each other's hands in order to gain a sense of security from each other. It can be seen that the incident a few days ago had a bad influence on them. It hasn't gone away yet, and may even be with them for a long time to come.

The situation of the three explorers was much better. Either they were not in the city when the incident happened, or they were well-informed and familiar with such things as the family members. In short, none of their faces showed any fear , flustered emotions.

These three people should not be in the same group. They each sat at a table, poured their own harvest on the table, picked out the best products among them, wiped them carefully, and put them in different pockets. They discussed and exchanged the things on hand, but the voices of their conversations were not very loud.

As for the combination of old people, children and bodyguards on the other side, it looks like a grandfather taking his grandson and granddaughter on a trip, and it doesn't seem to deserve too much attention, but after Leo entered the house, his main attention All the power is concentrated on this old man, because this old man has an energy fluctuation that doesn't need to be much weaker than Sylvia.

For some reason, the old man's energy fluctuations reminded Leo of a spider, because it appeared as a filament in Leo's vision, and Leo also found the pair of children laughing and playing around the old man and the spider behind him. The expressionless bodyguards are not real people, they are puppets controlled by silk thread energy.

"Puppeteer?" Leo quickly thought of a very special kind of transcendent in his mind.

In the world of Velen, there are many people with extraordinary power, most of them are concentrated in various churches, underground cults and several dark world organizations, but there are still some extraordinary people living in the cracks of these major forces, Puppeteer is one of them.

It is impossible to test who the earliest puppet master was, but it is generally accepted that it came from the circus, and the inheritance of the puppet master is not very long, only less than three hundred years, compared to the thousands of years of inheritance, obviously Not enough to watch.

However, the power of a puppet master cannot be measured by the inheritance time. In the black market information about extraordinary people, the degree of danger of a puppet master has always been ranked high.

The strength of a puppet master does not depend on the puppet master himself. In fact, the power of a puppet master is not much stronger than that of ordinary people. The strength of a puppet master depends entirely on the puppets he controls.

Some puppet masters will find all kinds of extraordinary materials and carefully manufacture a puppet doll, while some puppeteer masters will directly control people with powerful power and take their power as their own.

There have also been puppet masters who tried to control the people of a city to blackmail the local kingdom and church, but the end of the person who did this was not good. Because he had contact with the people of the whole city, countless people's ideas were directly instilled Into his mind, his spirit was directly washed away, making him a vegetable, and finally made into a puppet by other puppet masters.

How the puppet masters are inherited has always been a mystery, because the inheritance of the puppet masters has also been cut off in certain periods of time. When everyone thinks that the inheritance of the puppet masters has disappeared, new puppet masters will appear , so some people speculate that the puppet master must use certain objects as inheritance, as long as people with extraordinary power touch those objects, they will get this kind of inheritance, which also explains why there are four or five puppet masters appearing in some time periods , and do not know each other.

When Leo saw this puppet master, he immediately made a rough judgment on his strength. Although those tall and strong bodyguards seemed to be the main force of this puppet master, Leo did not. It is very clear that the puppet master's reliance comes from the two vivid child puppets beside him.

Obviously those bodyguards are just bait, if someone wants to deal with him, first attack the bodyguard as a protective barrier, then the two child puppets next to the puppeteer will show their sharp claws and give the attacker a fatal attack.

After Leo came in, he only glanced at the people around him, then walked to a chair facing the canyon and sat down. Afterwards, he used the spirit net to detect these people in the room, so everyone in the room These people didn't pay much attention to Leo, they just thought he was an ordinary solo traveler.

However, after Leo sat down, the old puppet master glanced over Leo from time to time, with a hint of vigilance in his eyes.

This is not to say that the old man saw Leo's true strength, mainly because of the old man's rich life experience and the instinct of going through life and death for many years, he felt that Leo was not as ordinary as he seemed on the surface, and even let him Feeling the danger, this can be seen from the fact that he calmly moved the two child puppets to the position between himself and Leo.

Leo didn't care that he became the target of the puppet master's vigilance. As long as the other party didn't make a move against him, he was not prepared to conflict with this extraordinary person.

After inspecting the people in the room, Leo focused his sight and part of his attention on the railway outside the window.

Although Leo has seen more fantastic architectural facilities than the railway in front of him, if this standard is placed in the world of Vinen, whose industrial level is still in its infancy, then the design and construction of this railway is enough to be called It was a miracle.

Every 20 meters, a steel frame with a width of five meters is erected in the air in a herringbone shape. The steel frames are all made of the best steel at that time, and the thickness of each steel has reached about 20 centimeters.

Legend has it that the Kingdom of Savile exhausted its treasury in order to build this railway, which can be called a miracle in the world, so that in the years after the railway was built, the kingdom increased various tax rates thirteen times in a row. Readjust back.

Therefore, the people of Savile Kingdom both love and hate this railway. The love is because this railway has brought convenient transportation and endless business opportunities and benefits, and the hate is because of this railway. The various tax rates almost caused riots among the people in the kingdom, which plunged the kingdom into turmoil for many years.