Eric turned north and started walking.
The faces came and went as the crowd moved around him — men, women, people mid-laugh, mid-argument, mid-nothing — each one entering his vision for a moment before the next step carried him past. He didn't try to hold onto any of them. There were too many, and none of them was who he was looking for.
He kept walking.
The change came gradually. The air was the same temperature. The lanterns were the same colour. The crowd was still a crowd. But the further north he went, the more the district seemed to stop trying.
The storefronts were less polished here. The vendors were fewer. The music that had followed him from the gate was faint now — just an echo of itself — and the silence filling in behind it wasn't the peaceful kind. It was simply the absence of effort. The district performed at its centre. Here, past a certain point, it didn't bother.
The crowd thinned. The people who remained moved differently — less deliberately, more like people with somewhere behind them rather than somewhere ahead. The air felt cooler, though nothing about the layer's inner formation should have allowed for that.
Eric noticed. He didn't stop. He continued walking.
He was still thinking about what the woman had told him — two weeks since Elara was removed from the Scarlet Rose after catching an STD, and after that, nothing. The district hadn't looked for her. Nobody had gone north to check. She had stopped being the district's problem, and the district had accepted that arrangement without difficulty.
He kept walking.
Eric looked to his left and saw a small brothel house. Its lights were dim, like the hopes of the people living in it. The veils and silk curtains were thinner, and the people's faces were colder, almost similar in expression. A woman stood at the doorway. She wasn't soliciting; she was just looking, with the expression of someone who had watched the street her entire life and had stopped expecting anything from it long ago.
Eric kept walking.
Two men walked out of the brothel house, laughing together as they conversed with each other. One of the men looked back, but his laugh didn't change. The woman also didn't see them leave.
Eric walked past the brothel house, treating it as nothing significant.
Eric passed a dark alley. The voices coming from it were quiet — not calm, just deliberately quieted. One pressed flat with authority. The other was even flatter, the way a voice goes when it has run out of options but hasn't admitted it yet. The smaller figure had its back against the wall.
Eric looked away and kept walking.
As Eric walked further north, he started to see more consorts but fewer customers, forming a deep contrast. Eric noticed a few.
The first one sat on a low balcony above the street. Her body was draped in a red veil, still and elevated slightly. She had the posture of someone who had not yet accepted that her circumstances had changed. She watched the street below with the careful eyes of someone who once knew everyone on it and was now watching strangers. She was a beautiful lady — the kind of beauty that the Beauty Pathway produces. It doesn't leave easily, even when everything else does.
Eric looked at her for one extra breath. He had seen the photo of Lady Elara; this woman looked like the ghost of her. The woman noticed his gaze and looked down at him. She waved her fingers at him. The coquettish gaze from behind her veil couldn't be hidden.
Eric bowed slightly to her as he removed his gaze, making her pout.
The second one was sitting between two buildings on a low step. She was eating something small and carefully. Eric could clearly deduce her intention of rationing it. He wanted to tell her to eat it whole, but in the end, he remained silent. She didn't look at anyone passing. She was simply existing in the gap between one thing and the next. She wasn't as enthusiastic as the people in the centre, but also not as sad as the one Eric expected to see ahead. She wasn't here because she wanted to be; she was here because this was where she could afford to be.
Just as he was about to shift his gaze to a different consort, he saw a scene that made him feel deeply disgusted. An old, wrinkled, thin, white-bearded man was walking down the road with his arm around a young girl. She was not a child, but young enough that Eric did the arithmetic involuntarily, and the answer sat badly. She was laughing at something the client was saying. The laugh was almost real — maybe one-quarter real. It was real enough to fool others, but not Eric.
He could see the fear in her eyes. How her laugh arrived a second too late. How her fingers tightened around her sleeve whenever the old man touched her. How she never once looked at him when she spoke.
Eric, however, kept walking. The old man brushed against Eric's right shoulder and continued walking, completely unaware that Eric was a Lysi Nova. Eric didn't say anything. He quietly watched the two's backs as they walked further away.
The girl looked back for a moment. Their gazes met for a second. She seemed to be pleading for help, but she quickly moved her gaze and laughed at the old man's blabbering.
His right leg took a small step, his mouth opened, but in the end, he didn't take another step, and no words came out of his mouth. The light that had shone in his eyes for just a fraction of a minute dimmed as he closed his mouth, and the disgust in his heart disappeared like a cold breeze.
He turned around and kept walking.
The old man and the young girl also disappeared into the darkness.
Eric started to walk again, but his steps seemed much slower and heavier now, like he carried some invisible weight on his shoulders.
As he walked, he noticed another consort. Her gaze was not one of professional interest, nor the calculated assessment of the white rose-in-hair woman. It was a gaze with something that took him a moment to identify — it was the look of someone who saw that he was seeing. She had watched enough men walk through this part of the district with careful eyes to know the difference between a man looking for something to consume and a man looking at something that was costing him.
Eric held her gaze, and they both stared at each other for a minute before the consort looked away.
Eric also looked ahead and started walking again.
On the way, he noticed a small girl holding a baby boy. He was crying, clearly hungry for milk. The girl's body was thin, covered in torn clothes. She was holding her brother very closely, patting his back and whispering, "Don't cry. Mother will be here soon. Everything will get better." Her eyes were teary as she said this. She had the look of someone living in false hope.
He continued walking, leaving the girl behind, bathed in her false hope.
After several minutes of walking, Eric started to hear laughs and screams. He turned a corner and looked ahead. The street was filled with children wearing old, shabby, and dirty clothes.
Some were sitting outside doorways. Others were running between adults' legs. One group was playing some kind of game in a small open space between buildings, the rules of which Eric could not immediately identify. They were loud in the way children are loud.
One of the kids was getting chased and ran into Eric's right leg. He rubbed his head, looked up, bowed, turned around, and continued the game. He was simply too young to know about ranks and people he shouldn't bump into.
Eric stopped walking.
He was very silent, so silent that the people around didn't even notice him. He moved to the side and silently watched the kids play their games. The ordinariness of watching them play was so serene to Eric at that moment. Perhaps he was trying to forget about his past or how he had let a young girl go with an old man. He didn't know, and he didn't want to think about it.
He looked around and saw a teenage girl sitting on a stair. She wasn't a consort, at least didn't look like one. She watched the kids with half-attention, clearly bored out of her mind. It was clear that she had been told to stay here by someone to look after the kids.
Eric slowly approached her, stopping several steps away from her, enough to not make her feel uncomfortable, and asked quietly, "Whose kids are they?"
"Why does it matter?" The girl answered without even looking at him. "We all belong to the streets — me, him, and all of us." She pointed at the kid who had bumped into Eric just a moment ago before going silent again. Eric didn't press her; he knew whose children these were.
Eric stood there one breath longer than he needed to. The child who nearly collided with him scored a point in whatever the game was and shouted about it. The other children argued the call.
Eric started walking again.
The lanterns were further apart here now. One of them had even gone out, and nobody had relit it. The black-red sky pressed closer without the rose-gold to push it back. The smell of wine and incense had thinned to something fainter, just a trace of it, like a memory of the district's centre rather than the thing itself.
The crowd was sparse now. The people who passed him didn't look at him the way people did closer to the gate — no recognition, no assessment, no professional interest. Just people moving through a place, going somewhere, coming from somewhere, not particularly interested in a tall man with pink hair walking north.
Eric was aware, in a way he hadn't been an hour ago, of how large the distance was between the centre of this district and its edges. Geographically, it wasn't that far. In every other sense, it was considerable.
Eric thought about the woman on the balcony and the young girl with the old man. His focus went back to the Serenity Codex's entry.
He didn't finish the thought. He continued walking.
Eric walked until a restaurant appeared in his vision. The restaurant was small, with little to no people around it. The air around it was depressing and heavy, reflecting the state of the waitresses working there.
A small group of five Aura users was eating there — three men and two women. The leader was an Auri Nova and was laughing loudly, a man in the complete comfort of his authority. He was blabbering about something that had happened in their last mission, which was quite a huge achievement for their group.
It was nothing interesting to Eric, but suddenly a loud noise made him shift his gaze back to the restaurant.
The leader had suddenly started screaming and pointed at the waitress as he threw a plate filled with food at her head. The woman, who was a dual part-timer working as both a consort and a waitress, started to bleed heavily, but she didn't cry out or scream. She simply bowed down. She had learned that becoming smaller was the best tactic to survive in front of the strong.
The other team members started to laugh at her and threw their food at her too, being amused by her suffering and helplessness.
For a brief moment, she looked at Eric — No, she wasn't looking at Eric. She had the gaze of someone looking at the floor. She could only look down when berated by others. It was just that Eric was in the way of her vision. He was the air in that decision of hers. Her eyes were cold, having lost all the will to live.
Eric looked away and started to walk yet again.
First step.
Second step.
Third step.
Fourth step.
Fifth step.
Eric only took five steps before his legs stopped working. He looked down. His legs were still, as if blocks of ice had formed on them.
It was a deliberate struggle of his last bit of humanity. Just like how a soldier fights the most ferociously in their final moments, like how a fire burns the brightest in its last moment.
Eric gritted his teeth, clenched his hands as veins popped on his hands and forehead, his brows furrowed, and the insults on the waitress continued.
Just then, Eric turned back. All the Aura users instantly felt the aura pressure intensify on them at a terrifying rate. Their bodies shook. They realized that Eric was not someone they could mess with. They all stopped hurling insults and throwing food at the waitress and slowly looked down, staring at the food that remained on their table.
The leader was the one who was shaken the most. The aura pressure on him was the strongest after all.
The waitress quickly took the pieces and left. She didn't look at Eric. She simply acted like she was supposed to.
Eric started to walk again.
His steps were a little lighter now, but still heavier than when he had first started walking.
He finally reached the extreme north, and there were barely any people here. The lamps were gone, the houses were abandoned, and only a few illegal substance sellers remained here, moving like shadows.
Eric quickly found one and asked for Elara's specific house. He was quickly told the house after the other person realized his Lysi Nova rank. The person simply didn't dare to ask him for a price.
Eric walked and finally stopped in front of a house that looked abandoned. The walls were gray and let out a dilapidated aura, and insects crawled around the walls, hiding.
Outside her house, there was a small pot filled with water, but the flowers in it were all wilted and lifeless.
Eric took a deep breath and knocked on the door. He heard someone's uneven footsteps, which were soon followed by the sounds of stuff falling down and breaking, and the cough of someone clearly ill.
The door slowly opened with a creak as Lady Elara looked outside. Some of her past pride was still clearly reflected in her eyes.
"Who are you?" Lady Elara asked plainly.
At this moment, Eric had finally stopped walking.