Industrial Cthulhu, starting from the island lord

Chapter 655 The Candlelight Relief
What kind of place is the Rhine?

Frey couldn't answer; when he first stepped into the city, he only felt a sense of novelty.

The crowded streets and dilapidated buildings felt somewhat familiar to him. He had lived in Baishibao for more than ten years and knew this kind of slum better than anyone.

How come there are slums in the Rhine?
"Oh well, the slums don't matter. At least I know these places well," Frey comforted himself.

Based on his experience, Frey decided to find some crowded places to gather information and, incidentally, make contact with the local gangs.

These slums are usually under the control of various gangs, and government orders don't work here—if city administrators could establish order here, then it wouldn't be a slum.

But Frey soon sensed that something was wrong.

He wandered around the lower district for a long time and found that the only place where people gathered seemed to be the church.

No, it wasn't a church. There were no churches in the lower districts, and it seemed that churches wouldn't bother opening their doors to people living in this muddy area.

Instead, there were individual church food distribution points.

Yes, the church distributes food in the lower districts, and any Candlelight Church member can come and receive it; the church calls it relief.

At each relief point, long lines of people stretched out, their faces etched with hunger and their clothes tattered, yet all chanting prayers for the candlelight with devout expressions.

This truly shocked Frey.

After spending a whole day exploring the lower Rhine, his shock reached its peak: there were absolutely no gangs in the entire Lower Rhine, the public security was excellent, and although people had no clothes or food, they all had peaceful expressions and were extremely devout.

Even the skeletons of those who starved to death by the roadside wore smiles on their faces.

Frey shuddered. He suddenly remembered the believers lining up at the city gate to be whipped by machines. They looked like they were made from the same mold, reminding Frey of the lambs on the Wall of Despair.

The lambs in Whitestone Fortress are extremely docile and will not resist even when whipped. Frey once witnessed a wolf sneaking into the sheepfold and devouring a live sheep piece by piece.

The sheep was eaten alive, without resistance or howling, as if it wasn't its body being devoured.

It wasn't until the very moment it collapsed and died that it let out a long breath.

The sheep just watched, neither bleating nor leaving, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

After the wolf had eaten its fill, it leisurely left. Only after the wolf was gone did the sheep finally react—

They swarmed around, vying to gnaw on the remains of their own kind that had been eaten by wolves.

Looking at the kneeling believers before him, Frey felt as if they too had grown square pupils and hooves, chewing on the fodder offered to them, and had become silent lambs.

But if the believers are the lambs, then who are the wolves?
Frey looked up at the sky—the lower levels couldn't see the sky, he could only see one church after another above, densely packed, blocking out the sun.

This is the Rhine.

After walking around all day without finding anything, Frey rubbed his empty stomach and joined the queue at the food distribution point.

If he could be given food, he wouldn't mind praising the candlelight.

But gradually, his brows furrowed.

The food being distributed had a wonderful aroma, so strong that Frey started salivating just from smelling it.

However, the believers who received the food had strange reactions after eating it.

After eating a couple of bites of food, they would immediately kneel down and pray, not even bothering to swallow. Sometimes they would kneel in the mud, their faces and mouths splattered with mud.

His expression during prayer was extremely fervent, as if he had witnessed a miracle. It would take him a long time to calm down and eat a few more bites of food before he would immediately start praying again.

Some people happened to be standing in the rubble, and they just knelt down directly on the sharp rocks. When they raised their heads, their faces were covered in blood, but even so, they didn't move an inch.

Frey even saw a man with a sharp branch sticking out in front of him. He knelt down and kowtowed, and the branch pierced straight into his eye.

He was completely unaware, and kept kowtowing. With each bow, he plunged his head in. When he stood up, his face was completely rotten. He staggered a few steps and fell to the ground again.

This time, he did not stand up again.

From a distance, Frey noticed that the rotten flesh on his face was still contorted into a slight curve.

He died with a smile on his face.

The memories gradually blurred. Frey finished recounting his experiences, took a deep breath, and looked around at the untouchables.

The surroundings were completely silent. The people were stunned and stood there dumbfounded, unable to understand what they had just heard.

Frey ignored them and went straight to the campfire, taking two skewers of roasted rats that were charred and dripping with oil. He took one skewer in each hand and began to eat them heartily.

Rat meat is not tasty; it has a strange, foul, and fishy smell. Unfortunately, there are no seasonings available, so you can only swallow it along with the stench from the nearby garbage heap.

Even so, Frey refused to accept the church's charity.

He now recalls the candlelight painted on the dome of the lower section, but this time he only feels a chill in his heart.

The untouchables nearby started arguing.

"How could that be! That's not how the church works!"

"Then tell me what a church is like? Have you ever seen a church?"

"I've never seen a church, but you have?"

"Lord Frey saw it with his own eyes, how could it be fake?"

"But that's the church, that's candlelight. If that's really the case, then, then..."

Frey ate his food with grease dripping from his mouth, but didn't say a word, just watched coldly.

While the commotion was raging, Xiao Bu timidly approached, first glancing at Frey's expression before cautiously asking, "Brother Frey, is it really like what you described outside?"

"Not necessarily. I haven't been here long either. I might lie. Why don't you go out and check for yourself?"

"I...I dare not," Xiao Bu said in a low voice, glancing at her crude prosthetic limb before pulling her gaze away as if she had been electrocuted.

Her hand was broken by the surface dwellers; if she hadn't escaped quickly, she would have lost her life.

"Little Bu, if you drive that 'big guy' out, wouldn't no one dare to bully you?"

Xiao Bu was taken aback. Her already large eyes widened in surprise. She looked at the "big guy" not far away who was using a robotic arm to load garbage into the incinerator, and for a moment she didn't know how to speak.

“I heard from them that you assembled ‘Big Guy’ yourself. If you go to the surface, you won’t have to go through the trouble of collecting these parts.” Frey pointed to the discarded parts she was holding like treasures in her arms.

"With this 'big guy,' you can make a hole in the sky and drag those high and mighty guys in the Upper Rhine down to suffer a bit."

(End of this chapter)