Nick rapidly floated away from the caravan.
While he was floating away, he kept glancing at the girl sitting on the big chair on top of the big cart.
For a short moment, the two of them looked at each other.
'This could've gone way worse,' Nick thought.
Earlier, when Nick entered the big floodgate between the city and the outside, his ability almost immediately deactivated.
Nick stopped for just a moment and retreated back to the vent.
Almost immediately, he could tell who had seen him.
The girl on the cart had glanced in his direction, and Nick looked back.
'That's at least a Mid Hero!' Nick thought as he readied himself for a stressful escape.
Yet, the woman just smirked before turning away with a noticeable flair.
She wanted to show Nick that she acted like she didn't see anything.
Nick decided to go with the flow and went below the cart.
His ability did not reactivate.
For the entire duration of the tour around the city, Nick had been within the girl's perception.
That was probably also why she had commented about the city a couple of times while talking to the young boy.
She probably wanted to tell Nick these things.
Nick was not entirely sure why she was doing these things.
This girl was 100% a human.
She was definitely not a Specter.
Why would a human help a Specter?
For a while, Nick had been nervous that she simply wanted to lead him to a place with more Extractors, but that didn't seem to be the case.
After leaving the caravan and floating away for a while, Nick's ability finally reactivated.
'Why is she helping me?' Nick thought. 'Or, maybe she's actually not helping me but just not interfering?'
Due to the short moment in which both of them had looked at one another, they had exchanged quite a bit of information.
When the woman had seen Nick halting immediately after she noticed him, she learned that this Specter had terrifying perception abilities.
She couldn't exactly tell what the cloud of mist was looking at, but she had felt like the cloud of mist had been looking at her.
The fact that the cloud of mist was doing that instead of immediately attacking or running away meant that it was intelligent.
And that was more than just a little strange.
The mistress was not sure if she had ever seen an intelligent Force Specter.
Force Specters were essentially forces of nature, and those didn't tend to be intelligent.
Lastly, Specters, even intelligent ones, would flee immediately since staying put would be putting them in unnecessary danger.
But this one did exactly that, which didn't seem to make sense to her.
Of course, there were also Specters that acted illogically. After all, plenty of Specters were insane and unreasonable.
Yet, this Specter didn't seem to act in an insane manner.
In fact, if she had to put it into words, she would call this Specter's behavior quite human.
Of course, Nick knew that the mistress realized most of these things, but that didn't explain why she decided to help him.
In the end, he was still a Specter.
Sadly, Nick wouldn't get his answers.
After making sure that Nick wasn't secretly being followed, he decided to take a look at the city.
Nick had been to over a hundred cities in his life, and he had seen great ones and horrible ones.
But this one.
This one was probably one of the worst ones out there.
'The Dregs only made up about 15% of Crimson City, while they make up over 80% here,' he thought.
Not even rats were running around in this city, which almost seemed unreal.
After all, the worse the people felt, the higher the likelihood of rats appearing since they could consume a ton of corpses.
Starving people didn't have a lot of strength.
'But there are no rats here. In fact, the number of insects is also shockingly small,' Nick thought.
After a while, Nick saw why.
'They are eating them,' he thought with furrowed brows.
Nick saw a couple of people carefully removing a sheet of metal to reveal a barrel filled with old water.
The water was filled with larvae from different insects, and the people quickly retrieved a couple of the larvae before putting the sheet back.
This was the most pathetic "farm" Nick had ever seen.
Until he saw an even worse one a minute later.
When Nick saw the next thing, even he felt unwell.
A family of three.
A father, a mother, and a young daughter.
The two parents were skinny, but the daughter was relatively healthy.
The daughter was eating a small plate filled with wriggling fat larvae.
Her two parents were looking at her with love.
Luckily, the daughter couldn't see the dark truth of these larvae.
Beneath the father's loose shirt, fat maggots were wiggling around in his flesh.
The father's back was already covered in holes, but he didn't get rid of the maggots.
The maggots the daughter was eating came from the father's back.
The father was growing these maggots for her.
Yet, his eyes were filled with nothing but love and hope as he looked at his daughter.
'He won't survive for much longer,' Nick thought. 'Most likely, they will hide his body and harvest the maggots born from it.'
Nick had already found a similar situation in a different house.
It seemed like the mother of that household didn't harbor any maggots while she was alive, but she housed a lot of them now.
But compared to the first household, it was not the child that ate the majority but the father.
Not everyone valued their children's life above their own.
'For some people, children are a safety net,' Nick realized with narrowed eyes. 'They can invest in them while they have food to spare, but if they ever need food desperately…'
It was horrendous.
This city was absolutely vile.
However, Nick wasn't disgusted by the poor people but by the elites.
The elites were the ones that caused such an insane state to occur.
'Meanwhile,' Nick thought as he looked at the big caves around the city.
He saw over a hundred people munching on their chocolate sticks.
'They just keep eating and eating.'
Ding.
Nick noticed that one of the Extractors accidentally dropped a chocolate stick while walking through the city.
The Extractor looked at the dropped stick.
For a moment, he seemed to hesitate.
In the end, he sighed and continued walking.
He really loved these chocolate sticks, but he didn't want to eat one that's been on the ground.
The poor people around him noticed the dropped chocolate stick.
And then, something shocking happened.
Not a single one of them tried to take it.
It was just lying there.
The people were obviously starving, but they kept ignoring the chocolate stick.
After several minutes, a young boy walked out of the shadows.
He looked around carefully before approaching the chocolate stick.
Most people ignored him.
The boy took hold of the chocolate stick and looked at it in wonder.
Was this food?
"Don't eat that," an older man sitting on the side said.
"Huh?" the boy asked, turning to the man.
Some of the onlookers threw a dirty eye at the man.
Why couldn't this guy mind his own business?!
"Why?" the boy asked.
"It won't help with your hunger," the man said.
"It does not have energy."
"It only wants to make you eat more."
"It wants you to eat and eat and eat. It wants you to be hungrier and hungrier."
"If you eat it, you will be put under its spell, and one day, you will be willing to trade your life for just one more piece."
"Don't eat it."
The boy looked with horror and fear at the man.
Then, he looked at the piece of chocolate in his hand again.
"No! You're lying!" the boy shouted, holding the chocolate to his chest. "You just want me to give it to you!"
Without waiting for an answer, the boy ran away with the chocolate.
He was too weak to bother.
Some of the onlookers watched the boy from a distance.
One of them slowly pulled out three pieces of old chocolate and readied them.
They would never eat these pieces themselves.
However, sometimes, these pieces could be traded for a maggot incubator.
Nick saw the boy eating the chocolate.
After a while, the boy seemed to become more nervous.
He ate the chocolate faster and faster, and within a minute, all of it was gone.
Next, the boy collapsed and held his stomach.
Saliva was gathering in his mouth, and he started to drool.
He looked around in horror before running away.
Nobody followed him.
They didn't need to.
In just a couple of days, the boy would be running around in panic, asking everyone for a piece of chocolate.
The hunger would make him desperate.
And then, they could ask for whatever they wanted.
Because, at that point, the craving for the chocolate would be worse than the pain and horror of becoming a maggot incubator.
The boy would run around in desperation, pulling out the maggots from his flesh to trade for just a tiny piece of the chocolate.
This was not the first time this happened, and it would not be the last time.