Jhin eventually stood up and started walking towards the slums. The area they covered was so big that different villages existed inside the walls. If they could even be called villages. Jhin saw them as communities that were separated from each other only by a lack of housing and no borders were set up between them.

“Probably didn’t need them.”

As Jhin walked closer, he managed to make out more and more sounds. And he quickly came to realize that this community was not quiet, in the least.

As he reached a little more than 10 meters outside of the house in the outskirts of the community he was greeted by a few people.

Tall and tough-looking, their eyebrows were furrowed, and they didn’t speak amongst each other. There were both men and women, even some children but the most important person was the elder in the middle. That elder walked forward and spoke first.

“Why did you come here for, young man?” The old and hunched over dark brown man asked in his raspy old voice. His tone was milder than the guard’s had been.

“Why? Is it a bother?"

“Yes, it is! We don’t want any trouble! Get away from here!" The tall and buff young man to the side of the elder spoke out before he had the chance to speak.

“Don’t worry about it. I'll just stay here, to the side of the road .” Jhin answered back. He looked at all the people that had gathered reaching a peak of 50 people, of every age.

He turned away from them and walked a little ways away from the dirt path. To the side were a small slope and some trees existed.

The young man tried to yell at Jhin again but he was stopped.

“Shaq. Let it be.” The old man said. “Get back to whatever you were doing everyone!”

Jhin chose a nice little spot and decided to get to work. Building a house would take way too much time and material. Even a mud hut like the rest of the villagers was too much for now. Instead, Jhin simply decided that he was going to use the trees and their leaves and branches to make a temporary house.

The whole area had many trees and there were even small and big rivers flowing through it. The water seemed clean even though it was probably contaminated but it was still drinkable water. And as far as food sources went other than roots, some nuts, and other berries or even small birds everything else in the area Jhin was in came from the big garbage dumps. Leftovers essentially.

Since he still had time in the day he walked over to the Leftover piles and searched for non-rotten eatable foodstuffs. It wasn’t easy and he certainly didn’t like it.

Dried bread some half-eaten apples where all that he found. This country was known for plenty of things and its oranges were one of them. Sadly though there weren’t any that were thrown unfinished. At least today.

Going back to his area tens of meters away from the village Jhin did his best to clean the food and ate it.

“It will probably take a while to adjust…..” He mumbled as he felt his stomach protest at the low quality.

He then tore off some big branches and placed then parallel to the ground between to trees. After which he took the longest leaves he could find and started weaving them together. It would take him till the sunset to make what he would call a half-roof.

Essentially, he had simply placed wood and leaves above his head to shield his body from direct rainfall. Even though he was taller than it was wide when he laid down and so his legs would probably get frostbite if he didn’t close it up soon enough.

Jhin tried not to think too much as he laid down and looked through the holes in his roof up to the stars. He was still thunderstruck by the massive changes that had happened in just one day. Not that he had much of a life, to begin with. He had set off to travel the moment his grandmother's funeral had been taken care of.

He had come here with a purpose and essentially completed it the day he arrived. Jhin wondered how his grandmother turned out to be such a kind and caring person even though she had grown up in these circumstances.

‘I wonder… How did she manage to escape from here? Where are her relatives? Did they all die?’ Jhin thought as sleep took him.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Time passed slowly enough in these slums. Excruciatingly so.

The first week had been complete and utter hell for Jhin. Both Mentally and physically. He was physically exhausted from making the walls and entranceway for his little hut. He had made more leaf-roof tiles and plastered them all over, creating a relatively effective wall of protection against the cold, and awful smelling wind.

It took on a round shape and had a diameter big enough to fit him, though he couldn’t stand up inside of it. It was still progress that he made only because he had a lot of free time and a need to take his mind away from his circumstances.

Food had been another problem. There was no real game to hunt, other than rare bunnies and birds. Meaning that Jhin had to scavenge the garbage dumps for food. It was easier than he thought to find food. The problem came in that everything there was dirty leftovers that were thrown down here without any care. Contaminated and in most other cases inedible. That was the only way to describe the food that Jhin had been eating for the past week.

In hope that he would be able to eat some normal food, Jhin had taken whatever seeds he could find and planted them near his hut. He wasn’t sure if it would work but even if it did it would mean that for the next few months at least he wouldn't have to consume that disgusting filth.

Jhin's attempts of talking with the villagers had, for the most part, not gone well, as most didn’t want to talk with him but even those that didn’t mind where always spotted and stopped by the burly young man that had yelled at him a week ago along with his group of supporters.

A young woman, around the same age, as that young guy, and jhin, was the sole exception as she had come during the night to talk to him. She was named Talisa. Talisa came wholly in the night after everyone had fallen asleep. The first time she had come up to his hut Jhin had been so surprised he had almost screamed. Jhin had been sleeping and she just slapped him in the shoulder to wake him up, Jhin jumped up and turned around, with a makeshift weapon at his hand in an effort to defend himself. It hadn’t taken long for him to drop that useless stick and start talking to Talisa. He had not spoken to others for a while and Talisa worked great as a conversation partner. The two hit it off quite well. Not to mention that she was a very beautiful human at that. Tall with Straight black hair, pure black eyes, and light black skin. She had a very pretty nose with nice, slightly bushy, eyebrows. Her body was really fit and well-built. She had long legs and her clothes only served to make her body stand out more. A Scar on the left side of her jaw, running down to her neck and almost her collar bone added a very different flavor to her look. She looked for the most part like a ferocious warrior.

Jhin still remembered the words of the guard when he first came here and on the subject of slaves, he had seen more than he would have liked. White, brown, and black slaves would scavenge in the bigger dumps for their masters most of the day. That didn’t really surprise him as he scavenged for food as well and the poorest slave owners probably didn’t have enough or didn’t want to spend their food to feed their slaves. Since everyone in these walls was essentially a slave, Slaves owning slaves was how the situation could be described.

The most extreme incident had been when a young man had been spotted by Jhin running towards his hut and the village. He looked afraid and he was even bleeding, but he didn’t scream for help. He kept running the best he could. Sadly, though from far away, more than 100 meters, an arrow came flying in and hit the young man in the leg. He fell down screaming in pain. Blood pouring out of the new wound, the arrow seeming to hit bone as shards of bone went out the other end of the leg along with the arrow’s dented tip.

His drive didn’t fade though. He used all he had, he pushed his fingers into the dirt and pulled. His nails came off and his hands started bleeding soon after. He crawled for more than 20 meters before a fat, ugly black man came over.

The owner wasn’t running though. Two extremely tough-looking black men were caring their owner on a… palanquin, essentially some boards of wood stuck together with some smaller pieces fitted on the sides as railing.

The two carrier slaves placed the wooden palanquin down slowly as the fat man started screaming at the useless bug the slave that he had saved from misery, the worthless scum that he paid less to buy than to make his clothing.

The relentless beating followed soon after. It didn’t stop till the fat man plopped on the ground like a burnt dumpling, sweating as if it was steamed and panting as if it was leaking its juices.

Jhin could barely look at the man, or what was left of the man. A corpse beaten so badly that it looked as if a pack of wolves had bit into chunks of its meat and thrown it a few meters to the side.

Jhin was so angry with the slaver at that point that he barely held himself back from rushing in and punching that fat dude's face in. HE did hold himself back though as he knew he would only be putting himself and most importantly, Talisa in her village in danger.

There was something else though, that Jhin didn’t know about. Something big was going to happen, something that almost no one had any knowledge of. Something that would rock the very foundations of this world.