Chapter 419: Chapter 418.

Chapter 418. Heading to a Bustling City: The Serene-Eyed Girl with Soul-Damage. (1/4)

After driving for an hour, I made it to the city safely with Dawn without a major incident.

I located the closest hospital on my phone as soon as I entered the city perimeter. That was my current destination.

However, halfway there, I felt something tighten around my waist.

I immediately pulled over to the side of the road and asked hesitantly, “Hey, Dawn.”

“...”

“Are you listening?”

“...”

Did she snap out of it or not?

Just when I was about to get off the motorcycle to check up on her condition a confused slightly anxious voice came from behind.

“Uh… Ran? Where… are we exactly?”

The tensed-up muscles in my shoulders relaxed when I heard her voice.

“We’re not in the countryside anymore if that wasn’t obvious enough.”

“Huh? When did we get here?”

“We just arrived. You’ve been spaced out for quite a while now.”

“What happened to my truck?”

“It hasn’t moved from where we left it.”

“I… don’t recognize where we are right now. Where did yuh take me exactly? Weren’t we going to head to my farm?”

“You never told me where it was and you’ve been completely out of it and unresponsive. I was worried and thought something was wrong so I drove to the city.”

“The city? Yuh mean… this isn’t a town along the way to the city… but the city itself?”

“Yeah. But what happened to you exactly? There’s no way you can call what happened to you simply losing yourself in a daydream.”

“What do yuh mean?”

“I tried plenty of things to get your attention but you didn’t respond to anything.”

“I don’t really know what to say. I was really just daydreaming about something.”

“About what?”

“Imagining what life in the city as yuh described it would be like.”

“You mean a dystopian city where you’ve given up the freedoms you grew up with?”

“Yeah.”

“And how was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you not know?”

“I don’t get it since I’ve never lived in or been to a city before. Just hearing about it, I can’t imagine what it’s like very well.”

“What did you specifically see while daydreaming then?”

“When it started I looked down and saw my hands. Below my hands was a conveyor belt. Behind me was a monotone voice giving me step-by-step instructions on what to do. It seemed I was inside a factory assembling something. I’d follow the instructions given to me over and over again. It continued for hours. I worked at it like a robot until the end of the day when I shut my eyes.”

“The next time I opened my eyes, I was in front of the conveyor belt again. This time the voice from behind was no longer there. But it didn’t need to be there anymore. I knew exactly what I had to do. I got to work and assembled whatever came my way.”

“This process repeated day in and day out. Each time I’d open and close my eyes to see the exact same scenery. I’d do the exact same things. I’d be repeating the same day over and over again without anything ever changing. It was a dreary black and gray world without any colors.”

“Eventually a question popped into my mind. What does the world outside this factory look like? I wanted to leave to see, but my body didn’t listen to me. It just kept repeating the same thing as if it had been programmed to do so.”

“One day, while assembling something, my hands froze up and stopped moving. Not just my hands, but my entire body as well. Without warning, the world turned sideways. But it wasn’t that the world had really turned sideways. I’d collapsed onto the conveyor belt.”

“I was dragged along the conveyor belt. I passed by a bunch of people who’d similarly been assembling things just as I had. I called out to them to help me. But my pleas for help fell on deaf ears. I was ignored. Nobody lifted a finger to help me off the conveyor belt.”

“It was only at that moment that I realized something. The people I passed by weren’t people at all. They were just robots with figures made to look like people.”

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“I made it all the way to the end of the conveyor belt where I fell into a machine. When entering the machine there was a piece of reflective metal that I was able to see myself in. It turned out I was a robot myself and I hadn’t even realized it.”

“Inside that machine, I was disassembled and spit back out onto a conveyor belt… the start of the very same conveyor belt I’d been assembling things on all this time. The robots I passed by with human figures started to assemble me. When I was fully assembled… everything started back from day one with a voice instructing me on how to assemble things on the conveyor belt again. That was the point where I opened my eyes and realized I was on the back of your motorcycle.”

“Haha, that daydream of yours isn’t too far off from reality. City life is basically that. It’s just an endless grind until you break down and have to be put back together. A lot of people in the city won’t help you when you break, they’d rather sit back, watch in schadenfreude, and not get involved. It’s someone else’s problem, not theirs as far as they’re concerned. Nobody’s got the time or energy to help you when you’ve broken down. They’d rather let the system, the machine deal with you rather than get involved themselves.”

“That’s… pretty awful.”

“Well, though there’s plenty of bad, there are some good things about the city.”

“What?”

“Stability. Some find comfort and solace in those repetitive unchanging days. Not having to live on the edge worrying that some sort of natural disaster will suddenly appear out of nowhere.”

“You mean like a tornado?”

“Yeah. The odds of a tornado, which can appear out of nowhere without warning, hitting a city is significantly lower than outside a big city. But tornadoes aren’t all you’ve got to worry about outside the city, right?”

“Yeah.” She started listing them off one by one, “There’s droughts, floods, earthquakes, landslides, storms, wildfires, infestation, wildlife, disease- there’s just too many to count…”

“Exactly, and in a city, you typically don’t have to worry too much about any of these things. You may get some storms, a bit of flooding, or a weak earthquake every now and then, but you typically don’t need to worry that you’ll suddenly lose your life in a big city with all the safety measures put in place. The biggest threat in a city typically comes from other people in the form of crimes rather than natural disasters.”

“It would be pretty nice to not have to worry about so many things.”

“Want to take a little walk around the city while we’re here?”

“Is it… really alright?”

“Yeah.”

“But isn’t Rosa waiting for yuh?”

“She‘s already predicted I’d take longer than expected to get back.”

“She did? How?”

“Because I’m helping out a girl with bad luck.”

“Ugh… isn’t that a bit mean?”

“Complain to her, not me. I’m not the one who made that prediction.”

“Then… I’ll take yuh up on your offer.”

I parked my motorcycle and pulled the cover over it so nobody could see the battery tied down on the back. The two of us got off and began to walk.

Dawn’s head was raised up high as she looked around left and right at all the buildings towering high above us overhead. She made it far too obvious to any third party that she wasn’t accustomed to being inside a big city with high-rise buildings. If you took her clothes into account, she really stuck out like a sore thumb.

As we walked together along the sidewalk, Dawn suddenly opened her mouth and said, “Honestly… I’ve always wanted to see what a big city looks like with my own eyes. I’ve only ever read about them in manga and seen them in pictures and videos online before. They always look so interesting and busy. Like there’s always something going on and something to do.”

“How have you never visited one before? Your parents never took you to see one?”

“Uh… it’s difficult for my dad to bring me. He’s always told me I could visit the city any time I wanted to, but I’ve been afraid to.”

Her dad? What about her mother? Now that I think about it, why didn’t she think to call her mother before instead of only calling her dad?

“What about your mother?” I naturally had to ask.

“My mom? Uh… she left home…”

“Left home? Is that another way to say she died?”

“No. They divorced. My dad met Mom in the city and they got married. She was a city girl, ten years younger than my dad. She was eighteen years old when they got married and had me. Dad said mom was really pretty and it was love at first sight for him… but things didn’t work out between them in the end.”

“Oh, why didn’t it work out?”

“Dad was born and raised on a farm but he’d gone to the city to study agriculture. When his parents passed away, he inherited the farm and moved back to take it over. I was conceived shortly after he returned to the farm with mom. My mom couldn’t handle life on the farm though. He refused to sell his parent’s legacy so mom divorced my dad and moved back to the city alone…”

“Your dad took custody of you?”

“Yeah. My mom didn’t want to take up the burden of raising me. It was too much for her to handle and she wasn’t as financially stable, so my dad raised me by himself on the farm.”

“She didn’t take anything when they divorced?”

“No… she apparently never asked him for anything, not a single cent.”

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