Chapter 612: A Friend in a Foreign Land

Bai Yin moved from place to place through Noirciel’s transporter portal; it was as though she did not have a destination in mind. After a while, she arrived at a location that she could not recognize. Bai Yin’s big sisters had kept a close grip on her, not letting her go anywhere on her own. This was the first time she had been somewhere far away by herself.

“Where am I?” Bai Yin eyed the surrounding streets, feeling lost. There was no one in the area amidst columns of dilapidated, decrepit buildings erected on an abandoned and moribund city at the edge of society. Bai Yin never imagined that a place so jarringly at odds with her memory of the ‘outside world’ before.

In fact, as the Empire’s youngest princess, Bai Yin had never thought that such a place could exist. It was nothing like those thriving cities and flourishing streets she had grown accustomed to seeing. The longer she strode in this desolated city, the sadder she became. She soon burst into tears. “Where am I? What am I gonna do now?”

She wanted to go home, but she had left so abruptly that she had forgotten to bring her phone, where the secret passcode to transport her home was installed. Now, she was alone, without money, breakfast barely touched, and so far away from home.

Bai Yin wandered around aimlessly for a while before succumbing to her tired feet. She found a decrepit bench that seemed functional enough and sat, pulling her knees into a ball with her arms wrapped around her silky white socks.

Her eyes reddened, and tears streamed out of them. “Big Sister Mia…”

The first image that floated into Bai Yin’s mind was not her mother or the father, who she had not seen for a long time. Almost immediately, however, her mind brought up how she had enraged Mia into tears, and her heart throbbed with guilt.

‘What if Mia will never want to talk to me again?’ A scary thought sprung into her mind. It quickly snowballed into more and more upsetting imagination until finally, she broke out a low but audible weep.

It was then when a voice rang behind her, “What’s the matter, little girl?”

Bai Yin glanced over her shoulder. It was a homely bespectacled girl in a plain outfit consisting of a big traveler’s backpack and a camera suspending from her neck. She looked harmless.

“Are you lost?” She asked kindly, offering a clean handkerchief.

“T-thanks.” Bai Yin rose and accepted the girl’s gesture. After wiping her tears-stricken face, she asked cautiously, “Where is this place?”

“The city of Eos,” the girl replied simply.

Bai Yin was a little stunned at the familiarity of the name. She had seen ‘Eos’ in her history book before; it was one of the New Empire’s first, flourishing cities. After its halcyon days, it declined into a state of abandonment due to reasons Bai Yin could not remember.

Many cities suffered similar fates like this throughout the New Empire. Since this world was so vast and spacious, its starkly few populations could afford to expand and rebuild old settlements or discard them altogether. Slowly but surely, ghost cities and ghost towns like Eos occasionally stood in the outskirts, so forgotten that not even the homeless would dwell.

“It’s not safe here. Let’s talk more after we get inside,” the girl said. She introduced herself as Anshin, a foreign student from one of the Empire’s vassal nations on a mission to collect information for her thesis on the New Empire’s development and history.

While the duo traveled, Anshin continued to snap photos of the city and its barren streets. “Eos is abandoned just like that even though it’s still a beautiful, functional city! I guess the rumors about His Highness being a spendthrift were right after all.”

Bai Yin thought of refuting the girl’s claim. Her father could not possibly be a spendthrift; unlike her classmates, she never had a luxurious chartered driver to bring her to school, her phone was not the newest on the market, nor was she given a lot of allowances. She could not even buy a beautiful, paid-only dress for her favorite mobile game character without first saving up on her money.

She remembered seeing her mother in a parent-teacher meeting when she was a child. Everyone else’s parents had been convivially mingling with one another and exchanging their phone numbers and business cards as though they were attending an upper-class birthday party. Her mother, however, just sat away from the conversations with her head buried on the phone — Bai Yin’s phone, at that. Occasionally, some of the parents would come to say hi, but they almost immediately left as soon as they heard that she was “just the owner of a small bakery”.

‘Surely all of these disproved the rumors, right?’ Bai Yin thought confidently.

It would have to take a few more years of maturity before the girl was genuinely cognizant of her privileges.

“So, little girl, where do you stay?” Anshin asked suddenly after snapping a few more photos.

“Oh, I… I don’t actually know…?” Bai Yin admitted. She was genuinely unsure; due to the characteristic of her residence, her house did not possess a typical house address.

“Huh. Is that so?” Baffled, Anshin examined Bai Yin even more closely. She was most delicate, gorgeous, and adorable, who reminded Anshin of a well-crafted porcelain doll. She also could not recognize the uniform Bai Yin was wearing, but from its design and quality, Anshin had a hunch that it belonged to an elite school.

So far, everything pointed to the girl being an affluent, aristocratic family’s daughter. But that begot the question why someone like that would end up in a stinkhole like this?

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“Have to hand her to the cops later,” Anshin murmured to herself. “But Eosia is a long way from here, isn’t it? Besides, I heard really bad talk about the cops there… I probably shouldn’t stake my trust in them.”

Eosia was the newer city built at the edge of the abandoned Eos. Much like the Resplendent City, Eosia was predominantly inhabited by immigrant workers. The city was known for being relatively unsafe, which placed a huge pressure on the local police to become overtly violent in their operations. Rumors had it that the Chief was a cruel savage named Zar’zar, who loved feeding his pigeon with the criminals’ organs.

Just when she was stuck on making a decision, she caught a sharp screech from a distance.

Anshin’s face turned pale. She grabbed Bai Yin by her wrist and ran, towing the girl forward. “Gotta’ bolt now! The thugs are back!”

A ghost city like this was bound to attract peculiar characters such as homeless artists or outlaws, which was why Anshin paid some money to hire protection from gangs operating in nearby cities to bring her into Eos. However, after seeing bereft of a soul this city was, Anshin rejected the gang’s offer to extend their protection. Little did she know how wrong she would be!

Unfortunately, the duo’s running speed was no match to the screeching airbikes, and soon, they found themselves walled by thugs with bizarre fashion sense, alien-like hairdo, and an air of unsettling excitement.

“Women! Actual, live women!” One of the younger thugs screamed, eliciting roaring applause and whistles.

“Looking for daddy, little pussycat?”

“Oh, ho! One of them is a f**ing loli! Oh, I swear on my dragon, I’ve never seen such a bodacious, perfect little girl! Look at that untouched body, those delicate white lace — oh, it’s pushing against my breeches, I can’t hold back!”

Mortified, Anshin pushed Bai Yin behind her back while she furiously produced a magical taser. “Don’t you… Don’t you try anything with us, you scums!” She mustered as much faux bravery as she could. “I’ve got the Whale Gang on my back, you know! Don’t you dare!”

“The Whale Gang? Gwaahahahaha!” The thugs erupted into a nasty guffaw. “Now you listen, little b****. Those wimps got nothing on us or this city. This city is our turf. Everything here belongs to us Mad Dragons, not some f**king p***y Whale Gang!”

Young Bai Yin had never been in a situation like this before. She was so terrified that she had completely forgotten that she was a master of stealth and was instead reduced to curling behind Anshin’s back, shaking like a leaf.

Unfortunately, this was the sort of action that fanned the degenerates’ hunger. Too many in that group had their eyes lustfully trained on the beautiful, young, unresistant loli, shooting Bai Yin with eyes so charged that she felt as though she was already naked.

Anshin refused to go down without a fight, swinging her magical taser as hard as she could. But before she managed to tase a single person, one of the thugs struck her weapon down with his chain before he stomped it into bits.

Anshin winced for a second. She had to pay by monthly investment for that! And now it was gone before doing what it was supposed to do.

“Bring them back to our camp. I call dibs on the little one,” said someone that looked like the chief. He licked his lips, and the look of hunger flashed in his eyes.

At this critical moment, another screech grazed against their ears. An expression of earnest fear immediately seized the thugs’ faces as they cried, “S**t; the boss is here!”

“On your best behavior, f***wads!” The chief quickly commanded before dropping his voice to a threatening growl to Anshin, “If you don’t keep your f***ing mouth shut, I’ll f***ing murder you and your f***ing family!”

To really drive his point home, the man slid his finger across his neck.

A few moments later, a bike that had been customized to resemble Earth’s Harvey motorcycle screeched through the pavement before stopping abruptly before them. Surprisingly, the rider was a youthful lady with a full head of technicolor hair bunched into a messy ponytail. She was donning a brilliant scarlet parka and a pair of hotpants, exposing her slim waist and snowy-fair legs with strange tattoos. Her makeup was going for “smoky and intimidating”, which was complemented with an unfinished cigarette in her mouth.

One look and everyone knew that they were in the presence of the worst kind of ne’er-do-wells.

“What’s the f**king matter?” The young woman spread her leg and dismounted her bike while barking at the nervous, respectful thugs. “Sod off!”

“Cough, you see, Boss, we… we found these two lost souls, and we were just about to escort them out of the city,” the chief explained, doing his best to remain respectful while shooting an aggressive look at Anshin. With a gesture, his boys stepped aside and revealed the two girls.

The young woman took a brief look at Anshin and immediately broke into a smirk. “Ha, being such fine gentlemen today? No f**king way. You were going to kidnap girls again, weren’t you? Have you forgotten my rules already —”

Her sentence was left hanging the moment she saw a shuddering Bai Yin behind Anshin.

“Little… Little Yin?!” The young woman blurted out, shocked.

At the same time, Bai Yin finally recognized this troublemaker. Hesitantly she mumbled, “Is that you, Big Sister Mor-Mor?” before shaking her head hard, murmuring, “No, you can’t be Big Sister Mor-Mor. Who are you?”