?Ti continued to pass in Crimson City.
Months had passed since the Crimson Sea broke out.
During these months, the Outer City underwent drastic changes, while the Inner City barely felt any difference.
Sure, a couple of wares in the Inner City had hiked up in price, but everyone could still afford them without any issues.
anwhile, tal beca extrely expensive in the Outer City, sothing that had never happened before.
Crimson City had always had a huge abundance of tal, and even if one found a pristine plate of tal on the sidewalk, one wouldn't even bother picking it up.
The only kinds of tal that were worth anything were steel and tal treated with Zephyx, but those were not materials that normal people ca into contact with.
The rusty tal in the city always seed to be everywhere, but now, things were different.
All the spare pieces of tal had been cleared off the streets.
In the past, if soone needed so tal to fix a hole in their house, they would just walk to the streets, grab a plate, and fix it to their house.
But now, they just couldn't find any loose tal anymore.
When the first shops selling normal tal popped up, the citizens beca confused.
Selling tal?
Which insane person would buy tal?
And when these sa citizens needed the tal, they beca angry that they had to pay for it now.
Nevertheless, many of them paid the exorbitant prices.
The ones that refused to pay for the tal just waited.
At so point, tal would beco free again.
Yet, just a couple of weeks later, things beca even worse.
All the tal shops closed business.
tal could now only be sold via the city.
Soone who had a lot of tal and wanted to sell it needed to contact the city to sell it, and sobody who needed tal also needed to contact the city.
The people who had too much tal could quickly sell it since the city was basically buying every single piece of tal on the market.
Sadly, the people who needed tal found it almost impossible to get it.
It was really, really hard to get the city to sell so tal to the people.
If one needed tal, one better had a good damn reason for it.
A hole in the ceiling was not a good reason.
So? That's just another light hole.
You're missing an entire wall? Just take half of another wall to close the hole.
The people felt like they were living in a different reality.
Sothing that had been abundant just months ago was now impossible to co across.
But then, sothing changed again.
A trend appeared.
Sleek one-strip houses.
Instead of having a house made of thick and cold tal with many holes in it, a company appeared that was offering a service to change the houses.
The company would take the old and rusty plates of tal and replace them with new, thinner, and cleaner plates.
Naturally, there were also no holes in these plates, and the entire house would even have a uniform style and look.
They also didn't even ask for any credits!
Just 20 liters of blood donated over an entire year would be enough!
Naturally, this company was owned by Kugelblitz.
Of course, not many people were fans of paying with their blood, but it was actually the best solution to their current problems.
But there was another problem.
Losing 20 liters of blood was a lot for one person.
It could even be life-threatening.
That was when the next change took place.
The price was per household.
Not per person.
While families didn't have issues with the cost, people living alone didn't have it as easy.
Even two people living in a house might not be completely fine with the price.
But they still needed usable houses.
So, these people looked to the streets.
At the displaced people from the Dregs.
Many people of the Outer City offered the people of the Dregs to live in their houses for one year in exchange for ten liters of their blood donated across the year.
The blood was basically seen as rent.
Even more, the actual owners of the hos would even pay the asly 100 or so credits of taxes for them so that they wouldn't die of blood loss.
In the end, the sudden rise in the tal prices resulted in the elimination of almost all holessness.
Within months, most houses were replaced with newer and better-looking ones.
Naturally, the company offering the service got more tal than they were using, which they then sold to the city for a hefty profit.
In a way, one could say that the Outer City was skimd off an entire layer of tal.
And what happened to all the tal that the city bought?
The first pieces of tal were turned into Crimson Shields, lovingly called Cockroaches.
The deaths on the city's underside had been brutal, but after the Cockroaches had been introduced, the deaths drastically reduced.
A Cockroach was a 2.2 by 1.2-ter bowl of tal with several straps attached.
Soone working on the underside of the city would strap that bowl on their back and grab the underside of the city.
The bowl would then encompass their entire body and only leave a small gap of about 10 centiters through which the worker could see the outside world.
The small gap and the good distance it was away from the eyes assured that the person couldn't see the Crimson Sea, no matter how much they turned their heads.
Additionally, people could use the Cockroach as a big bucket in which they could store their tools.
The Cockroaches were a great invention, which reduced the deaths by a ridiculous amount.
Of course, the Cockroaches were nad as such due to how they looked when soone wore them and worked on the city's underside.
A worker crawling along the city's underside looked like a tallic cockroach moving out from the city, leaving a trail of grips behind like footprints.
Working on the underside of the city was also called Roaching from then on.
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