Dai Long, a multi-layered nation, looked from afar like a tower, a giant fortress built vertically, where a person's fate was decided by the step upon which they stood.
At the very pinnacle was the Upper Tier. Here, sunlight was always brilliant, shimmering off white marble spires and golden-plated tile roofs. The streets were vast, without a speck of dust. From those balconies, one could gaze upon the entire territory as if it were a miniature painting. It was the world of the royal family and the powerful clans.
Below lay the Middle Tier – the sleepless heart of commerce. Lights, train whistles, vendor cries, and the scents of spices and precious woods blended into a hectic pace of life. Canals crisscrossed like blood vessels, transporting goods from everywhere. Here, money was the common language.
And finally, lying deep at the bottom, submerged in perpetual darkness, was the Lower Tier.
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The Lower Tier had no sunlight. Only a dim, bluish-gray light from discarded, glowing rocks seeped down through cracks in the impossibly high stone ceiling. The air was a thick, chaotic mixture: the stench of foul sewers, the toxic smell of metallic smoke from makeshift forges, and the odor of sweat, blood, and the tears of the wretched.
In a damp underground dock, a shrill shout rang out, drowning even the rumble of the black water.
"Hurry up, you scrap! You think I feed you to stand and stare?"
A strong kick to the hip sent Khanh buckling down. The foreman, a large man with a heavily scarred face, looked at him with a contemptuous gaze as if looking at a worm. He cursed and whipped his stick at Khanh. Khanh, an orphan not yet sixteen, struggled to rise, the aches in his joints tormenting him whenever the weather turned. His scrawny body trembled under the weight of the cargo sack he had just dragged from the barge.
"I'm sorry, I'll try my best," Khanh said, gritting his teeth as he lifted the large sack and moved forward.
His job was loading and unloading. Day after day, from the crack of dawn until the last glowing stones faded. His hands were calloused, the back of his shirt always soaked with sweat sticking to his skin. In return, he received only a few meager coins, just enough to buy a moldy piece of bread to stave off hunger for the day.
But Khanh had a secret. He could take things without touching them.
He didn't call it an ability, just a "trick." A strange focus, a strong enough will, and a small nearby object—a crust of bread, a withered apple, a scrap of cloth—would seem to leave its place and appear in his coat pocket. He thought maybe he was just deft, or that everyone in the Lower Tier could do it if they tried hard enough.
He didn't use this trick for himself. What he took, he gave to the other children at the dock: Little Boy, twelve years old with eyes sunken from hunger; Enh, nine with hands blistered from pulling nets; or Poi, always shivering with malaria. They were fragments of life just like him, trapped in a grind that crushed their childhood. A small bite of food, a slightly warmer rag—it was the only thing he could give. It was also how he clung to the last shreds of his own humanity in this hell.
He and Little Boy, like most children of the Lower Tier, shared a common dream of escape: to become cross-tier merchants. Only that profession could grant them the rare permit to climb freely to the higher levels, to finally see with their own eyes the world above they could only wonder about. It wasn't merely a dream of wealth, but a craving to touch the light, to know the scent of wind that wasn't the smell of refuse, and to decide their own path.
The two had made a promise. They would work together, save every iron coin and copper bit, until they had enough capital for a small handcart of goods. Little Boy often whispered in the dark: "I heard they have candy on the Middle Tier, shaped like animals, melts in your mouth. When we make it, we'll buy a pack, just to try." Khanh would just smile, but in his heart, that vision was the only thing keeping it beating against the cold of the docks.
But then, Little Boy died. The fit of coughing blood was no accident; it was the foretold end for an exhausted body. When his friend's body was wrapped up and cast into the black water, Khanh didn't just lose a friend. He lost his fellow dreamer, the shared promise, and the very belief that the dream was possible.
He looked around. His friends, those in the same predicament, were silently hunched under heavy loads. Some were no longer there. Little Boy, his friend, had died from a coughing-up-blood fit, his body exhausted from overwork. His corpse was wrapped in a tattered mat and thrown into the black canal. Khanh had witnessed it, and he could only stand still, because he knew, one day he would be like that too.
He himself did not know what else to do besides this wretched manual labor. Born in the Lower Tier, raised in darkness, no family, no education—he was just a replaceable cog in the giant machine of Dai Long. He knew above him was a completely different world, a place he could escape to, break free from this confinement; he wanted to be free. His biggest dream was not to be rich, but merely to have a sleep not tormented by hunger or pain, to comfortably enjoy peaceful moments like the nobles who often passed by used to tell stories about.
He lifted his eyes to look at the stone ceiling, where the noisy sounds and brilliant light of the Middle Tier echoed down. There, people lived a life he could not even imagine. But here, the foul stench clung to his skin, in every breath. People of the Lower Tier often said to each other: "Only when I smell this stench do I know I'm still alive."
Khanh took a deep breath. He knew he was alive. But he did not know what forced him to live this hellish life, nor what he should live for now that the only dream he had ever shared was dead with Little Boy.
"Is there some way, some escape from this place," he whispered, clenching a pebble he'd picked up from the ground. "Is there a way to escape this misery?"