Dai Long, a multi-layered nation, looked at from afar like a tower, a giant fortress built vertically, where a person's fate was decided by the step they stood on.
At the very top was the Upper Tier. Where sunlight was always brilliant, white marble spires and golden-plated tile roofs shimmered. The streets were vast, without a speck of dust. From those balconies, one could gaze upon the entire territory like a miniature painting. It was the world of the royal family and powerful clans.
Below was the Middle Tier - the sleepless heart of commerce. Lights, train whistles, vendor cries, and the scents of spices and precious woods blended together to create 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, seeping 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 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 for 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 from 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 am sorry, I will 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 only received a few meager coins, just enough to buy a moldy piece of bread and stave off hunger for the day.
He looked around. His friends, those in the same predicament, were silently hunched over under heavy loads. Some were no longer there. Little Boy, his friend, had died last week 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 where he could escape, 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 it was that forced him to live this hellish life.
"Is there some way, some solution for me to escape from here. I want to see the scenery that people often talk about of the Upper Tier."