The rain is sour.
It smelled of rust and hit Ling Ye's cheap raincoat, causing fine gray water splashes. He was walking on the streets of the subsidence area of Xinhai City, with water under his feet that would never dry up, reflecting the crooked neon billboards above his head. The grotesque colors are distorted, like a puddle of overturned inferior oil paintings.
This is the subsidence zone. City excrement, garbage discarded by cities high in the sky. There is always a complex smell in the air - ozone from pipe leaks, the sweet smell of synthetic food, and the fishy smell left by rain washing away metal.
Ling Ye pulled up his hood and quickened his pace. He spent too much time in the "Old Cemetery" today. The data streams there had long been torn apart by scavengers, like a group of vultures eating the bones of a carrion beast. He only found some scattered useless information about commodity prices decades ago, and exchanged it for less than 300 credits.
Not enough.
Not nearly enough.
