They left, but Milady stood frozen in place for a long moment.
The joy from just acquiring her new mechanism had almost completely dissipated. She didn't care about the attitude of her clan brothers. However, a familiar sense of guilt and worry crawled across her chest again like countless ants. Milady made up her mind. She turned and walked briskly toward the nearest automaton-car station—she wanted to see her mother, and she wanted her mother to see her and her new mechanism.
No form of transportation would take you straight into the crystallized pollution zone.
To enter this ring of crystal pollution—which appeared and disappeared intermittently in the sea surrounding Haidu's outer edge—one had to get off in the slums nearest the contamination, then trudge step-by-step through filth and chaos.
As a result, those who scraped by in the slums often contracted the crystallization sickness: a disease that turned flesh and blood into hard, blue crystal, causing them to lose all sensation and control over their limbs. They would often reveal the hard, pale-blue crystals on their bodies with a simple lift of a hand or turn of the head. The crystals replaced their dry, coarse skin, shimmering with a beautiful yet cold light.
Once it began, nothing could stop the spread of the crystallization. One could only watch as they slowly devolved from a person into an object, eventually becoming a substance no different from the floor, a clay pot, or a stone tile.
At the end of their lives, as they were carried to the seaside, the fine crystal fragments that broke off their bodies—once a part of their very flesh and blood—would be crushed under the shoes of pedestrians, crunching underfoot.
Haidu, having overused and abused its energy sources, was silent and resolute when it demanded its price from humanity.
It wasn't just people. In the waters farther from Haidu, giant fish and sea beasts that had struggled to leap into the air, trying to escape the crystalline icebergs before death, were also frozen in their final moments by the crystallization spreading within them. They became shocking, gargantuan sculptures, seemingly floating between the sea and sky.
But to the out-of-town tourists who didn't have to worry about the disease, the various sea beast crystals and pale-blue icebergs standing amidst the surging waves were an unimaginable and rare spectacle. High above, a sightseeing flying mechanism was currently gliding slowly across the blue sky.
Walking between the rolling, hill-like crystals, Milady always felt as if something was trying to seep through her skin.
'Every day, Mother walks these man-made paths between the massive, pale-blue crystals, just as I am now, breathing in air that carries the faint smell of something scorched. Perhaps Mother is also keenly aware of how fragile a barrier human skin really is... wondering which day the crystals emerging from the sea will begin to sprout from her own body.'
Logically, the cleanup work should have been a job for both mother and daughter.
No, logically, the cleanup was originally the Clan Leader's family's responsibility. It was a condition that came with their position, their political authority, and their commercial rights. But for as long as Milady could remember, the Clan Leader had assigned the cleanup work to the families at the bottom of the Tower, distributing it by headcount. It wasn't employment; it was an assignment, because they couldn't refuse.
And this so-called "cleanup" was nothing more than chipping away at the crystals that clung to and solidified around Haidu, shattering them piece by piece so they would sink into the sea and be washed far away by the all-cleansing waves.
A person's days on this earth were chipped away, one strike of the chisel at a time.
Milady stopped and looked at the figure on the man-made path in the distance. She even felt as if that person wasn't her mother.
The mother in her memory was vibrant and full of life, her every emotion vivid and dynamic. At home, Yidan could never sit still for a moment, always finding a hundred and one things to keep herself busy. Even in the heavily polluted and highly artificial environment of Haidu, she had managed to get her hands on a tiny, thumb-sized Beauty Fern, nurturing it until it was lush, green, and lovely, and placing it on Milady's bedside table.
In Haidu, living plants and animals were precious things. Yidan planned to raise it until it was bigger, then sell it to supplement the tuition for Milady's advanced studies.
She said she wanted Milady to see a different world.
She said Milady's future was a vast and vibrant sky and sea, and that she shouldn't waste her attention on a trivial matter like cleanup duty.
The Yidan in her memory had never looked as numb and impassive as the Yidan in the distance. Her chisel, and the cleanup mechanism beside her, both seemed more alive than she did.
"Mom?" Milady called out softly as she drew closer, a tremor in her voice she didn't understand herself.
That single word seemed to breathe life back into the human-shaped automaton. She spun around, and the moment her gaze fell upon her daughter, a bright, lively expression spread across her face, transforming her back into the mother Milady knew.