Herald of Steel

Chapter 1400 Revisiting The Eastern District (Part-2)

The eastern district was famous for three main things.

First of all, its large presence of soldiers and their families, giving it the colloquial name- Soldier's district.

Second was its large, permanent slave market situated near the gates. It was said a thousand slaves were sold every day there, which was roughly 0.5% of the city's total population.

Third was its various legal and illegal pleasure centers.

And it was this last section that Alexander decided to focus on first.

The legal establishments consisted of some of the biggest and best restaurants in the city serving all sorts of regional and foreign delicacies, a large number of hotels, inns, and bars serving various types of alcohol and spirits, a few registered red light houses catering to men and some to even wealthy women, some gambling houses where dice and a game similar to darts was played, and a handful of smoking bars, where cannabis, opium, and an extremely bitter leaf similar to betel leaf was served.

Of course in reality, many elements of the four establishments were meshed together to provide an all in one service- such as restaurants doubling as inns for the night, serving good quality alcohol, smoke up opportunities, and even companionship for the night.

Thus as Alexander walked across the orange hued streets late afternoon, he noticed large stacks of smoke coming out from many of the restaurants and inns, where men ate, drank, and smoked together with friends and family in many small, roadside stools and benches.

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Cannabis and opium were legal in Adhania, widely used as pain medication and to cure insomnia, while that bitter leaf- called 'Tefnia', helped sore throats and was thought to keep the body healthy.

And Alexander had no problem with the last one- Tefnia. He even occasionally nibbled on the stuff, although the taste was quite the acquired one.

As for the other two, looking at the people who had just gotten off work and were filling their lungs with stacks of this steamy opioid, Alexander mumbled,

"I will have to find a way to ban them! The harm they do to the lungs is irreversible. The good news is most of the nobles are on my side. They hardly touch the stuff."

"They are aware of their highly addictive properties. And the Ramuh faith forbids such indulgence. So the only problem is how to wean the people using it off it."

Despite how politically fertile the soil was for Alexander to outright ban the stuff, he was well aware of how difficult it was to enforce a ban on drugs.

The addictive nature of it made simply cutting off the supply would hardly ever have the large intended effect.

People needed to be slowly taken off it.

It was of course not impossible- just look at how the Chinese stomped out opium use into oblivion even after using it for a century.

But this was quite hard.

One needed to take draconian measures- and if you could not, well you got something like the US's war on drugs.

'As for the fizzy part, well I can get carbon dioxide from burning limestone. I already to that for the blast furnace. So I can simply channel the released gases into a large, sealed barrel of water, and once enough gas builds up, the pressure will naturally increase, dissolving the gas into the aqueous solution with no problem!'

'Yes, the theory has no major glaring flaws. I will just have to work out the details and see if it works.'

'And even if it does not work out, I think I can create a somewhat air tight steel cylinder using rubber and putty, and then pump the stored carbon dioxide directly into fizzy bottles. I already have the air pump I made for football.'

A thousand and more such thoughts and flashes illuminated Alexander's mind as he mechanically made his way through the wide streets, hardly paying attention to the late noon bustle.

That was until he began to dive deeper and deeper into the city's bowels, where the line between legal and illegal establishments began to soon blur.

Here, the inns served substandard food, especially meat, and fish of unknown origins.

Which was saying something given even reputable restaurants had a habit of mixing unspeakable cuts into their beef, mutton, or pork stew.

For them, this would mean sub studard cuts, meat that had gone off a bit, parts from the guts and intestines which were considered very low quality, and even meat from other much cheaper animals.

And it did not take a genius to guess which small animal or even insect would be considered cheap.

This was one of the reasons Alexander never ate at any restaurants or inns if he could help it.

And even if he was forced, he would only have freshly baked bread and vegetables. It was much harder to fake those, and frankly, they were cheap enough to not be worth the hassle for the seller.

Now, if this was the standard for reputable hotels, one would only guess how bad things were in the back alleys.

Looking at the water piece prices of some of the skewers and meat pies being sold there, Alexander even highly doubted if there was even actual 'meat' in there.

And when he asked a stall owner what he was selling, the man replied with a shameless grin,

"Chicken, beef, mutation, pork, venison and lamb! All straight from the city lord's manor. Only 1 ropal a skewer."

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