Old Jimmy is a lamp-lighter living in the Ninth District.

This is a job that seems insignificant, but it's essential for the city.

He needs to light all one hundred and fifty-three lampposts along the street before dark each day, ensuring they're all illuminated, and then extinguish them when daylight returns.

It's not a laborious task, one might even call it easy. After all, the one hundred and fifty-three lampposts line the main road of the Ninth District, and by walking from one end to the other and back, one can light all the street lamps.

Maintaining these street lamps isn't Jimmy's responsibility; his sole task is lighting and extinguishing them.

Correspondingly, Jimmy's income is quite meager, as it's truly a simple job that anyone can do well.

He secured this job only because he had been to war, lost a leg for his country, and earned a shiny medal.

Even though the job is easy, Jimmy finds it hard to sustain himself with such a meager income in the world's most bustling city, Langton.

So every morning, after extinguishing the street lamps, Jimmy takes on a special side job as a window-tapper.

This means using his long pole to tap on the windows of street-side residents, waking them up.

These residents pay Jimmy a little money each week. With this money, Jimmy, a lame widower, can live fairly well in Langton.

Even living in the lower town like the Ninth District, he can still afford a drink at the corner bar each night, which is quite an enjoyment for most men in Langton's lower town.

Originally, Jimmy thought his days would pass like this until he could no longer continue this work one day.

By then, the Priest from the church would come to handle his funeral, which was already agreed upon. For this, Jimmy donated a shilling to the church every week.

Though not much, he had persisted for a long while. The priests had long agreed to reserve a good spot for him in the church cemetery.

Jimmy had visited it; it was a spot under the tree shade, where white flowers bloom in spring—a very pretty graveyard, enough to bury the old man like him.

However, this peaceful life was shattered by the government's announcement of the world's end.

Jimmy didn't particularly react to the end times announcement. After all, even during an apocalypse, he still had to light lamps and tap windows; it didn't affect him much.

Other than no longer having money to drink at the bar and needing it all for bread, Jimmy felt little change in his life.

Even if he truly couldn't go on, Jimmy wouldn't feel regretful. He was nearly seventy and was supposed to die on the battlefield with his comrades back in the day—living so much longer was just extra.

Things wouldn't get worse, right? Jimmy remained optimistic.

But as days passed, the streets got quieter, and Jimmy suddenly discovered things were worse than he anticipated.

Firstly, the bakery he frequented stopped selling bread. This was somewhat understandable, as when relief grains began to be distributed on the streets, grain prices soared unbearably high; bread became unaffordable for everyone.

This added pressure to many households that didn't cook, but for Jimmy, buying wheat and cooking porridge wasn't difficult to accept.

Back in the war times, he'd done this many times, though his comrades would often jest about throwing his head into the pot if he cooked again; but they'd never get to taste Jimmy's porridge again.

But when the grain shop stopped selling grain too, Jimmy began to panic, as he remembered the last time this happened was when he first returned from the battlefield.

This change made Jimmy anxious. Though, with a veteran's vigilance, he'd begun hoarding grain when the bakery's bread prices rose, his stockpile was limited as a lame widower.

A week after no grain was for sale, Jimmy had no choice but to drag his lame leg to the relief station, lining up to receive the porridge—enough to prevent starvation but far from satisfying.

It was only then Jimmy began to truly worry and felt the nearing doomsday.

He thought he'd experienced everything in his youth and there was nothing left in life to worry about or fear.

When he saw the seemingly endless line at the relief station, his heart filled with anxiety and fear.

He didn't know if the end times were truly coming, but this continued deprivation would certainly lead to starvation.

And when people lacked food, they'd do things Jimmy didn't want to recall—it was a lifelong nightmare, a hell he'd seen with his own eyes.

Now, Jimmy felt if things continued like this, Langton would soon become the hell he remembered.

Thus, when someone came to Jimmy saying the government had hoarded lots of grain, planning to transport it all to the Northern Territory without leaving them a single grain, Jimmy was easily incited.

Out of distrust in the government and fear of that hell in his memories reoccurring, Jimmy, along with others from the Ninth District, shouted "We want food" and "We want bread," attacking the relief point at the instigation of certain individuals.

Jimmy knew well that those inciting them were not good people and likely had their own agendas.

But faced with the piled grains and the bread made secretly by the relief workers, Jimmy chose to abandon those meaningless worries and the remnants of loyalty to the Empire, taking up arms and bloody bread.

With his military experience, Jimmy began organizing and directing others to set up barricades and defensive positions.

Relying on these, they held off the first wave of attack from the City Guard and began counterattacking outside the district.

The iron blood scent seemed to transport Jimmy back to the smoky battlefield, watching his comrades get their heads pierced by flying lead bullets...

Old memories resurfaced, and Jimmy suddenly remembered why he enlisted when he was young.

Back then, Jimmy was just young Jimmy, and he joined because someone told him he could have his fill of food in the army and wouldn't starve.

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