Chapter 19 – The City Below

The road was smooth, as if it had been paved by human hands for walking.

Wei An stepped onto the path and walked through the doorway formed by corpses. Contrary to legends of an “intangible yet ever-present spatial membrane,” he passed through effortlessly, as if it were just an ordinary road.

He entered what should have been the void beyond the window. As he stepped into the previously unseen darkness, he found himself in a stone passageway, cold and ancient in texture.

Wei An turned around—the door was gone. Behind him stretched an equally long and dim corridor.

He had never imagined he would enter such a place.

Movies, TV shows, games, and novels had fantasized about the appearance of ancient cities in countless ways—some resembling the modern world with only minor differences, others grotesque and incomprehensible, like nests of monsters.

Wei An surveyed his surroundings but saw no high-tech products, as if this place belonged to an era before such things existed.

Ahead, he could make out an exit, its light murky and dim, like an overcast day when thick clouds block the sun.

He continued forward without looking back.

Then, he stepped into that somber light.

Wei An wasn’t sure which kind of fantasy he was witnessing.

In front of him lay an enormous plaza, stretching beyond sight.

“Enormous” didn’t do it justice. Even the largest plaza in the Federation would be nothing more than a small table at the edge of this one by comparison.

It was too vast, completely dwarfing any real-world structure. The edges of the plaza were supported by three massive, bone-like arches, two of which had eroded nearly beyond recognition. Only one remained standing, but its form was still astonishing. Wei An couldn’t fathom its original function or what it must have looked like when intact.

His vantage point was elevated, and the city sprawled out before him like a colossal corpse.

The entire world was shrouded in gray, with fog pressing down on the city, visibility low. Wei An had never seen such a sky in the human world—a suffocating gloom, as if the universe itself had yet to fully form. There was no wind. Everything was dead.

Further away loomed a massive shadow, indistinct—perhaps a building or a hill, but it didn’t quite feel like either. Just a chaotic darkness.

Nearby, there was a staircase, sized for humans.

Wei An walked down, feeling as though he were walking through a fragment of history erased from memory—only broken walls remained, their true forms lost to time.

The plaza somewhat resembled an arena, but its scale was too vast for that purpose, and there were no seats. Judging by certain details, its builders must have been a species similar to humans, though with fundamental differences in customs and lifestyles.

He noticed piles of filth by the stairwell of what looked like desiccated, rotted meat—not the corpses of living creatures, as there were no bones or organs. Similar waste was scattered throughout the city’s corners.

It was as if vast amounts of flesh had once existed deep within this city, and when the land died, it had slowly been expelled through the sewers, piling up on the streets.

Wei An stepped onto the grand plaza.

The surrounding buildings appeared relatively normal—factories or residences, even withered plants.

He hadn’t gone far before spotting a long fissure in the stone ground beneath his feet, as if a giant sword had once cleaved it open. The crack was deep, extending beyond sight, with buildings collapsed in its wake. These weren’t the results of modern weaponry but rather an ancient war.

Wei An pressed onward. The ground was empty, except for the rotten meat and occasional wind-worn debris whose original forms were unrecognizable.

An ancient vehicle lay overturned by the roadside, its cargo spilled out and long since looted, leaving behind only a wasteland of death.

The sound of the horn came from deep within this city.

Wei An paused briefly before heading in that direction.

As he walked, he kept an eye out for traces of human military activity but found none.

However, the further he went, the worse his headache became. The medication could no longer suppress what lay beneath.

His left ear had gone deaf, filled with faint screams and clamor, accompanied by the sound of fingernails scraping against walls—as if unseen entities beyond hearing were gathering toward him, clawing at barriers.

Beneath it all was that constant electronic voice, still incomprehensible.

For years, the thing inside him had remained dormant, stirring only in the dead of night or when he was at his weakest.

The Ministry of Science had declared him a failed experiment—his anomaly would never truly grow, and his headaches were merely rejection symptoms.

But as this city rose, Wei An could feel the ravenous urgency of the grotesque organ in his mind. There was something it had to obtain—

“It’s fine,” Wei An muttered. “It’s fine…”

He continued forward, palms slightly sweaty. His gaze swept the surroundings, but there was no sign of Gui Ling—only an unfamiliar, desolate expanse.

He tightened his grip on the gun, tempted to call out the man’s name—but in the end, he didn’t.

Something here unsettled him. The silence was oppressive, yet Wei An was certain that deep within this dead city lurked things he never wanted to know about.

He reminded himself that he held the contract. Now that they were in the same place, Gui Ling should be able to sense him.

Wei An ventured deeper into the city at the heart of this space.

Everything here was alien to the real world, governed by another existence—now dead.

He walked atop this colossal corpse, the noise in his left ear persisting, making everything feel surreal—like an old, staticky broadcast that could cut to a terrifying, unknown channel at any moment.

Ahead, an oppressive force loomed—something dark and heavy. Wei An could feel it dispersing the fog slightly, its decay seeping into the air, burrowing into his bones.

He took a few more steps before halting abruptly, eyes widening at what lay ahead.

It was the shadow he had mistaken for a hill earlier—perhaps a massive garbage pile, a mountain, or a building.

But it was none of those things.

On the plaza lay a gigantic severed head, towering over forty meters tall.

It seemed to belong to a woman, one who must have been breathtakingly beautiful in life. But now, her golden hair had decayed into dull, tarnished foil, lying lifeless in the endless gray mist. The eyes were hollowed out, weathered into black caverns.

A third of the head had been cleaved away, leaving a horrifying black wound where blood clots tangled with hair—perhaps brain matter and debris too—all a chaotic mess.

It had lain on this ancient plaza, sunken into Deep Space, for who knew how many millennia—maddening and desolate.

If it had once resembled a deity, then this was the corpse of a god—a half-head mountain of refuse.

Then, the head’s withered lips twitched unnaturally. Wei An stared—and something crawled out.

Human language could scarcely describe the thing’s repulsiveness; such abominations didn’t exist in the known world. It was like a maggot from a trash heap—grayish-white, filthy, decayed, with limbs resembling a human’s but moving on all fours.

Its head was halved, lacking a brain or eyes—only a mouth full of fangs.

Wei An stared blankly. Everything here was too supernatural, as if he were dreaming.

The creature lunged at him.

Wei An sidestepped, feeling it brush past his face. He caught a whiff of smoke and fire.

It landed and immediately pounced again.

Though it felt unreal, Wei An’s instincts for combat were bone-deep. His expression turned cold and focused. As the creature reached the peak of its leap, he raised his gun and fired.

A direct hit. The large-caliber firearm packed enough power to send the monster sprawling even with a suppressor.

It writhed on the ground. Wei An approached and fired another shot into its head.

It went still. Finally dead. Wei An stared at the corpse for three seconds before examining it closely.

The thing was eerily humanoid. Its head looked surgically altered—brain, eyes, ears, and nose removed, with visible sutures.

Most of it was blown apart, revealing that its insides… weren’t biological flesh.

It resembled charred bone and meat reduced to ash, with embers still smoldering at the core before flickering out.

No living creature could be like this. This was something from hell.

Wei An knelt beside it, studying the details.

Then he noticed a faint trace of fluorescent pigment on its abdomen—faded from fire and weathering but unmistakable.

Fluorescent pigments had many uses: markers, live-action games, banknote authentication, road signs. Based on the mark alone, Wei An deduced that someone had drawn a fluorescent symbol somewhere, and the creature had brushed against it while the paint was still wet.

It had happened a while ago, but the pigment was stubborn enough to remain.

Wei An stood, thinking about the implications.

Several possibilities came to mind, but he couldn’t determine where the creature had come from…

Suddenly, he staggered. A sharp, excruciating pain erupted in his mind—the thing inside him convulsing violently.

He collapsed. The pain was overwhelming, blanking his mind instantly—unfamiliar in its intensity, enough to destroy any human’s body and will in moments.

He couldn’t even scream. His voice was gone.

In his periphery, he saw another hellish creature crawling toward him, but he was powerless to act.

Agony consumed everything. The horn still sounded—low, urgent, soaked in the scent of blood.

In the delirium of near-death, Wei An saw the thing in his mind clearly for the first time.

The remnant inside him—this thing that should have died long ago, this unimaginable horror born from a maddened brain’s delusions, existing beyond the known universe.

In the misty void stood a gray lump of flesh—mutilated, bloody, lacking any intellect, pulsing with the malice and suffering of a grotesque, incomplete life.

And he finally heard the electronic voice that had haunted him for years, always just out of comprehension:

“Deep Domain System is Offline—Deep Domain System is Offline—”

Deep Domain System is Offline.

Wei An knew he was facing death.

He didn’t understand ancient technology, but in this moment, he was certain he wouldn’t last three more minutes. Organ failure caused by ancient relics was rapid.

He had witnessed such deaths many times—during contract rituals in Qingshi Province, in cases tied to ancient relics, in the depths of testing facilities he’d seen as a child—all horrors too insane to distinguish from nightmares.

They said people saw their lives flash before death, but Wei An’s mind was blank. The only thing that surfaced was a vague, long-buried memory—the kind of maudlin moment no one cared about, meaningless in the grand scheme.

He remembered a friend from before he became “Mr. Qin.”

A man named Pu Lan, from the same orphanage, later in the same experimental group.

A ghost from childhood, gone at seventeen, emaciated, wasted until he looked scarcely older than five.. His skin was chalk-white, his hair nearly gone—what remained long and filthy, a dull metallic gray.

Pu Lan was the last in their group to die. Wei An had visited then, seeking evidence, thinking he could make someone pay.

But in the end, he could do nothing. The trail went cold.

When it came to ancient relics, society’s darkest atrocities were practically legal. The system tacitly endorsed the torment of the weak, with regulations murky yet meticulously structured. Though counterforces existed, such horrors persisted like mold within civilization’s cracks.

He was a senior investigator in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, an important son of the Qin family. Once placed in this position, he belonged here.

In his final moments, Pu Lan had stared at Wei An with an eerie hunger—something ancient growing inside him, peering through his eyes at the human world.

He died as if starved to death—like all the others in their group, their vitality and flesh consumed by something unknown.

Wei An had always known he’d end up the same. If everyone else died, why would he be an exception?

In his fading vision, the monster crawled closer. He could smell its rot, smoke, and fire.

He had lived his retirement earnestly—built a house, tended a garden… all the things books, TV, and people promised: a life unshackled, comfortable, fulfilling.

He had planned and built for so long…

But he wasn’t meant to have it. He didn’t deserve it.

A needle pricked his neck.

His body was wracked with agony, but in that instant, the pain receded.

The gray lump of flesh in his mind quieted, its jagged edges soothed and reinforced as an inexplicable power infused it. Like water crystallizing into ice, a strange substance stabilized in the void, attempting to construct a framework for the abomination in his skull.

Though it was a fragment of ancient technology—a ghost of malice and hunger—the framework was clear, cutting through the chaos to grant temporary peace.

It took Wei An a while to regain awareness. He found himself curled on the ground, weak, fingers trembling.

He looked up and saw Gui Ling kneeling in front of him, wearing the stylish jacket Wei An had picked out—still as handsome as ever.

In his hand was an injector.

A Federation injector. The latest model.