"Master!" Corvus snapped awake from the nightmare, a torn, ragged roar bursting from his throat.
He bolted upright, his rapid gasps carrying a metallic, rusty sweetness. His chest heaved violently, cold sweat having completely drenched the inner lining of his tattered trench coat. He panted heavily; inside the dim sewer, nothing echoed except the hollow dripping of water against stone flags.
The scorching warmth of that bloody dream from ten years ago still lingered, forming a stark, jarring contrast with the bone-chilling, filthy water around him, leaving him momentarily dazed and unable to tell where he was.
Only the mechanical prosthetic arm on his left shoulder, still throbbing with dull pain, emitted a faint, lonely shimmer in the darkness.
Not far away, a man crouched by a campfire, his back turned to him.
That back looked distinctly uncanny—under the warm glow of the fire, a pair of shriveled black bone wings could be clearly seen extending from behind his shoulders. Meanwhile, the arm dangling at his side was covered in dense, dark purple metallic scales.
The man didn't turn around, yet he expertly smoothed a clump of crushed green herbs over Corvus's injured ankle. His touch was remarkably gentle, presenting a striking contrast to his monstrous and terrifying appearance.
"Yo, you're awake?" The man slowly turned around, his dark red eyes glinting with a playful flicker in the firelight. He deliberately picked up a clean strip of cloth and carefully bound the wound. "You're pretty tough—can't even die from something like this. I was wandering through the sewers earlier and almost got knocked out by the heavy stench of blood on you. Add in that lingering mana pulse from your mechanical arm, and it was pretty much impossible not to notice you."
Corvus's muscles tensed up as he instinctively tried to get up and guard himself, only to find his body so weak that even his fingertips trembled slightly.
However, a steady stream of soothing coolness flowed from his left ankle and right shoulder, his agonizing pain receding at an astonishing speed.
"Thank you." Corvus suppressed the surging suspicion in his heart, his gaze fixed tightly on the man's unnatural black bone wings. "But... who are you? And where are we?"
The man let out a dry, self-deprecating chuckle. The firelight illuminated a long, deep scar running straight across the bridge of his nose. As his expression contorted, the pair of shriveled bone wings twitched slightly, making a rustling sound like rubbing leather.
"Who am I?" The man stood up, casually tossing the leftover herb residue into the burning pile of debris. The flames suddenly flared up, lighting up the bottomless, pitch-black passage behind him.
"Down here, a name is nothing more than a few random letters carved on a headstone. You can call me... 'Scavenger'."
He tilted his head slightly toward the depths of the dark passage, gesturing for Corvus to look.
"As for where this is..." Scavenger's tone dropped lower, laced with a barely perceptible trace of sorrow. "Welcome to the 'Abyss of Abandonment'—the deepest giant dumping ground beneath London. Every 'surplus' relentlessly discarded by the surface world gathers right here."
The moment the words left his mouth, heavy dragging sounds and eerie low groans drifted echoing through the surrounding pipes, breaking the previous dead silence.
Corvus forced his battered body up, looking toward the end of the passage by the weak firelight.
From the shadows, several terrifying figures slowly writhed into view.
Leading the way was an old man whose half face had completely mutated into a translucent crystal mass. As he walked, fine threads of azure electricity crackled and darted inside the crystal. Behind him was a young girl whose arms had been brutally replaced with massive, rusted industrial mechanical pincers. With every step she took, the mechanical bearings let out a soul-jarring, metallic screech.
More and more figures gathered from the darkness, their bodies without exception broken and deformed. Some had ribs bursting through their skin, exposing pulsating monster organs glowing with faint blue luminescence inside; others had stitched their lower bodies with twisted beast limbs, presenting a stomach-churning sight.
"They are..." Corvus's pupils contracted sharply in shock, his mechanical prosthetic arm instinctively moving to protect his chest. "What on earth are these people?"
"Failed experiments, war trash, and those living dead who developed severe rejections after being forcefully implanted with demon-core organs—their meat turning deformed or even steel-hard—discarded here to rot by the Exorcism Bureau as 'uncontrollable factors'."
Scavenger narrated coldly, his eyes sweeping across the numb, vacant faces. "To those on the surface, they are demon specimens; but here, they're just fellow castaways clinging to life before turning completely rotten."
As a man with precise mechanical meters embedded into his face passed by Corvus, the red light on his gauges flashed twice, emitting a raspy, cold synthesized electronic voice: "Another... piece of trash... thrown down... from above..."
Watching this crowd of residents who resembled the walking dead, a bone-chilling dread rose from the depths of Corvus's heart.
This wasn't a underground sanctuary at all—this was a "living tomb" filled with despair and stench.
And he, owing to that tragic, fatal duel, seemed to have been dragged mercilessly by fate into this dark corner forgotten even by God.
The heavy dragging noises grew clearer as more people gathered deep within the passage, as if the entire "Abyss of Abandonment" was awakening at this moment.
Corvus leaned his back against the damp, cold brick wall, keeping his mechanical arm firmly guarded in front of him. His crystal heterochromatic right eye flickered unsteadily due to exhaustion, yet he kept his gaze locked on the approaching crowd.
Suddenly, a hunched woman wrapped in ragged bandages stumbled out of the crowd and threw herself in front of the campfire. Her hands trembled violently, her fingernails already torn off, revealing the raw, horrifyingly exposed dark-red flesh underneath.
"We... we escaped from the research facility of the Exorcism Bureau..." Her voice was cracked and raspy, as if her throat were filled with grit. "Please... don't turn us back in... that place isn't a shelter at all... it's..."
Choked with tears, she couldn't go on, able only to cough violently as streaks of murky blood dribbled down her cheeks.
The playful smirk instantly vanished from Scavenger's face. He crouched down and used his dark-purple scaled monstrous claw to gently pat the woman's back—a gesture whose tenderness stood in stark contrast to his terrifying appearance.
"I know. I know. Nobody's turning you in here," he comforted her in a low voice, cold rage suppressed deep within his tone. "The Exorcism Bureau's research facility... Ha, they sure know how to pick a place to hide their dirty secrets."
The words detonated like thunder beside Corvus's ears, causing his pupils to shrink abruptly.
The Exorcism Bureau—the very organization he had served for years, the one that pulled him back from the brink of death—was actually conducting such inhumane experiments?
He opened his mouth, but his dry throat couldn't produce a single sound.
He could only watch helplessly as more failed experiments who had fled from the "research facility" filed out. In his mind, the cold commission contract clashed violently with the desperate pleas of "Please don't turn us back in", tearing at him until he could hardly distinguish righteousness from darkness.
Right at that moment, a slender figure slowly emerged from behind the crowd.
It was a girl wearing a thin, flimsy hospital gown. She was barefoot, her jet-black long hair draped messily over her shoulders, veiling most of her delicate face. Her footsteps were so light as to be almost silent, making her seem completely out of place among the surrounding residents who dragged their broken bodies along.
Corvus's breathing halted completely in that instant.
The girl slowly raised her head. The dancing firelight filtered through her messy hair, illuminating a pale yet exquisite face—a slightly upturned nose, cherry-red lips, and those large, watery eyes currently gazing at him with timid trepidation.
"Long Qianqian?"
ns216.73.216.47da2
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