Half an hour later.
The two crossed most of the block and arrived at the filthiest part of the Lower Hive, the buffer zone on the edge of the Wastewater Treatment Station.
The air here was so damp it felt like it could be wrung out.
Every breath felt like swallowing thick phlegm coated in grit.
The walls were covered in colorful mutant mold, some of which even emitted a faint bioluminescence in the darkness.
The pungent smell of ammonia mixed with a certain rotting, sweet metallic scent, hitting them right in the face.
"Right here."
Scarface covered his nose and pointed at a pile of abandoned pipes ahead.
A hunched figure was sitting next to a pile of rusty valves.
It was an old man with hair as sparse as a mangy dog's, wrapped in several layers of rags whose original color was long gone.
He held a homemade long hook with a sharpened tip, staring intently at the drainage outlet beneath his feet that was bubbling with black water.
His left leg below the knee was a crude wooden peg, wrapped in greasy bandages that were seeping yellow fluid.
"Yo, Mangy Dog, I'm talking to you, you old cripple!"
Scarface shouted, his voice sounding particularly jarring in the empty pipe area.
The long hook in Old Cripple's hand twitched, nearly falling into the water.
He slowly turned his head. His cloudy, yellowed eyes showed no reaction upon seeing Scarface, but his pupils suddenly constricted when they swept over Cyril.
In this mud pit of the Lower Hive, Cyril's attendant uniform, which despite being bloodstained still maintained its aristocratic tailoring, was more eye-catching than a searchlight in the night.
Especially those leather shoes.
Even stepping on the oil-slicked ground, Cyril still walked as if he were inspecting his own territory.
"Heh..."
A dry laugh, like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together, came from Old Cripple's throat.
"A lord from the Upper Nest? Or... even higher up?"
His gaze lingered on Cyril's expressionless face for a second before quickly shifting away.
This was the instinct of a Lower Hive rat. Do not look directly at anything that might bring death.
Cyril did not speak.
He just watched the old man quietly.
Then he fished five golden throne coins out of his pocket.
Clack.
The coins were laid out in front of Old Cripple on a broken wooden crate used for holding rat meat.
In this hellhole, where people would fight to the death over a piece of clean bread, these five coins were enough to buy the lives of every vagrant in the area.
Old Cripple's eyes lit up instantly.
It was the light of a hungry wolf seeing fresh meat.
But he did not reach for them immediately.
His grime-covered hands froze in mid-air, then pulled back as if they had been burned.
He looked up, his eyes full of caution.
"What do you want to know?"
Old Cripple licked his cracked lips, revealing a mouth of broken black teeth.
"My old life might not be worth much, but I haven't lived long enough yet. If I remember something I shouldn't say and get chopped up to feed the reclamation furnace, then I won't have the life to spend this money."
Cyril crouched down.
He didn't mind the filth, bringing his gaze level with Old Cripple's.
That sense of superior pressure vanished, replaced by a hair-raising calmness.
"I don't care how long you live. I only care about the water beneath the Iron Crow Gang's territory."
Cyril's voice was kept very low, audible only to the three of them.
"Anything unusual about what's been flowing out from that direction lately?"
Old Cripple froze for a moment.
He stared into Cyril's eyes, which seemed to see through everything. The greedy expression on his face slowly solidified, turning into profound fear.
"You... have really asked the right person."
Old Cripple finally reached out with his calloused and scarred hand.
He didn't grab all the money at once. Instead, he picked the coins up one by one, held them to his ear, and blew on them to listen to the ring.
After confirming they were real, he stuffed the money into a pocket close to his body, clutching it tightly as if afraid it would be stolen.
"Three days ago."
Old Cripple lowered his voice and leaned forward, a sour stench wafting from him.
"When I was cleaning the main drainage outlet on the edge of the Iron Crow Gang's territory, I noticed the water flowing out wasn't right."
Cyril's brow quirked slightly. "How was it not right?"
"The water... was green."
Old Cripple's pupils dilated slightly, as if recalling an extremely disgusting image.
"Not that moldy green, but a glowing green. Like those glow sticks the Upper Nest lords play with at their banquets. It was a terrifying green!"
Cyril's gaze sharpened.
"And the smell?"
"The smell?"
A gagging expression squeezed onto Old Cripple's wrinkled face.
"Like burnt fat mixed with engine oil, and a pungent, acidic chemical smell. When that smell hit me, I almost threw up my gall."
He paused, his voice dropping even lower, carrying a hint of a tremor.
"I've been in this trade for forty years. What kind of corpses or rotten meat haven't I seen? But that smell... it reminded me of the waste discharged from those illegal black clinics in the Upper Nest."
Cyril nodded and stood up.
This matched his previous deduction.
That smell wasn't just chemical waste.
It was the residue of a rejection reaction produced when biomass was forcibly fused with metal.
"What about the discharge frequency?"
"It's not fixed."
Old Cripple shook his head.
"Sometimes once a day, sometimes once every two or three days. But every time the volume is huge, at least as much waste liquid as half a person."
At this point, Old Cripple seemed to suddenly remember something. He grabbed Cyril's pant leg, then let go as if struck by lightning.
"And! There's something else strange!"
His voice became shrill with fear.
"In the places where that green sewage flowed, the rats in the pipes... they all died."
Cyril looked at him. "Poisoned?"
"No... no."
Old Cripple's face looked as pale as paper in the dim light.
"They exploded."
Scarface, standing nearby, couldn't help but interject, "Exploded? Can rats swallow detonators now?"
"Shut up." Cyril glanced coldly at Scarface.
Old Cripple swallowed and continued:
"I saw a rat drink that green water with my own eyes. Not two minutes later, its belly swelled up like a balloon, getting bigger and bigger, and then bang... it burst open."
He made an explosion gesture with his hands, his eyes full of fear of the unknown.
"After it burst, there were no intestines or organs inside, just black pus and some... meat chunks that were still moving."
"Those meat chunks were like they had lives of their own, still crawling on the ground... I've lived so long, and I've never seen such a wicked thing!"
A deathly silence enveloped the sewage area.
Only the sound of dripping water came from afar, drip, drip, like some kind of countdown.
Cyril was silent for a few seconds.
This was no longer simple biological modification.
This was a collapse at the genetic level, or even some kind of twisted blessing from the Warp.
The so-called Ascension Experiment was nothing more than a carnival of creating monsters.
He took out two more throne coins from his coat and placed them gently on the wooden crate.
"If you find that green water again, go to that maintenance station from earlier immediately and draw a circle on the door."
Old Cripple's eyes lit up, and he bowed repeatedly.
"Yes, yes, yes! Rest assured, milord, my eyes will be glued to it!"
Cyril turned and strode out.
Scarface followed closely behind, his face looking even worse than before.
"B... Boss, what exactly is that green water? It sounds so creepy."
Cyril did not look back.
He lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and used the smoke to suppress the churning nausea in his stomach.
"That's the smell of greed, Scar."
Cyril looked up at the metal dome that never saw the light of day and said coldly,
"Those idiots in the Iron Crow Gang are trying to put a demon in a jar."
"And what we need to do is smash it in their faces before that jar explodes."
____
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