Su Zhou then took a closer look, surprised to find that the water flowing through the channel wasn’t very dirty. There were even fish and shrimp swimming about.
’Sothing’s not right.’
Things were out of the ordinary, and with an Evil Demon already on the loose, Su Zhou grew wary of the anomaly.
After a mont’s thought, he stopped worrying about whether he might alert the distant monster and simply switched on his miniature flashlight to illuminate his surroundings.
Then, he saw it. The crevices at the sewer’s edge, and even the sides and bottom of the pipe, were all covered in a strange kind of growth.
It looked like Black Moss. However, when Su Zhou plucked off a small piece, he was stunned to discover it had a woody root system. This rooted "moss" seed to be what was purifying the sewage. Although it showed no glow under his Spiritual Vision, it was clearly a special product of the Spiritual Energy Revival, different from any normal moss. It could rapidly decompose and purify filth in order to reproduce.
The moss was thick, averaging about three to four centiters. Large patches of it had been gnawed away, as if it were food for so creature.
Countless small insects rustled about within the moss. They were all slightly larger than their surface-dwelling counterparts and scattered in a hurry as Su Zhou drew near.
Looking at his surroundings, he started to form a theory.
’The damp sewer environnt... Could the unknown Evil Demon be a giant lizard? Or maybe so kind of insect?’
Su Zhou caught one of the small insects and sniffed it. It had the sa sweet, tallic scent as the Evil Demon. But that only raised more questions.
’But why does its aura feel like a plant’s?’
Still pondering this question, Su Zhou pressed on. Soon, he reached a sewer grate where the Black Moss was incredibly dense. It clogged most of the bars, forming a bulging black sac. The sac appeared to be alive, pulsing as it expanded and contracted. He could even hear a HUFFING sound, as if it were breathing.
It was here that Su Zhou slled an extraordinary stench... a stench that was all too familiar to him, coming from a family of Patrol officers and doctors.
His brow furrowed. He had a bad feeling, but he had to act. Su Zhou raised his Long Spear and stabbed it straight into the sac. After a large amount of toxic gas hissed out, he used the spear to pry away the surface layer of moss.
"Just as I suspected."
Upon seeing the contents, Su Zhou’s gaze turned grim. His fingers tightened instinctively around his spear, and a flash of anger crossed his face. But in the end, he withdrew the Long Spear and sighed softly, "Rest in peace, you innocents."
For what had appeared before the young man’s eyes were several corpses, piled together, long since bloated and rotten from soaking in the water.
A black centipede scrambled frantically out of a corpse’s hollow eye socket and fell into the water below.
Like a teardrop.
These corpses were likely so of the recently missing people. It seed they had been used as a culture dium for the Black Moss.
He could see countless insects squirming within the corpses. The gases produced by their movent and the bodies’ decay were what had caused the sac to pulse and heave as if it were alive.
Around the mass of Black Moss, the insects, the moss itself, and all sorts of strange sli molds and fungi had ford a small, bizarre ecosystem. The area was overgrown with bizarre, alien-looking plants and a viscous, snot-like growth.
This growth also seed to be corrosive; a layer of the sewer grate had already been eaten away. If it was left to continue, the entire grate would rot through in a matter of weeks.
"Over there is a Spirit Plant that’s in the process of turning into a Spiritual Object."
Yara spoke for the first ti, its tail pointing to a string of deep purple fungi growing beside the remains. "If that fungus continues to absorb resentnt and filth as it grows," it said in a leisurely tone, "it will beco what’s known as a ’Bone-Eroding Black Mushroom.’ You can extract an Extraordinary-level strong acid from it, one capable of dissolving bone and rusting iron in an instant, as well as a lethal poison that kills on contact with blood. It also contains a massive amount of Yin-Wood Qi."
"Speaking of which, this Black Moss absorbs Spiritual Qi from the filth and converts it into nutrients for the Spirit Plant. I never would have thought an Evil Demon would be so skilled at farming its own als."
"Mm..."
Su Zhou glanced over but didn’t seem to care. He just grunted an "Mm..." and continued to stare, his brow furrowed, at the decaying corpses and the insects scurrying away from him.
After a mont, he reached down and began moving the tangled, rotting corpses from the water onto the concrete walkway at the side of the sewer.
Su Zhou gently separated the remains, careful not to damage the skeletons. After laying each one out, he did his best to clear the Black Moss off the bodies, lest the growth corrode them any further.
The feel of them was slick and nauseating. The stench of rot was overpowering. The flesh had turned to sludge, falling from the bones bit by bit and releasing toxic gases.
But in life, they had been human.
Innocent victims.
Their Souls were long gone, but their remains deserved a final asure of respect.
Only after he had finished did Su Zhou quietly reply to Yara, "There’s Spiritual Qi in the sewers, too? I looked all over the surface for so long and didn’t find a single Spirit Plant."
"Haha, Su Zhou, which do you think is closer to the Earth Veins? The sewers or the surface?"
Yara chuckled. The Snake Spirit’s gaze swept around, seeming to pierce through the city’s entire underground water system. "It seems your country started its preparations a long ti ago," it said calmly. "Just look at it all—this entire sewer system, the city’s power grid, the fiber optic cables, the signal base stations, and the subway tunnels."
"All this electricity, all this water, all this flowing energy and potential... information bound within light, nodes made of spirit clusters propagating through electromagnetic fields... This is a man-made Earth Vein! A man-made Spirit Vein!"
"So that’s it!"
Upon hearing this, realization dawned on Su Zhou. He finally understood why Hongcheng’s underground systems, which had been under repair for more than ten years to no avail, had been properly finished within two years of the Central governnt’s directive. "So," he asked, "are you saying the Evil Demon was born *because* of this special environnt?"
The mont the words left his mouth, the young man froze. He whipped his head around to stare into the distance, a blue-violet light swirling in his eyes.
He stared down the distant tunnel at a massive, flickering Spiritual Light that was rapidly approaching, its coming heralded by a rumbling echo.
’—It’s here! And it’s so fast!’
"No, you’ve got the Cause and Effect backward. The Evil Demon was already fated to be born, so it chose this suitable Spirit Vein as the place to manifest."
Yara’s voice sounded then, answering Su Zhou’s question with an intriguing, amused tone. "You see it, Su Zhou? Then prepare for battle, my Contractor... Co to think of it, this is your first ti encountering a ’Monster’ that isn’t ’human’."
"In this first, sudden ’fight to the death’... will you stand your ground and win, or will you turn tail and flee?"
"Do you even need to ask, Yara?"
His answer was to ready his spear!
Su Zhou tightened his grip on the seven-foot Long Spear, leveling the tip to point forward. His voice was calm, but seething with suppressed rage. "I don’t care if it’s human or a Monster."
"If it is an Evil One, I will kill it!"
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