Falling into the Abyss

From the rundown escape route stairway to the second floor, the walls on both sides of the dark corridor had been knocked down and replaced by iron fences covered with unknown filth and copper-red rust. There was a layer of greasy black stains on the ground, which made Ethan recall a nightmare he had about his home, the Fifth Space Station, a long time ago. In that dream, all the plants were covered with similar oil stains.

Most of the compartments behind the iron fence were empty, but there were many burnt marks on the ground or the wall. The air was mixed with excrement and a bloody stench, and Samuel could not help covering his nose with his arm.

“Fuck……what a damned place……” he cursed.

Ethan was still searching around for the source of the scent. It was obvious that Samuel’s father had been here, but he didn’t stay long.

Just as Samuel walked behind him through a “ward,” something suddenly rushed out from the dark and collided with the iron fence, letting out a loud clang. It let out the terrifying howl of a beast. In front of him, a huge, swollen body was baring its teeth at him through the iron fence. The human face was covered with tumors of different sizes, which distorted his facial features. Many tiny earthworm-like tentacles were growing out of his finger joints. His fingernails had disappeared, and he was trying to grasp Samuel.

Samuel was still in shock, and a long string of swear words came out of his mouth. Ethan turned to look at the infected “man” and sniffed in his direction.

Fortunately, this was not Samuel’s father.

However, when Ethan approached the iron fence, the patient’s ferocity and thirst suddenly subsided. His swollen body shrunk, his head drooped, and he looked carefully at him through his swollen eyelids, just like a dog that had done something wrong waiting for its owner to punish him. Ethan stood so close to him that it was too dangerous. Samuel quickly got up from the ground, grabbing his shoulder as he tried to pull him away, but Ethan waved him away and curiously looked at the infected person.

“Do you have something to say to me?” Ethan asked.

Samuel was surprised to see that the infected person was really mumbling, but it was difficult to tell whether he was speaking a human language or not. His tone was sharp and strange, and in some parts of his speech, it seemed like he was coughing, while the other parts were unlike human grunts. However, Ethan listened carefully to the strange sounds as if he could really understand them.

“Hey! We can’t waste any more time. There’s probably a camera here!” Samuel urged uneasily.

Ethan seriously asked the infected person, “You say they burned everyone? And those people are still conscious?”

The infected person continued to murmur in an intolerable voice. Ethan’s brows wrinkled, and there was a flash of anger in his eyes. However, he subsequently reached into the cage and touched the infected person’s twisted face that was dripping with mucus with some pity. “He said that he saw several guards go upstairs with a normal person yesterday, so we have to continue to go up.”

Samuel looked at Ethan with a strange look. “Did you understand him?”

Why is this so? Was it because you created them? Samuel did not ask these questions. He just felt more that the Ethan in front of him was no longer the Ethan he used to be. He still believed that Ethan would not hurt him, but he also instinctively felt a kind of fear and a little bit of……disgust in the face of the dangerous creature completely different from himself.

Yes, wasn’t it true that human beings had changed little by little from insects to what they were now? Why should they think that insects were terrifying? Maybe these insects were what they should be. Maybe everything should return to its origin, and the dirty and chaotic world would finally become peaceful.

Why couldn’t they live happily as a worm?

The main in black told him that his vengeance would be attained, and those who owed him would pay the price of blood. At the end of Order, everything would return to the original chaos. Those who had passed away, those who had not been born, and those who may or may not exist would reunite with those who were still alive. That was the real paradise, wasn’t it? Samuel thought in a trance.

The next floor was in almost the same situation, but there were an increasingly large amount of monsters behind the iron fence. In his heart, Samuel could no longer describe these monsters using “they,” nor could he regard them as his companions. The swollen, wet monsters wriggled in the dark, making strange sounds like coughing or purring. These things were very aggressive when they saw Samuel, but once they noticed Ethan, they would immediately calm down and even bow down, as if they were meeting their king. Ethan stood in the dark, dirty, and twisted corridor, but Samuel didn’t feel that it was incongruent. His black attire seemed to be quite harmonious at the moment, as if he belonged to such darkness.

Both of them met the patrollers on the fourth and fifth floors. Those people didn’t seem to believe their eyes when they first saw them, and they immediately took out their laser guns and ordered them not to move. But obviously, these people were not Ethan’s opponents. When a terrifying tentacle appeared behind him and his body, burned by the lasers, recovered in an instant, the patrolling guards were too scared to move. Obviously, some of them still remembered to press the alarm for help, but before they could move, they were caught by Ethan’s tentacles and thrown to the other side of the iron fence.

Then, Samuel saw the bloated monsters smash the guards’ heads on the ground and devour the flesh on their faces. The shrieking voices of the guards made the monsters in the cage cheer excitedly. They hit the iron fence hard, causing mucus to fly everywhere, as if committing a grand revenge.

Ethan looked at the scene of the guards being eaten indifferently before he turned to Samuel and said, “Don’t you think the number of guards here is a little too little?”

Now, Samuel was so disgusted that he was speechless, and he didn’t want to answer Ethan’s question. However, Ethan really felt that it was strange. He was almost certain that this building was the bait, the center of the trap. He was afraid that when they found Samuel’s father, they would be encircled.

He didn’t believe that there were no surveillance cameras in these corridors. Maybe some people were looking at him at the moment, wondering what his ability was and how lethal he was. This was a testing ground, a prison where he would be held. If he was even more suspicious, he might think that Samuel was also a part of this plan, and Samuel was the messenger who brought him here. After all, Samuel was the only one who he would never hurt.

But Ethan didn’t care about this.

He took steady steps upwards, floor by floor. The darkness condensed around him and became his extended arms. A strange sense of power filled his body. The howls of monsters around him entered his ears, but they were all cheering.

Finally, they came to a floor without any iron fence or cage. It was empty. There were no windows, only clean concrete walls and some concrete columns. The white fluorescent lamp shone all around the area, and there was only a chair in the middle of the empty space. An elderly Omega sat on the chair. His hair was gray, his body was thin, and his eyebrows were similar to Samuel’s. With his eyes closed and his head tilted, one could barely distinguish whether he was living or dead.

“Dad!” Samuel shouted and rushed over, but Ethan grabbed him by the arm.

“Wait a minute.” Ethan looked around cautiously.

The space remained open and quiet, and no sound could be heard.

Samuel couldn’t wait, and he had already rushed over. Ethan had to keep pace. The tentacles with strong olfactory organs emerged from the back of his beck again, floating up and down as they scented the air.

“Dad! Wake up!” Samuel shook his father in his chair, not noticing that Ethan’s expression had changed and Ethan was looking up.

At this time, a very wide net descended from the sky, with a faint blue light mixed among the fine mesh. Ethan instinctively stretched out his sharp-toothed and prickly tentacles to cut the net, but at the moment of contact, he suddenly pulled back as if he had been scalded, letting out a cry of pain. When the net fell on his body, the burning pain increased by several times, and smoke rose from his body immediately. His skin that was in contact with the net quickly turned black as it carbonized.

He recognized this radiation from the Internet. It came from the God of Order’s eggs!

He never thought that the Earth Union would have such a thing. Did the Eves’ planet tell them something?

The God of Order’s egg, which once helped him suppress his mutation, had now become poison to him……

“Ethan!” Samuel rushed up to help him, but in an instant, a laser shot across his cheek and gave him a burning wound, a show of deterrence. Many heavily armed soldiers emerged from all directions, their guns aimed at Samuel and Ethan, who was curled up in the net as smoke constantly emitted from Ethan.

It was as if Ethan could not see anything. He simply felt that it was very painful and that he had to struggle, but the more he struggled, the more painful it was. It was as if a lot of red-hot irons were wrapped around him. The muscles of his entire body were so taut that he was twitching, but he finally held back and didn’t continue to howl.

In pain, he raised his pair of green eyes that were burning with anger and saw the man standing in the distance wearing a neat suit, who seemed to be the leader of these soldiers.

The man was a tall, middle-aged Alpha that was slightly bald. His pair of gloomy eyes were staring at him from afar. Seeing that he finally gave up struggling, he walked closer slightly. He took a look at Samuel and said, “You did a good job. Now you can take your father away.”

However, Samuel gritted his teeth and glared at him. “You promised not to hurt him!”

“This bit of harm is nothing to him,” the man said in a toneless voice, “You didn’t take the initiative to inform the government when you brought him back, and I can throw you back to the Forbidden City for this alone. Get out of here before I change my mind.”

“You son of a bitch!” Samuel said and was about to rush up and beat him, but Ethan cried out, “Samuel! Don’t be stupid! Take your father away first!”

At this time, Samuel remembered that there were dozens of guns aimed at him and his father. He gritted his teeth and glared at the man. At the same time, he looked in Ethan’s direction with a look not only containing guilt but also worry. Ethan stared at him and shook his head slowly.

Samuel clenched his fist tightly, gritted his teeth, and finally turned to carry his unconscious father. Seeing this, the officer ordered the small group of soldiers to “send” Samuel out.

After watching Samuel leave, Ethan finally relaxed. He was numb to the terrifying pain that lasted until now. It seemed that the net was only contaminated with the radiation of the God of Order’s egg and was not as powerful as the real God of Order’s egg. Otherwise, he would have been severely burned by now.

“Ethan Eldridge.” The Alpha slowly came up to him and looked down at him. “A monster with tentacles all over his body and the source of this great plague. And unexpectedly, you are a scholar who looks like you can’t even truss a chicken.”

Ethan did not emit a sound and just stared at him coldly.

“I’m Colonel Sasha, from the Earth Union’s special intelligence office. From now on, you are no longer a nonhuman, but you are not a citizen of the Earth Union. You will be taken as an alien species and sent to the Research Institute of the special intelligence department for our experts to study an antidote to the plague.” The Alpha stared at him with disgust and hatred and coldly pronounced his sentence, “Although I would prefer to immediately burn you, a disgusting monster in human skin, to ashes, in order to get rid of a danger to the people.”

Ethan suddenly chuckled, and the burn scar on his face twisted, appearing very frightening.

“You say that I’m a disgusting monster. I think you are the real monsters, burning those infected people alive whether or not they are conscious?” Ethan’s green eyes swept every soldier around him. “In fact, they still remember who they are and their pasts. Although they can perceive many things now that they could not before, and the desire to eat raw meat in the early stage of infection would make them lose control and become aggressive, once they passed that stage, they would calm down a lot. They are still human in their hearts. Just because they look ugly, because they can no longer utter human sounds, you don’t try to communicate with them, and you think they have become monsters.”

Along the way, he heard the complaints of those monsters full of fear and hatred in the dark. They watched their friends or relatives who had been sent in with them be burned to ashes and watched the guards fork up the burned bodies with thick iron pitchforks. Sometimes the guards did not even wait for them to turn into worms before lighting them up with the terrifying flamethrowers.

Amid such torment, even if they had their memories of when they were human, what remained in them was only hatred, endless hatred. They gave up their identities as human beings and regarded human beings as their natural enemies.

Ethan looked at some of the soldiers who seemed to be stung by his words, while the others refused to listen to what he said and believe his words. Finally, his gaze fixed on Colonel Sasha. He yelled, “How can we say we are monsters, and you are not?!”

As his words echoed, suddenly, a terrifying, deafening roar came from the floors beneath them, just like a burst of thunder.