Falling into the Abyss

Before the shrill morning alarm went off, Ethan took Typhoeus to the clitnic located in the East Area. The small building was very close to the Forbidden City’s first layer of walls, and numerous robot policemen flocked together near the wall. When Ethan carried Typhoeus in, several armed guards stared at them from afar. They had a chilly look in their eyes, and their gazes were like a thorn piercing Ethan’s back.

Typhoeus was lucky, and there was indeed a doctor who had come to the clinic to provide free services, and he happened to be Omega. Seeing that Typhoeus was so weak, he immediately arranged a series of examinations. Typhoeus would likely have to stay in the clinic to rest and for observation. After Ethan settled Typhoeus down, he planned to leave, but Typhoeus suddenly grabbed the sleeve of his clothes.

He looked back and saw Typhoeus with a serious expression. “Be careful.”

Ethan didn’t know what to say, so he nodded and hurried to the canteen. However, because he had taken too long, the nonhumans had already gone to different factories and construction sites, and the canteen door was closed tightly. He rubbed his growling stomach and was about to leave when he heard a cold voice sound behind him, “Ethan Eldridge?”

Ethan turned and saw it was a guard. He was relieved that it wasn’t Gray Fur.

The young guard walked over while swinging his baton and glanced at him impatiently. “What were you doing? Why didn’t you eat on time.”

“I got up late…….”

As soon as he finished speaking, the baton smashed heavily towards his stomach. His empty intestines and stomach seemed to entangle together, to the point that he could not even groan. He curled up like a shrimp, and his face scrunched up, but the guard kicked his knee. Ethan fell to his knees and listened to the guard speak using a tone that showed he was not used to being so severe, “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting here? Next time you’re late, be prepared to go into the Darkroom.”

The Darkroom was slang that the people of the Forbidden City used to refer to solitary confinement. Generally, nonhumans who made mistakes would be sent there. Inside, there was no source of light, and it was completely soundproof. There was nothing in the room. People said that being alone there for three days felt like three years. It was strange that these seemingly ferocious people would be afraid whenever someone mentioned the Darkroom. Even nonhumans who could get stabbed with a straight face would cry and admit their mistakes after staying in that isolated and confined space for less than a week. Those who hadn’t experienced it would find it difficult to imagine their experience.

It was only then that one would realize that humans are creatures that require social interaction.

Of course, Ethan hadn’t experienced it yet, so he didn’t know what the guard was threatening him with. He just perceived from the guard’s tone that he seemed to want to trouble him. Moreover, judging from how he exaggerated his words and by his capricious words and actions, it was likely because he was tasked to do so.

“I’m sorry.” Ethan did not hesitate to bow his head and admit his mistake, appearing obedient to avoid further irritating the other party.

This guard had just started working in the Forbidden City not too long ago. In the past, he never would have thought that he would treat another person this way. However, everything changed after three months of being in the Forbidden City. The people in the Forbidden City were not humans, but scum who had committed crimes such as murder, arson, robbery, and so on. While drinking in the pub outside the City, beautiful Omega girls like to hear him boast about how he’d taught the scum in the City who should be killed. They applauded his deeds and said he was enacting Heaven’s will. As time went by, he became more and more accustomed to life in the Forbidden City. He gradually began to understand the sexual jokes about nonhumans that his other senior colleagues would make.

Moreover, they said that the man he beat today used to be an important member of the government. He didn’t know how many immoral things the people from the upper echelons had done, and how many ordinary folks like them had been exploited. Now that they were in the hands of small fries like himself, he felt that he should really give him a piece of his mind.

After thinking of it, he kicked Ethan a few more times. Ethan let out a series of coughs and held his stomach as he fell to the ground, covered with dirt.

Having vented enough, the young guard smoothed his hair down and adjusted his clothes, as though he was not the one who had just hysterically beaten someone. He threw a number plate in front of Ethan and ordered, “Report to Building 11’s pipeline maintenance department in ten minutes.”

Ten minutes…… Ethan didn’t even know where Building 11 is.

Ethan was stunned for two seconds until the other party squinted dangerously at him, and he rushed out the door. The building didn’t take up a large plot of land, but after ten laps, he was already very sweaty. Additionally, he was beaten before, so his lower abdomen now hurt with every step he took.

After 30 laps, Ethan was dizzy, and his mouth was filled with a salty and fishy taste. He walked back through the door on trembling legs, and the guard threw him a helmet with a headlamp attached. He took him around to the back door and pointed to a well that did not have a cover, instructing, “The tools for cleaning up the sludge are all here. Your job is to clean up the sludge from the drainpipe with the others.”

Ethan looked at the narrow hole and remained motionless. The pipe was so slim that it didn’t look like a place that people could fit into?

The guard prodded him in the back with his baton. “What are you doing? Go in.”

As Ethan climbed down the ladder, with rusty nails in the cracks between the bricks, he was sure that Gray Fur had gathered all the guards and told them to give him trouble. The narrow space made it hard for him even to turn around. The hole above him gradually shrank into a small dot, and there was nothing but darkness towards the bottom. He could only hear his breath as it quickened. In a daze, he felt like he was about to be buried alive.

At the bottom of the vertical shaft was a horizontal, circular pipe. As soon as he landed on the ground, he felt his feet sink into mud that came up to his calves, soaking his shoes and socks. The damp stench surged through his nostrils, reminiscent of a corpse that had soaked in water for a month. He turned on the lamp on his helmet, and a beam of light was projected into the darkness, illuminating the drainpipe that was cast with some ancient material. It might have been brick or stone, but the wall of the pipe was covered with thick, greasy stains and moss. Fuzzy substances hung down randomly, and it inexplicably appeared like a person’s intestinal tract.

As Ethan walked around, he could only hear the roar of water. He shouted a few times but didn’t hear any response. He stumbled forward through the sewage, the ground below his feet soft and muddy. He didn’t know what he was stepping on. After smelling the stench for a long time, he wanted to vomit, but he couldn’t since he hadn’t eaten anything in the morning and could only occasionally dry heave a few times.

After walking for a while, he reached a fork in the road, which branched off into three paths. Ethan stopped moving, and did not dare to go forward.

He had heard before that some ancient Earth cities had extremely complicated drainage systems, such as the past Paris in France, and certain rich people seeking a thrill would pay people to guide them and explore the sewers. Those pipes were like a labyrinth, and once someone lost their guide, they would be trapped. He remembered that a similar incident had happened last year. A child of a rich man had died of starvation together with his girlfriend. When he passed away, his face was contorted in an expression of extreme horror.

He wondered if this was Gray Fur’s plan. Perhaps, he wanted to trap Ethan in here?

He was not going to be tricked by Gray Fur.

He waited anxiously, moments passing before he heard a voice come from one of the forked paths.

“I still believe in Chen Zeng’s preachings very much, because Johnny also saw it. They say that the Great Evil God looked like an octopus, but it had many more claws than an octopus, and it was hundreds of stories high.”

“Well, maybe it was really a giant octopus.”

“How can an octopus talk? She said she was coming to earth. Alas……there are too few people holding onto faith on Earth now, and they’re all sinners who only know how to enjoy themselves. This is just like the City of Sin…… Oh yes, wasn’t it the same as what happened to Sodom? Sooner or later, the Lord will punish us. The Great Evil God is his angel sent to kill us all.”

Ethan heard their conversation. They seemed to be talking about Shub-Niggurath from Red Earth?

But what was with this hundreds of stories tall octopus? What was this thing? It obviously not wasn’t what Shub-Niggurath looked like?

What strange rumours did Chen Zeng spread among the nonhumans?

“Hmph, God should have descended long ago. Nowadays, people will do anything for money, and are simply morally deficient. Not to mention, those Omegas are originally low in numbers, but they refuse to be with perfectly good Alphas and insist on fucking around with other Omegas. I think that all these people who don’t think about the future of mankind should die.”

Ethan wanted to roll his eyes. He was curious about the crime the person who said this had committed in order to get stuffed into the Forbidden City. After a while, as expected, people showed up, two skinny nonhumans whose bodies were covered with dirt.

It was not unreasonable to see why they were assigned to work in an environment that even he had to squeeze into. If Samuel was here, he might get stuck.

“Hello!” Ethan took the lead in shouting out.

The two nonhumans immediately noticed him, asking, “Who are you?”

“They asked me to help with the plumbing.”

“Damn it, why would they send a nerd down here again?” one of the nonhumans cursed and spat into the puddle on the ground.

For the rest of the day, Ethan carried a large box of shovels, containers containing acidic and corrosive substances, and many other tools. He followed the two nonhumans to find problematic areas. He realized that the Forbidden City had once been a prosperous city on ancient Earth. Eighty percent of the drainage pipes were remnants of ancient times, but nearly half of them were no longer usable and had been covered with bricks.

The pipe’s infrastructure was surprisingly complex, and many places were blocked by yellow seals covered with stains. Among them, the elderly nonhuman Kim Ki-joon told him that anything could be found in the sewers. Once, he even found a nonhuman corpse, who had passed on a long time ago. It was likely that he tried to escape from the City through the drainage channels but was trapped inside.

“Can you escape from the City through the sewers?” Ethan firmly grasped onto the main point of the story.

“It’s just a rumor. Since its establishment, no one has ever escaped from the Forbidden City. Anyone who enters the sewers is either caught, or dies here.”

At the end of the day, Ethan returned home smelling like a stinky mudman, and people would retreat whenever he passed by. Even Samuel was so disgusted by him that he was not allowed to approach his bed.

After a month, Ethan finally got used to the mud, rat carcass, feces, and feminine hygiene products that were floating everywhere in the sewer. He also got used to the stench and would no longer vomit out everything in his stomach. There was one time that he found a harmonica and took it back, washing it with water. He then put it by his mouth and tried to play it. Except for a few keys being out of tune, it worked quite well. Samuel couldn’t believe that Ethan would put something he had picked up from the sewer into his mouth and immediately forced Ethan to brush his teeth five times, even giving up his toothpaste for it. His excuse was that he couldn’t bear to have a person dirtier than a mouse in his nest because his estrus was coming.

Adhering to the principle of keeping a low profile and never talking back, Ethan seemed to be gradually forgotten after being bothered by the guards two or three times. After being beaten black and blue the first time, he had sat on his bed while Samuel applied medicine on his bruise by the corner of his mouth. He had even laughed and said, “I’m a man who has fought with others now.”

“How can that be considered a fight. You were just beaten up.” Samuel frowned and poked him hard in the waist, which caused him to suck in a breath of cold air.

Fortunately, everything soon returned to normal. Recently, all the guards seemed to be very busy. More guards had appeared on the streets, and they checked for prohibited items more frequently. Ethan didn’t know what had happened, and the nonhumans in the Forbidden City gossiped between themselves. He assumed that there were probably some bigwigs who wanted to inspect the Forbidden City.

Just when he thought that his life was on the right track and he had slightly relaxed his taut nerves, he felt that the atmosphere on the road was a little strange when he finished his work. On the way back to his residential area, instead of going straight back to their residences, the nonhumans who had finished working had gathered at the “Central Axis Road”, which was the widest road in the Forbidden City in the East and West regions.

On both sides of Central Axis Road, robot policemen were flocking about. Ethan suspected that all of the city’s robots had been mobilized. The nonhumans were whistling on the sides of the road, reminiscent of the noises he had heard on his first day when he entered the Forbidden City blindfolded. Those noises had frightened him so much he had almost urinated.

Now that he thought about it, such noises were merely an empty show of strength.

He was slightly curious, so he also went forward, covered in filth. People around him who had been hit by his stench all moved away, making it convenient for him to squeeze all the way to the front.

Then he froze.

It was obvious that no new nonhumans had entered the city because, in addition to Schneider, the guard who had disappeared for a long time, four soldiers were escorting a man walking in their midsts in front of him.

There were four Eve soldiers with three eyes and pointed ears.

And the one walking in the middle was a beautiful man donning a silver robe and carrying a scepter in his hand, and wearing a calm smile. It was the man who Ethan thought he would never see again!

Tanisiel’s third eye opened slightly, as though he knew Ethan was there. As Ethan opened his eyes wide, his light gray eyes also looked over at him. Then, Tanisiel broke away from the team and walked straight towards Ethan.

The nonhuman’s noise immediately rose to new heights. The four Eve soldiers clearly wanted to stop the priest, but Tanisiel just raised his hand slightly, and they retreated like obedient puppets. He looked so tall and holy, and the dim sunlight reflecting on him seemed to carry a soft luster. In contrast, Ethan suddenly realized how sorry a figure he cut and thought it was a miracle that Tanisiel recognized him.

He kind of wanted to run away, but his feet just wouldn’t move.

After a while, the priest stood in front of him, separated by the spread arms of two robot policemen. He and Ethan looked at each other for a moment, and a slightly sinister smile curved on his lips.

However, he did not say anything. He merely looked at Ethan’s neck where the bite had healed, turned around, and left.

The author has something to say:

These few chapters are duller. The next atonement mission will commence soon.

T/N: From now on, ABYSS will be updated twice a week, courtesy to Kat & Yuzu ! Chapters would be released on Tues & Thurs, but during exam period/times when our team has to attend to RL matters, chapters may be delayed or postponed. Hope y’all understand!