Falling into the Abyss

Thank you MapleDokiDoki for your kofis—Bonus Chapter (2/2)

Tanisiel’s body temperature seemed to be higher than ordinary human beings. In his arms, Ethan finally felt less cold, and his whole person seemed to have rid itself of anxiety. The muscles throughout his entire body ached, he had a sore throat, his head was also very dizzy, and there was no place on his body that was comfortable, but because of the presence of that person, he felt at home. He put his forehead against Tanisiel’s shoulder and neck and let out a comfortable sigh.

Tanisiel, tickled by his breath, trembled and feigned anger, “Don’t move.”

Ethan chuckled as he laid on his neck. Then, he nudged his shoulder. “Put me down. I can walk.”

“Why?” Tanisiel held his hand tightly and said solemnly, “If someone else can carry you, why can’t I?”

Ethan looked up at Tanisiel in disbelief and said in a hoarse voice, “It seemed like I had a fever, right? Why are you talking nonsense?”

Samuel coughed heavily from the back to remind the two people walking in front of him that their situation was unsuitable for flirting. Ethan shut up and felt guilty. Tanisiel, on the other hand, merely indistinguishably twitched his mouth.

“What’s the matter with that worm you spoke about?” Samuel asked coldly.

Ethan’s first reaction was to avoid telling Samuel that a worm in his body was waiting to hatch from his body after he died. However, as soon as he was about to speak, Tanisiel said, “Yes, previously on Pales, these worms seemed to have laid their eggs in some nonhumans’ clothes and brought them to Earth. Ethan found the worm hatching in the pipelines.”

“You mean those disgusting worms crawling underground on Pales have come to Earth now?” Samuel’s expression lacked the anxiety he should have, and his expression even felt somewhat insipid. “And Ethan, you didn’t kill it but raised it?”

Ethan pursed his lips. “There’s only one, so it can’t breed. And I thought at that time since they could dig so many tunnels underground, maybe it could dig out of the Forbidden City one day.”

Samuel nodded and suddenly began to laugh darkly. “That’s unfortunate. It would be more interesting if a female and a male could reproduce with each other.”

Ethan was a little surprised that Samuel would say such a thing, but anyone who had experienced what Samuel had might undergo a change in their personality. However, Ethan didn’t know that Samuel had lost more than his lover. He didn’t know that this was the Omega’s last hope of being redeemed and finding a tender lover who could understand his painful past.

At this time, they had already arrived at another subway station. Tanisiel placed Ethan on a bench covered with dust, before taking off his robe and covering him, stroking Ethan’s cheek gently. “Bear with it a bit longer.”

“So, how do we know where the worm is? Will that thing listen to us? Are you sure it won’t eat us?” Samuel took the flashlight that was running low on electricity and impatiently searched around on the wall covered with black mold. The moldy marks hanging from the ceiling were akin to water stains, reminding him of the moldy inner wall of the base on Red Earth under the influence of the Goddess of Fertility. A kind of desolate and primitive corruption was spreading deep within Earth.

“Giant worms are a species with high intelligence. They have existed in the universe for a long time, and their social system is similar to a bee colony. Generally, a planet is a community, and all the eggs are born from the Queen’s body. All young worms will have an instinctive attachment to their first perceived life at the moment of their hatching, because usually, the first thing they see is the queen.” A beam of light shot from the top of Tanisiel’s scepter and quickly scanned the entire subway station platform. His eyes fell onto Ethan sitting on the bench. “If I’m guessing correctly, then Ethan, you were by its side when it hatched?”

Ethan, wrapped up in Tanisiel’s clothes, nodded stiffly. “Do you mean it’s taken me for its mother?”

Tanisiel laughed. “It seems this way.”

Ethan grinned bitterly and swore, “Damn, I’m a Beta. Why am I always asked to do an Omega’s work?”

Samuel snorted and said, “Who says an Omega has to be a parent to this kind of thing? Don’t talk nonsense. If it treats you as its mother, then it will listen to you. If you call its name, then who knows, it may head towards you.”

Ethan rolled his eyes at Samuel. “Why do you think that I would have named the worm?”

“How did you direct it to drill through the wall leading to the subway station?”

Ethan frowned, but he didn’t quite know the answer. Maybe it was just a coincidence? Seeing that he was frowning and could not answer, and he was inhaling dust and coughing, Tanisiel glanced at Samuel with slight reproach, before going to Ethan’s side and patting him on the back. “If you can’t think of it, then you don’t need to think further. I’ll find a way.”

Samuel and Tanisiel searched the platform first, but they didn’t see any freshly dug holes. They followed the train tracks and entered the tunnel that Samuel had explored previously. As Samuel said, the end of the tunnel had collapsed a long time ago, and the mountain-like debris blocked the way to the rest of the subway system.

Maybe the other side of the stone mountain led outside of the Forbidden City.

Ethan was sitting alone in the subway station’s hall, and Samuel had left him the flashlight.

The strange figure he saw here last time still made him feel cold when he remembered it. However, when he thought about it carefully, it seemed that he was also a monster. After thinking of that, he didn’t feel so terrible.

Somewhere in the dark, the sound of the stone rolling emerged.

Ethan immediately shone the flashlight in that direction, but he saw nothing.

He thought that maybe he was too nervous, so he closed his eyes and continued to rest, but this time, the footsteps sounded again, and it sounded closer than the last time.

Ethan sat up straight, looked in the direction of the sound, and yelled, “Tanisiel?”

There was no response.

Ethan was a little annoyed and yelled, “Who’s there!”

It was still silent.

Ethan raised his hand and looked at his healed fingertips with only a few scars remaining. Although he was extremely tired, and his limbs felt heavy, if there really was a situation that suddenly cropped up, he should still be able to protect himself. He calmed down and turned off the flashlight.

The darkness as dense as blood immediately surrounded him.

It was only when you were in absolute darkness that you would realize how much you depend on your vision. Without the information received from your eyes, many ordinarily small sounds were suddenly magnified several times. The things you normally perceive from your senses of touch and hearing became strange, so that you are unsure whether what you heard and touched was really what you thought.

He heard it again, approaching him. It was the sound of footsteps. The pace was different from normal people’s and sounded very languid. Ethan seemed to hear the sound of someone breathing in the dark. It was as though that thing was very ill, akin to the uncomfortable strange rumbling from the throat of a dying tuberculosis patient.

He didn’t move. When the sound got closer to him, he could tell the direction the thing was in, and he suddenly turned on the flashlight. A ray of light split through the darkness and immediately locked onto the thing close by.

It was petrified, as though he had used a technique to halt the undead.

It was a person standing on two feet, appearing as a human-like……thing. Due to the dim light, Ethan couldn’t see his face clearly, but from the mere distorted and out-of-proportion body shape, he could tell that he (it?) would definitely not have a normal appearance.

Its legs were very thin, and it seemed that its two feet pointed in opposite directions, with one knee bent backward and the other forward. Its torso was not proportional to its height, and it looked like a gray sack. Its waist, chest, abdomen, and back all had a lot of small tumor-like grape bunches growing out from them, and from a distance, it appeared to have a bent waist. It had two thin arms on each side of its ugly torso, each with a five-fingered hand at the top. At this time, its four arms hung at both sides of its body, but it seemed that it didn’t intend to use them.

And its head……compared to a normal human, it seemed to be a little too long and thin.

Seeing such a thing suddenly appear in the dark, even Ethan, who had experienced a lot, was so scared that his heart missed a beat. He reached out with one hand, and thin barbed tentacles stretched out from the tip of every finger on his right hand. The tentacles quickly and silently rushed towards the humanoid, but before they touched it, it suddenly turned its head and rushed back into the darkness with a very uncoordinated but astonishing speed. Ethan, who was wrapped in Tanisiel’s clothes, got up and followed reluctantly.

He found a piece of skin where the monster had just been standing. He crouched down, stuffed the tentacles back into his fingertips, and picked it up.

It really was a piece of skin, but he didn’t know what animal it was from. It was very soft, a shade of light pink close to human skin, and there were several black hairs on the back of it. He turned the skin over and found some very strange asymmetric patterns with sharp corners carved on it, and between the lines were some words Ethan had never seen, which looked like ancient cuneiform characters.

Ethan frowned, suspecting that it had fallen from the monster.

However, Samuel said that there was no exit here. How did the monster survive? And how could it have such a weird thing on its body?

Ethan thought that the words looked very familiar and suddenly remembered that similar characters had been engraved on the stone pillars in the temple under Pales. He remembered that when he touched the words, many images about the worms entered his mind suddenly. Samuel even said that he was possessed and spoke a language he had never learned.

He then thought about how, when he first heard the sound emitted by the giant worms, he didn’t seem to actually hear a sound but felt the “sound” in his mind. It was not so much a voice, but rather, it was a kind of telepathy, like the connection between Tanisiel and him.

Perhaps the reason why the so-called holy races were regarded as superior to human beings by the horned people was because they could easily carry out this kind of communication without the necessity of speaking?

Ethan suddenly thought of how to summon the little worm. He stood in the same place, looking at the endless void, and called it again and again in his heart. Before he gave it a name, he consciously chose the first name he thought of——Little Rafael.

Yes, Rafael was Schneider’s name. Everyone in the Forbidden City only used surnames to address each other unless they were very close friends. Therefore, it was common for people, including Samuel, to forget that Schneider was only the chief security officer’s last name, and Rafael was his first name.

Ethan always felt that this little worm was the continuation of Schneider’s life. Maybe……there may be some connection between them.

“Little Rafael, I need you!” Ethan was so absorbed in calling it that he didn’t know what he was saying.

At this time, a loud noise suddenly emerged from the depths of the ground, as though thunderstruck. The entire subway station shook, and the sand on the ground kept bouncing. All of a sudden, the ground in front of him cracked. A gray creature about the size of an ancient tree rushed out towards the sky, shaking its front happily amid the raining dust and stone, shaking so much that its acid flew around.

Ethan stood in front of it, his mouth wide open. It seemed that the worm was growing several times faster than he expected……

T/N: …The way Ethan calls Little Rafael felt like a scene from Pokémon. (cue: Pikachu, I need you!)