Secretary Choi carefully drank his Eight-Treasure Congee.
The chef at the Traditional-Medicine branch had told him it was too potent in Yang energy, but Choi enjoyed the kick and the richness of the rice-broth.
"Sir, we have a breach on the Eastern Quadrant," his head of security, Bui, roused his attention with great care.
Choi continued to sip his congee with an expression of absorption.
"Suspect is female, late teens. She was seen riding a compactable bike, and she owns a large Storage Ring. Our informants describe her as an Earthern Mage, but she could Transmute the metal within the concrete."
Choi paused.
Staff Sergeant Bui gulped.
"I did offer an extra 20 CCs for extra labour for our Fudan Mages, did I not, Bui?"
"You did, Sir."
"And you have distributed Magister Wen's Dossiers to our hot-headed gangsters?"
"I have, Sir."
Choi took another sip from his soup.
"Our unexpected Guest? Sir? Should I send a team to..."
The Secretariat drained the pot. "Bui, you've been with me for what? A year now? Do you know why Fudan keeps sending their most talented Mages into this shithole? Year after year, incident after incident, casualty after casualty?"
"Experience, Sir?" Bui had a dark expression. The last time Fudan had sent over a troop of Mages, they had left behind a dozen corpses. To Bui, the citizens of D-109 may be residents of the Lost Districts, but they were also citizens of Shanghai. To have them offered up for slaughter to blood some young Masters and Mistresses was the precise reason he loathed the old powers—not that he would risk his skin to make a difference.
Choi played with the clay pot in his hands.
"Bui, do you know what a Gu is?"
"Sir?"
"In Lingnan, several bloodlines of the Miao Clan remain, you know, the ones rumoured to have coupled with the Yuan-ti."
"Sir." Staff Sergeant Bui inclined his head slightly, informing his superior officer that he knew of the second, but not the first.
"They have very particular bloodline magic involving magical poison. To Awaken their junior Mages, they first create a monstrosity of supreme toxicity by placing five or six, up to a dozen, poisonous Magical Creatures into a poison crucible."
"Once inside, a special incantation is used to make the creatures wild with hunger. They begin to hunt and kill one another, while the crucible's magic ensures that they cannot die from wounds, only from toxicity. Yet, as each creature consumes the next, it grows and grows in potency and power until one remains - one that possesses a superior venom drawn from all the others."
Bui's face paled.
"Then, they get the Awakening Mage—usually a girl and usually a virgin—don't ask me why—and they have the girl place her hand inside the jar."
"Sir?"
"The Gü bites the girl, and she either awakens as a Poison Mage, or she dies, becoming a boil covered mass of flesh consumed by the poison. Her corpse becomes so necrotic and deadly that her remains are harvested to be applied to weapons, darts, whatever have you."
"That's terrifying, Sir."
Choi chuckled.
"D-109 is a Gu, Sergeant Bui," Choi clarified for his pale subordinate. "The entire city, infested with Triads, NoMs, Slavers, Gangs, cults; now an unfriendly rival. What a wonderful bug pot for our student Mages to get bitten."
"But..." Seargent Bui wanted to ask why a Magister would give out information on her students.
"Sergeant." Choi shook his head. "If you ask too many questions, you'll never make Lieutenant."
"Sir!"
"The thing with a Gu," Choi instructed his young officer patiently. "When there are so many vermin in the pot, Bui, who would notice if we slipped in one or two more?"
The Secretariat cackled to himself.
"It's not every day you get sanctioned killers from the upper echelon who ask no questions and know no one to clean up our mess!"
[https://imgur.com/xJGXTPm.jpg]
Gwen stood in the cargo elevator with her companions, enduring the ancient gravitation platform's groaning and shifting as it descended toward B7.
As expected, her party was operating independently from their seniors.
"Well, what do you think?" Richard asked the rest of them. As the eldest and the most experienced Adventurer, he was their de facto leader. "I want your individual opinions before we proceed."
To Gwen's surprise, Kitty was the first to speak.
"Carrion Crawlers don't just appear out of nowhere. Someone's bringing them into the sub-levels, breeding them, that's my opinion." Kitty continued. "According to Aldous' Urban Bestiary, Carrion Crawlers are found among excess carrion. They should be large, between five to six feet long on average. They secrete a paralysing ooze found in their saliva and bodily fluids, paralysing the creatures they touch. Usually, they do not prey on living beings, though if they become large enough, they are known to attack humans. Their medicinal—"
"Thank you, Kitty," Richard nodded affirmatively at the pixie girl. "That was very useful. Mayuree? You wanted to say something?"
"The Filtration System are exchange-pillars using Conjuration and Transmutation glyphs. So, the Crawler could be holed up down there because of the mana-rich environment. Given enough time, a broken column could collate quite the mass of mana. At any rate, if you can get me within twenty to thirty meters of the thing, I can tell you more."
"Clairvoyance?"
Mayuree shook her head. "There is too much interference in those rooms. I'll have to send in an Arcane Eye."
"I see. Gwen?"
Gwen had been silent the whole trip down because she had been thinking about Boss Yi since they left the conference room.
Secretary Choi issued the edict for the purge, but Boss Yi had provided them with the details. The gangster had told them that Filtration Column B7-4-3, located on Basement 7 extending to Basement 4, had been out of commission for almost three months. The NoMs that made a living down at the sub-levels reported seeing a giant slug of some sort—pale yellow and worm-like in appearance, lurking in the general vicinity. It had supposedly been snatching up the sick and infirm at night and dragging them back into its lair.
Watching Yi's face, though, Gwen suspected that the big man wasn't telling the whole truth. The reason being that he had glanced at Secretary Choi's face about four to five times while they conversed.
To test her theory, Gwen had turned to ask the Secretariat why the PLA didn't send any Mages down to investigate. Choi joked that if they had done the job, what need would they have for students like Gwen.
Unperturbed, Gwen continued to question Boss Yi, who was forthcoming and liberal with his information, almost as if he was reading from a script. The area, he informed them, was out of their zone of control and, therefore, not their responsibility. Yi controlled the west towers of the Hive City, Lam controlled the East, while Kha controlled a section near the middle. Though their influence extended below Ground Floor in theory, the lower levels were usually inhabited by NoMs who had lived there for generations, becoming cloistered into a kind of incestuous tribe of 'Undercity' degenerates who had grown to love the shelter of the darkness. Ergo, they needed a third party to go down.
"Are you serious?" Gwen demanded of the gangster.
Choi explained with laughter that there were people like these in every Hive-City of the Lost Districts. Once a few generations had passed, such groups tended to lock themselves into a cycle of self-abuse and poverty.
One time, the PLA tried to root them out, to 'help' the fallen citizens of D118 back into normalcy.
Instead, the 'Under-folk' chose to immolate themselves, destroying three levels of the lower strata, trapping close to 4000 souls in a boiling hell of choking miasma before the Tower Mages moved in and purged the whole section.
"A Lost District within a Lost District, hilarious, no? Microcosms within microcosm! A crucible for the human condition!" Choi appeared in love with the catchphrases, positively delighted with the elegance of his Chinese prose.
He told her that since the incident, the PLA rotated lower strata citizens by lottery—elevating families to the surface levels, sometimes even the mid-levels, to offset any desire at entrenchment into the sub-basement.
Families who resisted the benevolence of their autocratic leaders simply disappeared, evaporated, moved away.
But no such systems existed within the Lost Districts.
"In my opinion, there are bigger problems down there than a loose Crawler, that's for sure," Gwen began, informing her party about her suspicions. "Boss Yi has told us a lot—where it is—what it is—what we should be expecting. But he averted every question as to how it got there, where it came from."
She felt herself shiver at the memory of Blackheath.
"Let's say I am being paranoid, its entirely possible it spawned due to an abundance of magic or a tear in the Prime Material; it would still mean that something is creating carrion down there. I doubt this place can afford to waste food. Crawlers are omnivores, but they feed on necrotic flesh, right? There's no agricultural industry here, there's a protein farm, but that barely keeps up with demand, which leaves us with an unpleasant prospect."
"Someone is making carrion, dumping bodies. Someone is rearing these things intentionally. YET, our quest is just to kill one of these things - a specific creature in the location Yi gave—what do you guys suppose that implies?"
"Eww..." Mayuree made an unpleasant expression.
"They're hatching targets for us to kill?"
"That's my theory, anyway." Gwen pieced together the circumstantial evidence. "Additionally, I am not sure what the other 20CCs are for."
"Maybe we will run into more than one Crawler?" Mayuree asked.
"Or other trouble," Richard added. "The Crawler's 5 CCs, what do you suppose could be worth 20?"
The party members regarded one another.
"Let's keep an eye out," Richard informed them.
"Agreed."
"Yep"
"Fine."
"Great." Richard turned to the door. "We have to go through B7's residential zone first. Eyes wide open. Mayuree, we're in your safe hands. I'll take the point. Kitty's on second. Mayuree's third, Gwen, bring up the rear."
"Detect Magic! Detect Invisibility! Detect Poison! Detect Trap!" Mayuree launched into a dazzling array of self-buffs as the lift slowed and finally stopped.
"Lea!"
Richard's giggling Undine appeared in mid-air, half-clad in water.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Kitty's eyes enlarged with self-evident longing.
"Lea, can you keep watch as well? Mayuree takes precedence. She has the weakest Shield."
Lea inclined her head haughtily, shot Kitty a snide glance with her pale blue orbs, then shimmered before becoming invisible. As a high-ranked Spirit and a demi-Fey, she possessed both Flight and Invisibility at will. Richard once joked that he could have Lea hold him up and pretend instead of learning Flight himself.
The cargo lift opened.
Suddenly, Fudan's darlings were in the middle of basement B-7.
[https://imgur.com/xJGXTPm.jpg]
"Mistress Zalaam, they should be arriving. As you suspected, they're headed for the area where Yi asked us to plant the Crawler."
"Shukraan, Sui. Tell the others to be wary of the tall girl's Void spells. Get the handlers to send in the Crawlers first. Remember—I need her alive. The others don't matter."
"I shall endeavour to keep them 'all' alive for you, Mistress." The woman known as Sui replied humbly.
"Where's Zuyao now?"
"He was last seen proceeding through the western sewers, Mistress. The passage there should be safe before the rains hit."
Nephres nodded with satisfaction. Everything was going smoothly so far. Her messenger to the Organisation was safely away. The trap-within-a-trap was set. AND her naive lover had unknowingly sent the Student Mages her way. Best of all, when it happens—and it will happen—the blame would fall on Boss Yi. The aftermath of losing Gwen would also bring down that conniving Choi, the PLA hound guarding this place. Perfection.
She rechecked the Dossiers.
Richard Huang—Wate—Abjuration-Conjuration. His parents were not even citizens—a true nobody.
Mayuree. There was no last name, nothing on the girl other than her role as a Diviner.
Kitty Liang—Ice—Evoker-Transmuter, a sponsored Mage from the House of M. The girl could be problematic, but her talent also made her a prize.
As for the senior Fudan students, Lam had sent them elsewhere.
Nephres had hoped the reports were more detailed, but this wasn't the Frontier. Here they couldn't work their numbers into the stratum of the administration. Nephres recalled that her Mistress had mentioned Faceless was dead. The loss of the shapeshifter was a significant blow to the Organisation, for the creature had many identities that remained untapped. Nephres wondered if Faceless had been unique or if her Mistress had more Doppelgängers under her command. When they had met, she was sure Faceless resembled the result of some infernal Conjuration, some nightmare made flesh, like in the Odes of the Abyssian from Egypt's legends, borrowing the skin of loved ones to fuel their malevolent desires.
She thumbed the papers once more.
Nephres couldn't help but feel her nerves fray.
It wasn't a foretelling Divination, but she felt the unshakable buzz of peril. Call it instinct, perhaps, or a woman's intuition. Trusting her feelings, Nephres had enjoyed an outstanding track record of escaping harm so far.
Once more, her eyes fell upon Gwen Song's Dossier. She would have to be extra careful with the girl in transit. It wouldn't do to have what happened to Edgar happen to her. Perhaps a drug? Or maybe a Stasis Unit. Yes. A Stasis Unit would be safest.
Nephres smirked.
The girl would look lovely hog-tied and placed in a Stasis Unit.
In front of her, Sui waited patiently for the Mistress' orders.
"Sui." Nephres' voice was the promise of milk and honey. "Go, I want you to oversee the operation personally. May Anubis guide you."
Her servant touched her forehead to the ground and kissed Nephres' feet. "I will do as you command, Mistress."
Nephres teach down with a finger to feel the softness of Sui's lips. She wondered if her faraway Mistress of the Void ever missed her company. How beautiful her Mistress could be! Unlike her honeyed skin, the Mistress's complexion was always pale and flawless and cold as though Nephres was touching her warm lips to hoarfrost.
Hopefully, with this redemption, she would be seeing her Mistress soon.
[https://imgur.com/xJGXTPm.jpg]
While she waited for her mana to recharge, Lulan Li began to have second thoughts.
She had travelled all this way out of the CBD because there was no opportunity to confront the Void Sorceress within the PLA Tower's public domain.
And Gwen Song was a Power Progeny connected to the PLA, she was the Dean's favourite, and she was protected by more than one Magister from the university, a true heir of nepotism.
If Lulan were to challenge her within the teleportation range of the Tower, even assuming she succeeded in humiliating the girl, there would be hell to pay for her Sect.
But here in the Lost Districts, she could fight her fair and square. Lulan could issue a challenge, and they would fight. There were no Magisters here to interfere.
That was what Lulan had thought at first, at least when the red mist came down.
Now the mist had thinned, and gone was the zeal that had compelled her to traverse Fourth Orbital Highway to District 109.
Should I return? A voice of reason whispered faintly in the dark.
No-NO! She needed to show Gwen Song the difference in their power!
Maybe then, Gwen Song would realise the error of her ways and return Kusu's daggers, or at least offer reparations if she had destroyed them.
Mao! She wanted to smash the girl's pretty face inward.
Somewhere at the back of Lulan's head buzzed the idea that all of this was folly, that she was going to make things worse or make a fool out of herself, but each time that thought surfaced, it was overridden by a scene of Gwen Song standing over Kusu's unmoving body.
She thought of Uncle Kwon screaming.
She thought of Pei giving them that smirk that he always affected.
She thought of her father shaking his head and saying they took after their mother.
She thought of Patriarch Li slapping their father on the back approvingly, then turning to Kusu with disapproving eyes.
Her bruised cheek burned.
Her jaws ached.
Her blood was up before she knew it. The red mist came on as dense as iron. It always felt the most potent when using her Sect's unique talent.
Again, Lulan found her body in motion before she could think clearly. Brother had told her that it was the Yang energy. The more proficient she became with the Iron Sword technique, the more she was prone to these episodes.
After some time and some indiscriminate destruction, her mana once more needed recharging.
While holding an HDM, Lulan became aware of her surroundings once more.
She was in one of those warren-like corridors in the lower strata. She was sure that this was still Building 3. Assuming Gwen and her friends went to the central area, she needed to find Building 10 or 11. Comparing the appearance of the strata from her previous visits to the triple-digit Districts, Lulan estimated that Gwen's party should be in Basement 2. The concrete layer between the levels shouldn't be nearly as thick past the foundation.
Her eyes scanned the corridor.
She was being watched.
"You!" Lulan broke her trance and strode toward an adjacent door, where a face quickly disappeared behind a shoddy wooden door. "Come out!"
It only took her a second to approach the barrier. As she arrived, there was the sound of a bar sliding into place.
She turned to the next door. Her eyes met something dark in the dimness of the corridor.
"Dark Vision!"
Her eyes glowed like that of a nocturnal carnivore.
A quick self-buff and she was staring down a corridor a hundred meters deep and filled with just as many pairs of eyes staring at her with a mixture of fright and curiosity. However, they shrunk behind their barriers whenever they saw her face and slammed closed their iron-wrought door. As her scarlet orbs swept across the darkness, the sound of doors closing ricochetted down the corridor until it turned from her view.
How do these people see in the dark? Lulan felt equally impressed and disturbed by the acute timidity of the undercity's denizens.
She then knocked on a few more doors to no avail.
Lulan resisted the urge to kick down the door. It was better to play it safe in a place like this. There was an ambient sense of hostility in the air that made her scalp crawl, and the stank of acrid ammonia caused her eyes to water.
"Iron Skin!"
Her complexion took on the colour of rust. Where her fingers touched the rough walls, it raked and chipped the surface.
Building 11 was northward.
Maybe she could find someone deeper in who could tell her where the Fudan party had gone. Lulan sauntered down the twisting passageway, her footfalls heavy against the pavement like the beating of a telltale heart.
Abruptly, her progress was interrupted by the scraping and screeching of floating platforms moving in the distance.
There! Lulan's heart soared. In the Districts, movement between the layers was rarely undertaken by the magically operated lifts. Only important guests, outsiders, and the building's administrators used the platform.
"Haste!"
Lulan shot down the corridor, barging past the trash and the debris strewed across every surface. There were barricades too, but she ploughed past those with a single swing of her Conjure Blade.
"Stone Shaping Strike!"
The concrete walls parted.
An NoM family stared at the Transmuter, mouth open, as she appeared in their room, shattered their dinner table, then disappeared again.
A dozen ruined homes later, Lulan could no longer hear the lift.
She did become faintly aware as she ascended into the deeper levels of the East Wing that there was a great deal of groaning and moaning happening somewhere above her. The noise wasn't the groaning associated with stressed metal, a sound she knew well.
There was also the tinnitus wail of those weeping in despair.
Lulan grimaced. She must have missed a critical turn.
There were whorehouses in the Districts. As much as Kusu would like it, she wasn't that innocent.
As fitting as it was for Gwen Song to inhabit one, Lulan wasn't going to find her there.
The lift had been going down.
Lulan had run Quests in the Districts before and knew that it wasn't unusual for creatures to spawn in the magic-dense spaces below, no matter the warding put up by the Enchanters.
From the lay of the strata around her, she could infer that somewhere below was a centre line that ran from one side of the superstructure to another, usually used by maintenance crews to access suppression systems or the underlying plumbing quickly.
"Stone Shaping Strike!"
The concrete parted.
Lulan descended.
When she broke past a concrete barrier into what she hoped was B-3, she appeared to have fallen into what seemed to be, for the lack of a better word, someone's home, raising a cloud of dust and debris.
She used the word 'home' lightly because she was in a cubical, one hollowed out from what was once a tiny tunnel, padded and built up with salvaged wooden planks and painted over with what appeared to be tar. The resulting construct was a 'room' with a door, and now she had sliced through the roof and was standing in the 'abode' of whoever owned this place.
The door in front of Lu opened, revealing the filthiest man Lulan had ever seen. There was a sort of encrusted grime on the man that had almost become a part of his skin, making the man appear more southern than his Han facial structure first suggested. His clothes were likewise filthy, layers of unwashed stink piled upon one another until they were almost fused into a sort of cloth armour.
She felt immediately ill.
As the man opened his mouth to speak, a foulness Lulan dared not believe possible assailed her nostrils.
"EH? How did a beauty like you get in here? You from Madam Lam? Wocao! My house!"
"S-Shut up!" Lulan hissed. Madam Lam? The man thought she was a whore?! The nerve!
"Me, shut up?! Who the FUCK you think you are? EH? Sha-bi! You want to fucking die!? EHH—!" Unafraid, the filthy creature hurled a torrent of abuse toward her.
Lulan had never been treated this way in her life. Not even the Elders spoke to her like this when they beat her for insubordination.
Perhaps taking her timidness to mean she was afraid and helpless, the man came closer, made more brazen by the fact that she was a girl.
Suddenly, inexplicably, Lulan grew self-conscious of her leather pants her simple white singlet. Against her exposed skin, the man's gaze felt like slathered paint.
Did the man not recognise that she was a sorceress? Shouldn't the man flee for his life?
Wasn't someone like her a Deity-like existence for these denizens of the deep? She might be covered in dust and grime, her clothes soiled by passage through the ceiling, but hadn't she broken into his house by rending the concrete?
Lulan's eyes widened in horror as the man reached out with scaly fingers, his parched lips dividing to reveal rotten teeth. The redolence was so ripe as to make her dizzy with disgust.
The mana insider her exploded.
"Conjure Sword!"
From a torn slit between the Elemental Plane of Earth and the Prime Material Plane, an iron slab burst forth in the rough shape of a poorly smithed sword.
As it slid forward, the metal crashed into the body of the tramp, punching through flesh and bone with the ease of a stiff finger of reprimand piercing a sodden strip of tissue paper. There was a sound of crunching bone, wet and sudden, as the weight of the blade was freed, dipping forward and smashing tip first into the concrete floor, cracking the pavement.
Several inches into the concrete, it stuck there, embedded into the floor, singing a song of violence.
Behind its rusty edge, guts and viscera cascaded over the singularly shattered rebar slab, splattering and splashing with a grotesque cacophony.
The man's door earlier opened remained ajar, hanging from a nail.
A dozen pairs of blood-rimmed eyes stared in horror at the gore-soaked girl inside their companion's abode; their mouths parted in terror.
"Monster!" someone screamed.
"Find the Boss!"
"Block her in! Don't let her escape!"
"YAAAAA!"
Discondordant noise abruptly filled the shack-strewn corridor of Access Tunnel B-7, the sound of clattering feet, screaming voices, beating sheets of galvanised iron, women's hysteria, men crying blue murder, every noise in the world filled the echoic space of the tunnel's circumference.
To Lulan, it felt as though the world had suddenly gone insane. Why couldn't these NoMs just shut the fuck up? How was she going to find Gwen Song in all of this chaos?!
Her face felt sick with filth.
There was a sudden taste of iron on her tongue, as well as Mao knew what else was inside the man.
With a vengeance, the red mist descended.