476 Afterimage in Purgatory (1/2)
They had only taken a step forward, yet the world was completely different. The blazing light and shadows seemed to have all disappeared. Everything became dark and ambiguous like a blurry dream.
Under the high tower, before the sealed black metal gate, Charles watched Gaius take out a key. The man placed it into the lock carefully and used all his might to turn it. Gears began creaking and grating and the door opened.
Charles froze.
There should have been a spiral staircase in the large room behind the door. Now, the room was still there but the staircase was not. The originally solemn room was eerie as if it had been abandoned for decades. There was a giant crater in the ground.
Charles stood at the edge and looked down, feeling the eerie breeze from the abyss. The steel staircase extended brokenly to somewhere deeper underground. There were faint lights but had all been covered by dust and cobwebs, making everything dark and subtle.
”Where…is this?” Charles did not know where they were but he knew this definitely was not the Judgement Tower.
”Here? Just somewhere abandoned for a long time.” Gaius walked to the end of the room and pushed open the door to the lift. Behind it, metal grated and countless scraps of rust fell down the deep well like dead bugs that were still dancing in the air.
An ancient lift slowly rose up from the darkness.
Gaius turned and motioned for Charles to come over.
There was a corpse-turned-skeleton leaning in the corner of the lift. Half of its body hung outside and its legs were gone. His nametag seemed to still hang from his ragged white uniform. However, the name had faded through time.
Gaius squatted down. Studying the skeleton's broken face, he sighed. ”Long time no see. I thought you were living under a different name. I didn't expect that you'd died here.”
He pulled open the skeleton's old clothes and pulled a key out.
”Thanks, old friend. I used to not like you but I didn't think that you could help me again after so many years.”
He rose and kicked the annoying skeleton off the lift. He walked onto the panel and inserted the key. He twisted it to the bottom.
”Such good luck,” he said to Charles. ”With this, we can save a lot of effort.”
Under the grating sounds of the lift descending, Charles looked around in confusion. After a while, it finally dawned on him. ”This isn't a pure material world anymore?”
”This is a piece left behind when establishing the holy city in the aether world back then. It's scrap waste…the material and aether world overlapped, creating a stable area.”
Gaius inhaled the cold and rotten wind. He murmured, ”Abstinence musicians of the territory way turned the scrap into this. It overlaps with the Judgement Tower. Or rather…this is the true Judgement Tower.
”Charles, what you see is the secret that the Sacred City wants to hide under the Judgement Tower. If people find out, they'll probably send you to the stake to be burned even if you've only heard about it.”
”The Sacred City?” Charles was confused. ”What did they do here?”
”Many things. Human experimentation, mutation surgery, forbidden research… Humans must make immoral sacrifices for the future. This is something a Choir musician told me. Perhaps madmen have more common topics. I always thought he was right until someone woke me from my beautiful dream.”
Gaius stared at the changing levels outside the lift and said lightly, ”Here, they imprisoned the most dangerous criminals, dark musicians, and…natural catastrophes. I had once created this with my own hands. The nations and Sacred City ordered it.
”I created this hell for the future heaven. Later, too many things happened. I betrayed, Ye Lanzhou went crazy, Bai Heng left, and even this place was abandoned. Otherwise, I would probably have to serve a sentence in the institution I once commanded…”
Charles was silent. He gaped at the levels flashing past. There were signs he could not read and should not appear here.
Clinical Experiment Zone.
The Sixth Practice Office.
Extinction.
The Fourth Incubation Room.