30 The Coun (1/2)

Li's boots sloshed through the sewers. As far as sewage systems went, Riviera's was quite advanced, consisting of a maze of sloping pathways engineered at specific angles so that when rainwater and muck fell in through the gutters, they created a current that washed away the sewage to a massive treatment center at the lowest part of the city, wherein dedicated workers and the occasional mage needing to fulfill his community service hours would purify the sewage or package it into fertilizer.

Because there had been recent rain, the sewage hadn't built up much, and as Li followed the spawn, the filthy water only reached up to his ankles.

The spawn took up a leisurely pace, its eight legs clicking across stone as it occasionally turned back to Li, making sure he was fine.

”Don't worry about me, little one,” said Li. ”Go ahead as you like, and do not be afraid. You can take care of yourself.”

The spawn nodded the vampire's face it had stolen, and it rushed forwards, ploughing up splashes of brown water as it faded into the recesses of the sewers.

Li followed behind at a more leisurely pace. Due to the spawn being a unique familiar in that it only lasted a temporary amount of time, it did not have restrictions on the range of its control as the Myrmeke did, allowing Li to track its movements regardless of how far away it went.

So Li decided to allow the level 80 child of horror to explore for him.

As Li turned several corners, making his way through the winding corridors of sewage, he found several freshly mangled corpses floating atop the scum water. The spawn's victims.

Li inspected them. They were hunched-back creatures, a little smaller than a man and completely pale and hairless. Their skin was wrinkled in deformity rather than age, and their eyes were a squinty red while their ears roughly pointed up. Their mouths were lamprey-like, circular and lined with razor sharp teeth.

Lamashu – lesser vampires. Li appreciated the spawn in that it surgically eliminated these creatures, merely requiring a quick slash of its arachnid appendages to cleanly cleave them in two or disembowel them, their guts staining brown as they floated in the filthy sewage.

Of more interesting note, the corpses had packs on them filled with elixirs and herbs bound in preservative bagging. But these weren't for curing colds or giving a little kick of strength on the battlefield. These were for getting high.

All these Lamashu were drug mules, moving Black Vine's illegal products all throughout the entire city through the sewage system.

As Li traveled further through the passageways and found dozens upon dozens of the Lamashu corpses, he realized that the scope of Black Vine's operations was truly massive. It must have been supplying the entire city's criminal underground and far more, likely making drugs in bulk to ship out to other towns, villages, and perhaps even other cardinal cities.

Li eventually came upon the spawn again at an interesting junction in the sewers. The sewers were made of brick and concrete, but the spawn stood pointing eagerly with one of its legs to a gaping hole in one of the sewer walls, neatly circular and drilled straight through the concrete.

The hole was large enough to four or five men, and it was located at the farthest eastern end of the sewers, right below the residential district for all the nobles of Riviera, the counts and barons that ruled directly under lord Lys.

Li peered into the hole, and wherever it led, it led up. It was surprisingly clean, well-maintained and smelling sterile.

The spawn rattled, its breath a little labored.

Li knelt down, and the spawn flattened itself on the ground, pressing the stitched vampire face to Li's hand. Li took the face and tore it off, revealing an inky, starry blackness underneath, as if a part of the night sky had been cut off and transplanted.

”You should be wearing your own face when you return to your mother,” said Li as he caressed the starred void, feeling an indescribable coldness that leeched into his hands like numbing poison. He knew that in lore, the spawn of Atlach Nacha, once their mortal hosts provided no more nutrition, would fade away, their essences returning to a higher dimension where their mother lay. ”Your time is up. I'm sorry you had to spend it in the sewers.”

The spawn purred as it fell into the comfort of Li's hand. Li waited, stroking the spawn's carapace as it slowly stiffened up, its physical shell starting to crack and decompose. Eventually, it broke apart entirely, scattering into countless particles of black that faded into the air, as if never having existed in the first place.

Li gave the spawn an acknowledging nod for its help and made his way through the pit. Eventually, the pit started to angle drastically upwards, until at a certain point, it was a straight vertical climb. When he looked up, he could see thin glimmers of moonlight at the top, perhaps a little shy of thirty meters away.

Here, it wasn't so much a pit as it was a deep hole in the ground leading to the surface, and there were claw marks scratched all across the length of the hole – evidence of how the vampires came up and down.

However, Li had a far simpler alternative. He angled himself properly and then jumped. He soared straight upwards. A little too far up, unfortunately, as he wasn't too used to judging his strength, and he found himself a dozen meters beyond the hole, high up in the air where he could see all around him.