Chapter 113

Chapter 113: Searching for a Great Fire

Walking down the road, Shirley looked rather annoyed: “Why wouldn’t that old man answer my questions! He acted like he didn’t hear me at all when I talked to him… Is being short really that easy to ignore?!”

“I don’t think your height is the main reason. It’s because you kept chasing him about the factory,” Duncan tilted his head slightly and glanced at the girl. “And instead of wasting time on a local who doesn’t want to cooperate, wouldn’t it be better to go and see the factory with our own eyes?”

Shirley pressed her lips together and said no more. Ahead of her and Duncan, at the end of the street, they could already faintly see the factory that had been abandoned eleven years ago.

In the Lower City, many factories stood close to residential areas, sometimes only a single wall away from where people lived. The limited land within the city?state and the blockade of the Boundless Sea meant the city planners could not spare enough ground for separate industrial zones. Every piece of solid ground was crowded with people. There was no such thing as “moving industry out” or “a plant in the suburbs”.

Most people in this world had no time to worry about the health risks of industrial pollution. For the general public, the safety that modern technology brought to the city?state was far more important than the dangers of the factories. Gas lamps, heavy firepower, the Steam Grid, potions and mechanical ships — these things had made the population of the new Age of City?States nearly three times that of the Old Era. Anyone who understood how a modern city?state worked could see one fact clearly: factories were the bones and flesh of modern civilization. They could no longer be separated from the city?state.

In fact, as Nina’s textbooks described, these industrial facilities were not only gathered in the Lower City. City planners tried their best to move the most dangerous ones toward the outer edges of the city?state, but some things still had to be placed in its very heart, even right beside the great cathedral. There was the sacred Great Bell tower, and the “central steam core” that sent Holy Gas through pipes to the entire city.

All of these were, at their core, enormous machines. They held terrible power and great risk, yet they still had to stand beside the city’s heart.

In Nina’s engineering and mechanics textbooks, the writers even gave a special explanation for this.

People had to “grant sanctity to the holy steam” and “rely on the power of the great cathedral to keep the bell tower’s timing in order”. Machines were not only machines. They were also pure, sacred hearts that kept modern civilization running. People had to place these pure engines of steel under the God’s gaze, so that the Shadows of Subspace would not corrupt their oil and bolts.

Duncan recalled what he had read in Nina’s textbooks, then looked up at the factory still standing abandoned in the middle of the district. A strange feeling rose in his heart.

This bizarre, absurd world… really did keep testing his view of reality.

He and Shirley reached the factory. A thin perimeter wall, collapsed in many places, was the only barrier between the factory grounds and the surrounding residential blocks. Between the plant and the nearby houses lay a narrow ring of wasteland. Nothing grew on the barren ground. Only scattered chunks of masonry and long?rusted metal scraps lay there.

No matter how important factories were to the city, no matter how used people had become to living beside them day and night, a factory was still a factory. When these giants went into a runaway state, they still left huge scars in the city.

But in a city?state where every scrap of land was precious, it still struck Duncan as odd that a scar like this had been left “unhealed” for eleven years.

“…Land in a city?state should be valuable,” he said thoughtfully as he stood at the edge of the wasteland, looking at the abandoned workshops ahead. “Leaving this place empty like this… doesn’t make much sense.”

“Didn’t that old man say it already? The corruption here couldn’t be cleaned up…” Shirley didn’t seem to be thinking that deeply. “Some corruption can only fade slowly with time.”

“Maybe…” Duncan shook his head. His gaze moved over the rows of pipes and storage tanks along the edge of the factory grounds as he tried to reconstruct how the accident had once unfolded. He saw several broken lengths of pipe. One tank’s base had collapsed, and the whole vessel had toppled over, crushing part of a nearby building. It looked like the carcass of some huge beast.

From these signs alone, it did look very much like a leak had happened here.

But Duncan still frowned slightly.

The old man sunning himself had said there was still corruption lingering around the factory, and that it had even kept the entire Sixth District from seeing a single newborn in eleven years. Yet around the factory he saw no warning signs, and no patrols or guards.

Things did not add up. It was not a major anomaly, but these small irrational details were still enough to stir doubt.

“Are we… really going in?” Shirley’s voice sounded at his side. Her expression looked a little tense. “There might really be corruption here…”

“Can’t your Dog give you some advice?” Duncan glanced at Shirley. “This place is deserted. You can let that Abyssal Hound out for some air. And I don’t believe you’re really afraid of whatever ‘corruption’ is here — the tension in your eyes looks a little too fake.”

Shirley dodged Duncan’s gaze. She raised her hand and replied: “Fine, fine… mainly, Dog isn’t in great shape…”

As soon as the girl finished speaking, the crackle of flames suddenly sounded out of thin air beside her. A sheet of pitch?black fire spread along her arm and half her body. The flames gathered into chains, and at the end of the chains, in thick smoke and dark fire, the figure of a Abyssal Hound emerged.

Duncan watched the process with interest. When Dog finally appeared, he smiled and nodded to the Abyssal Hound: “Long time no see, Dog — you ran off pretty quickly last time.”

“We left in a hurry, in a hurry, please don’t hold it against us,” Dog tucked its tail the moment it appeared. When it heard Duncan’s voice, its whole body visibly seemed to shrink by half. It drew in its limbs as much as it could and lowered its skull carefully. “What do you need done? I’m good at all kinds of things. I can fetch plates, sweep the floor, entertain a child, whatever you like…”

Before the Abyssal Hound even finished, Shirley was already covering half her face beside it, clearly thinking: [I’ve been cowardly enough this whole way, and you still manage to set a new record.] Duncan couldn’t help but laugh. He raised a hand and pointed at the factory ahead: “I don’t need anything done. I just want to borrow your eyes. You can see things ordinary people can’t, can’t you? Take a look at that factory and tell me what’s wrong with it.”

“Listen to you, as if my eyes were worthy of your notice…” Dog flattered him at once, but still turned its head toward the factory as it spoke, muttering, “I’ve been watching this place since just now and didn’t see anything… It still looks the same now, just an abandoned…”

Dog’s voice cut off. It suddenly crouched low, a warning growl rumbling in its throat — yet the next second, it shook its skull and made a puzzled sound: “…Huh?”

Seeing this, Shirley tensed at once: “Dog, what did you see?!”

“I… I don’t know. For a moment, I think I saw… fire? It looked like a huge fire, surging out of the factory like a giant wave, but… it vanished in the blink of an eye…”

Dog’s voice was full of doubt, but Shirley suddenly became excited: “You’re sure you saw fire?! A real great fire?!”

Dog shook its massive skull. “It was just a flash. It might have been a hallucination. I am a Abyssal demon after all. Having a hallucination now and then, being a bit unsound in the head, that’s normal…”

“But a great fire is different!” Shirley’s voice grew urgent. “We’ve been searching for so long. We finally found traces of ‘the fire’. This has to be it, Dog. It must be here…”

Shirley was halfway through her excited words when she felt a large hand rest on her shoulder. Her voice cut off. A delayed sense of tension ran through her as she stiffly turned her head — and saw the terrifying “Mr. Duncan” quietly watching her.

“Why did you react so strongly to ‘the fire’?” Duncan looked into Shirley’s eyes and asked slowly.

“I…” Shirley opened her mouth. “It’s noth—”

“You’re also looking for a ‘great fire’ from eleven years ago, aren’t you?” Duncan did not care about the girl’s attempt to change the subject. Her reaction had already made him think of something. “A fire that doesn’t exist in any official record, but that you experienced yourself. Am I right?”

Shirley’s body went a little rigid. She swallowed slowly. “H?how did you…”

“I’m looking for it too,” Duncan said with a smile. “It seems we’ve come to the right place.”