At the center of Senluo Province.
Forest City.
As the provincial capital, Senluo Province was unimaginably vast in scale, more than a dozen times larger than cities like Greenwood City.
Towering buildings filled the city, many of their structures defying the laws of common sense and giving it an intensely futuristic feel.
At that moment, on the outskirts of the enormous city, in an entertainment district where the city's lower classes gathered.
Dog-meat eateries stood everywhere.
In the underground storage area of a public hospital bearing a conspicuous medical emblem.
Frigid air, dozens of degrees below freezing, filled the entire space.
Inside a sealed room.
A tall, bald, one-eyed man was concentrating on dissecting the corpse before him.
He used no scalpel, merely drawing his sharp nails lightly across it.
The frozen skin beneath his nails rapidly corroded as though splashed with concentrated sulfuric acid, releasing a pungent smell of sulfur and a strange stench.
The bald man seemed not to smell it at all. Instead, an expression of enjoyment appeared on his face.
The frozen corpse lying on the stretcher belonged to a woman with a voluptuous figure.
She looked like a young girl, but her pretty face still bore the extreme terror and despair she had felt before dying.
With his long, narrow fingertips, the bald man gently plucked off a piece of scorched, blackened tissue and placed it in his mouth, chewing slowly as though savoring an exquisite delicacy with an endless aftertaste.
Just then, the temperature in the quiet room abruptly soared, multiplying several times over in an instant. The bald man seemed to sense something.
First he froze, then his face filled with terror, reverence, and fanaticism. He threw himself flat on the floor, pressing his narrow cheek completely against it, and spoke with utter