148: Tensing Up

When it came to crawling through ventilation ducts, Carl was a complete novice—or, to put it more bluntly, this was the first time in his life he had ever done anything like this.

Although he had long since memorized every movement involved in crawling through ventilation ducts from braindance virtual experiences and Training Chip simulations, those narrow, metallic passages in worlds built from data streams had always been kept just clean enough. Even the simulated dust was neatly piled in the corners.

Real ventilation ducts were an entirely different matter.

Carl still vividly remembered what Oliver had looked like when he returned from Clouds. The guy who was always grinning like an idiot had worn a rare grim expression, his brown hair clumped together, with a few dull golden strands visible through the gaps—now smeared with black grease and gleaming strangely beneath the fluorescent lights, like a rag doll stuffed into a barrel of used motor oil.

Later, Oliver had talked Jack into crawling through a ventilation duct too.

And the outcome? That jacket rumored to have been a gift from an ex-girlfriend had been thoroughly soaked in the smell of rust, mold stains, and years of accumulated dust. No matter how hard Jack scrubbed it, the filth seemed to have grown into the fibers. In the end, Misty personally threw the poor coat into the incinerator, and the rotten, scorched stench it gave off made people frown from three meters away.

Carl was not a clean freak, but he still found this kind of activity—basically stuffing himself into grease and dust—somewhat repulsive.

Still, no matter how unwilling he was, Carl knew that was just his mind kicking up a fuss. In truth, he handled crawling through the ventilation duct quite efficiently. Not long after the gray-clad man whose movements