Strange undercurrents surged through the Deep Sea.
Arakawa Village.
Uesugi Tetsu had just opened his eyes and was still groggy.
Ever since he had achieved mastery over the mind, it was rare for him to feel this dazed after entering Everworld.
This was the first time in days.
He twitched his nose slightly, but the scent Uesugi Tetsu caught was not the familiar mixture of moldy thatch and sulfur.
Instead, it was a stench laced with a heavy smell of machine oil and countless other indescribable industrial odors.
"Ugh..."
Even Uesugi Tetsu felt slightly nauseous for a moment.
After several seconds, Uesugi Tetsu's vision gradually cleared, and he finally understood why the smell was so strong and pungent.
—Because he had appeared directly inside an open-air sewage channel!
Looking down, Uesugi Tetsu saw greasy, blue-black wastewater gurgling between his calves.
It flowed in with a rumble and streamed toward the silent land of Everworld.
When he raised his head, he saw that the sky overhead had been smoked into a dazzling array of colors.
Suppressing his faint discomfort, Uesugi Tetsu did not immediately climb out of the sewage channel, which had been dug deeper than his height.
The first thing he did was crouch down and search for the missing shrine.
That was right—a shrine.
Since he had been resurrected in this sewage ditch, the shrine had to be somewhere nearby.
Uesugi Tetsu plunged both hands into the wastewater, whose heavy-metal content was who knew how many millions of times over the limit, and began rummaging around.
After feeling around for a while, he indeed touched something with sharp edges and corners.
Uesugi Tetsu exerted a little force and pulled it out, discovering that it was the shrine sunk at the bottom of the sewage channel.
However, after being soaked