The last rays of the setting sun sank completely into the gaps between the city's steel forests. Tianhai City seemed to have shed the bustle of daylight and donned a bizarre cloak woven from neon and shadows.
In the abandoned western industrial district, the enormous, rust-covered skeletons of the factory buildings loomed in the darkness like crouching beasts, radiating decay and danger.
Lin Xiao was wrapped in an oversized, worn-out hoodie, its brim pulled low to hide most of his face.
The brace on his right arm was concealed beneath his clothes, but it still throbbed faintly.
He leaned behind a cold, graffiti-covered concrete pillar, warily observing the surroundings.
The air was thick with the smells of machine oil, rust, and some indescribable stench of decay.
Fatty Wang crouched beside him, his chubby face taut with nervousness. His little eyes darted anxiously in every direction as he clutched a crumpled note, his voice lowered to a barely audible murmur tinged with excitement. "Brother Xiao, this is the place! That Skinny Monkey kid has all kinds of connections. He said the entrance is beneath the collapsed exhaust pipe behind the 'Old Boiler Room'! We need the password!"
"The password?" Lin Xiao's voice came from beneath the brim, carrying a hint of hoarse amusement.
"Yeah! 'Rusty iron for fresh firewood'!" Fatty Wang swallowed and added, "Skinny Monkey said it's a real mess in there! All kinds of people are inside, so he told us to be extremely careful, not to show off our money, and especially not to cause trouble! Apparently, there are actually Martial Artists there, and they don't care about rules!"
Lin Xiao said nothing. He merely nodded lightly.
Beneath the shadow of the brim, his eyes were sharp as an eagle's as they swept across the ruins ahead, shrouded in immense shadows.
Source Energy Points: -1.3.
That glaring negative value hung over him like a blade. The feeling of spiritual exhaustion caused by overdrawing his strength, along with the dull pain from the fracture in his right arm, constantly reminded him of his lack of power and the urgency of reality.
Su Qingxue's halo could protect him for a while, but not forever.
The shadows of Scarface Qiang and the Blood Wolf Gang clung to him like maggots in the bone.
He needed strength. He needed Source Energy Points!
This black market, supposedly a gathering place for all kinds of people, was currently his only hope.
"Let's go." Lin Xiao's voice was low and firm.
The two of them moved swiftly through the ruins, like civets merging into the shadows.
They circled around foul-smelling piles of garbage, avoided the shards of glass and steel bars that glimmered dangerously across the ground, and finally arrived at a corner blocked by a huge abandoned boiler.
A massive rusted iron pipe, more than a meter in diameter, jutted diagonally from the ground. Most of its opening was buried beneath collapsed bricks, leaving only a pitch-black hole barely large enough for one person to pass through while bent over.
Two men in filthy work clothes stood before the entrance like guardian deities, their gazes unusually fierce. Their bulging waists clearly concealed weapons.
One of the men, whose face bore a centipede-like scar, scrutinized Lin Xiao and Fatty Wang, who were wrapped up from head to toe.
"What are you here for?" the scar-faced man rasped, his voice like sandpaper scraping against metal.
Fatty Wang's palms were slick with sweat. He stammered, "Rust... rusty iron..."
"...for fresh firewood!"
Lin Xiao finished for him, his voice steady, with the greasy, slippery tone of a street thug from the lowest rungs that he was deliberately imitating. At the same time, he calmly slipped two rolled-up hundred-yuan bills into the scar-faced man's hand.
The scar-faced man pinched the bills to gauge their thickness, then glanced at Lin Xiao's face hidden in the shadow of his brim and the unnatural position of his right arm. The viciousness in his eyes faded slightly, but his wariness remained.
He gave his companion a look, stepped aside, and jerked his chin toward the pitch-black hole. "Go in. Keep your eyes and mouth under control. Don't look at what you shouldn't, and don't ask what you shouldn't. The people inside aren't as easygoing as we are."
A murky wave of heat mixed with the smells of mildew, sweat, cheap tobacco, and some pungent chemical flooded over them.
Lin Xiao drew a deep breath to suppress the stirring in his heart, then bent down and entered first, burrowing into the passage like the throat of a giant beast.
Fatty Wang followed close behind, his teeth chattering with nerves.
The inside of the pipe was longer than expected, sloping downward, with wet, muddy ground beneath their feet.
The darkness was as thick as ink. Only a faint, swaying yellow light seeped through from ahead. Oppressive and cramped, it felt as if every step was taking them toward the gates of hell.
After walking several dozen meters, the passage suddenly opened up!
A massive "market," transformed from the underground space of the abandoned factory, abruptly crashed into view!
The space was extraordinarily vast. Rust-covered steel beams formed the ceiling, from which hung several dim spotlights that buzzed incessantly, their insufficient power casting unsteady patches of yellow light.
The air was even more polluted. All kinds of smells had blended and fermented together into a nauseating stench.
People! Dense crowds of people!
They surged through the dim light like swarms of ants.
There were lone wanderers in battered leather jackets with savage eyes; gang members gathered in groups of three or five, speaking in low voices with bulging waists; mysterious figures wrapped in black robes whose faces could not be seen; and even people dressed like relatively respectable merchants, though their eyes were just as wary... All kinds of people from every walk of life were mixed together in this chaotic place!
The stalls were even more varied, crammed haphazardly across the uneven concrete floor.
All kinds of cold weapons were on sale: from rust-covered machetes and mountain-cleaving axes to alloy daggers that gleamed with a frigid light, steel knuckle-dusters, and even several long and short swords of antique design, their blades marked by dark blood grooves.
Stones of different colors and irregular shapes were piled haphazardly on the stalls. Most were dull gray fragments of low-grade Energy Stones with barely perceptible energy fluctuations, yet they were priced outrageously high. Occasionally, a few slightly larger pieces with somewhat brighter colors would attract greedy gazes at once.
There were all kinds of strange bottles and jars. The medicine bottles were labeled "Bone Tempering Powder," "Great Strength Pill," and "Qi Recovery Water." Their colors were bizarre, their smells pungent, and it was impossible to tell the genuine from the fake.
There were also people selling information and recruiting desperate criminals. From somewhere in a corner came faint, suppressed moans and the smell of blood. It seemed to be a place that handled "special services."
Shouts of vendors, haggling, low threats and curses, women's exaggerated laughter, and the indistinct clanging of metal from the corners... All kinds of noisy, grating sounds gathered into a dizzying roar that battered their eardrums.
Chaos! Disorder! The naked law of survival of the fittest!
Lin Xiao stood in the shadows at the entrance, the pupils beneath his brim suddenly contracting!
For the first time, he so directly sensed that outside the order of mainstream society, there existed such a bizarre and perilous underground world of Martial Artists!
There were no laws here, no morality—only strength and profit!
The air was thick with brutality, greed, and bloodshed that could erupt at any moment!
The modifier ability he had once taken pride in, the power that had allowed him to cripple Zhao Hu, seemed pathetically insignificant here!
He could sense at least a dozen gazes, cold as venomous snakes, sweeping over him and Fatty Wang, the two "new faces," carrying undisguised scrutiny and malice.
The auras emitted by the owners of those gazes were far more dangerous than Zhao Hu's!
Several of them even caused the modifier interface in his mind to ripple faintly as it displayed the targets' threat level: Moderate!
Source Energy Points! In that instant, his longing for Source Energy Points spread through every inch of his body like a wildfire!
Even when he saw the fragments of Energy Stones piled on those stalls—the lowest-grade ones—his eyes could not help turning red!
In his eyes, those fragments were no longer stones. They were pieces of "life" that could fill his spiritually exhausted soul, keep him alive, and make him stronger!
"Brother... Brother Xiao, I... I can't quite breathe..."
Fatty Wang's face was deathly pale, his voice trembling. His fat body pressed tightly against Lin Xiao's, almost shrinking into a ball.
The atmosphere here made him feel as though he had fallen into a piranha pond.
Lin Xiao forced himself to calm down, suppressing the churning desire and apprehension.
He tugged at the brim, hiding his face even deeper in the shadows, and said in a low voice, "Don't look around. Stay with me, and don't talk."
Like a genuine old streetwise hand from the bottom rung, he hunched his back slightly and walked with a deliberately careless, languid drag, blending into the surging crowd.
His gaze appeared to sweep casually over the stalls on either side, but in truth it was like the most precise radar, searching for anything that might contain energy while remaining alert to malice coming from all directions.
He saw several slightly larger fragments of Energy Stones on one stall, glowing with a faint earthy-yellow radiance. They were priced at "fifty thousand each."
The stall owner was a burly man with a face full of jowls and a missing front tooth. He was spitting as he haggled with a black-robed man.
In another corner, he saw a hunched stall owner wearing a bird-beak mask. Only a few inconspicuous, rust-covered metal fragments and a fist-sized strange stone sat before him. Black mist seemed to circulate inside the stone, and it radiated an intensely unpleasant, bone-chilling aura.
Lin Xiao's gaze lingered on the black stone for an instant. The modifier interface in his mind suddenly rippled violently and displayed a prompt: High-concentration foreign energy source detected... Extremely dangerous... Unable to analyze...!
Lin Xiao's heart jolted violently, and he hurriedly shifted his gaze away.
He also saw a woman dressed provocatively and wearing heavy makeup leaning beside a stall selling "special medicines." She winked seductively at passing Martial Artists, but her eyes were like poison-tempered hooks.
Beside her stood a tall, thin man with a gaze as sinister as a hawk's. A cold, murderous aura radiated from him. When his eyes swept over Lin Xiao, the hairs on the back of Lin Xiao's neck instantly stood on end! Target threat level: High!
"Damn it..." Lin Xiao cursed inwardly, resisting the urge to immediately put as much distance as possible between himself and that area.
Just as he was cautiously observing his surroundings, a commotion and suppressed screams suddenly erupted ahead!
A stall had been overturned, scattering its goods all over the ground.
A young man in a tattered martial arts uniform, his face swollen and bruised, was being trampled and kicked by two burly men covered in vicious tattoos. Blood foam kept spilling from the young man's mouth as he let out anguished moans.
"Damn it! You dared sell fake goods on my turf? You're tired of living!"
A leader-looking man with a scarred face and a fierce aura—close to the peak of a One-Star Martial Artist—held a cigarette between his teeth. He stomped viciously on the young man's chest, producing a teeth-grating crack of breaking bone!
The young man screamed once, then fell completely silent, his life or death unknown.
The people around them watched with indifference. Some even snickered quietly, as if this were something they saw every day.
Several people who looked like patrolmen, dressed in identical black vests, sauntered over. They glanced at the "trash" on the ground, then at the scarred leader. They actually nodded and said something before ignoring the matter and walking straight away.
Survival of the fittest! Human lives were as worthless as grass!
That scene struck Lin Xiao's heart like an icy hammer!
It also smashed into Fatty Wang's already collapsing nerves!
Fatty Wang's legs went limp, and he nearly collapsed. Lin Xiao caught him with one hand.
"Let's go!" Lin Xiao's voice carried unprecedented gravity and coldness.
He pulled the trembling Fatty Wang through the crowd and hurried toward a relatively quiet corner.
Standing in the shadows beside a pile of discarded tires, Lin Xiao's heart was still pounding violently.
It was not fear, but anger! Helplessness!
And an even more blazing desire that had been ignited!
Strength! Without strength, he was nothing here but the next piece of "trash" to be trampled beneath someone's feet!
He would not even qualify to become a source of Source Energy Points!
He gazed at this chaotic, bloody underground world, one filled with tremendous temptation. Beneath the shadow of his brim, his eyes were like a volcano on the verge of eruption, filled with savage greed and icy resolve.
"Fatty," he said in a low voice, with a faint hoarseness that was difficult to detect, "go back and tell Skinny Monkey to find out for me where the cheapest and most reliable source of Energy Stones is here!"
His gaze, almost tangible, locked firmly onto the few stalls in the distance selling fragments of low-grade Energy Stones.
Source Energy Points! As soon as possible! At any cost!
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