In the afternoon, beneath a gloomy sky, the distant wind carried over an unbroken stretch of dark clouds.
The stench of the open sewer spread through the sweltering air. Beyond the scarred wire fence, the empty lot was choked with weeds and thick pipes stripped of their paint.
The pumps and purification equipment in the enormous reservoirs still shrieked with piercing noise.
And atop the huge iron bridge between the machinery and pumps, only one figure remained, like a walking corpse.
"Finally found it."
Wen Wen expressionlessly pulled the key from her motorcycle, then looked up at the sign of the waterworks. "Source of Infection."
Now, the source of every Spirit Plague outbreak in North Mountain District—no, in all of Yacheng—seemed to have guarded against the Aether Chosen's investigation. The mastermind behind it had laid countless smokescreens, splitting the clues and sending them in different directions, only for them to come up empty again and again. It was not until Tong Hua had painfully endured a week of work that she finally pieced together the final direction from innumerable scattered traces.
Who could have imagined that the source of the pollution would be a waterworks that had long been abandoned and vanished from everyone's sight?
And that it would happen to sit on the edge of North Mountain District.
Songxiang Waterworks had been a tap-water company that went bankrupt decades ago. With the municipal budget scarce and delayed, it lost City Hall's support, became insolvent, and had long since had its sign taken down. But without a water company, people still had to drink water.
Especially with the vast numbers of unregistered residents and immigrants in the shantytowns throughout North Mountain District, some gang naturally took over the abandoned plant. After patching it together into a ramshackle mess, they used