In the afternoon, a distant wind swept rolling dark clouds across the overcast sky.
The stench of the sewage ditch spread through the muggy air. Beyond the scarred wire fence, the vacant lot was overgrown with weeds and littered with thick pipes whose paint had peeled away.
The pumps and purification equipment in the massive reservoir still emitted shrill noise.
And between the machinery and the pumps, atop the huge iron bridge, there remained only a staggering figure, like a walking corpse.
"Finally found it..."
Wen Wen expressionlessly pulled the key from her motorcycle and looked up at the waterworks sign. "The source of the infection."
The source from which all Spirit Plague in the North Mountain District—no, throughout all of Yacheng—had spread...
Apparently wary of the Aether Chosen tracing them back, the mastermind behind the scenes had laid countless false trails, splitting the clues and sending them toward different locations. Yet they had repeatedly come up empty-handed, until Tong Hua spent a grueling week piecing together the final direction from countless tiny traces.
Who would have thought that the source of the contamination would be a waterworks that had long been decommissioned and vanished from everyone's sight?
And that it would happen to sit right at the edge of the North Mountain District.
Songxiang Waterworks had been a tap water company that went bankrupt decades ago. With municipal budgets scarce and delayed, it lost City Hall's support and became insolvent, its sign taken down long ago. But even without a water company, people still needed to drink—especially the vast number of unregistered residents and immigrants in the shantytowns scattered throughout the North Mountain District...
Naturally, some gang had taken over the abandoned waterworks. After patching it together in a haphazard fashion, they used illegally laid pipes and the long-abandoned