She had kept smiling the whole time, and was nowhere near as fragile as she looked. Xu Huo could tell this wasn't a choice she'd made out of desperation. She'd planned to do this from the very beginning.
"First, you dragged the Chief Political Officer into this. Then you tried to bring both the General Political Office and the government under your thumb. Whether those steps succeeded wasn't that important. They were meant to divert attention. The real plan was to open the fungal nest and infect everyone in the city." He looked at Lang Lang. "You've been preparing for a long time, haven't you?"
Lang Lang looked up at the mycelium above them. "Almost twenty years. When my family and I were thrown into the quarantine zone, I survived by hiding in a crack underground. Later, I crawled along the fissures, eating the fungi in the tunnels whenever I got hungry. Somehow, I survived."
"My family and my uncle's family—Lang Lang's father's family—numbered dozens of people. They slowly died off. Only a few children hid underground and escaped the Aliens and the other infected who were hunting them," Xin Hui said. "Later, we discovered that this fungal nest was far larger than the General Political Office had mapped, and that it was still growing. That was when I realized the fungi had already spread beneath Clown City. They just hadn't come out into the open yet."
"Clown City took precautions, too, reinforcing the ground with Metal Plates. The reason Clown City was built the way it is was that those who knew the truth had deliberately stretched the city upward to keep it away from the ground. And given how deep the underground nest was, even if the fungi corroded the hardest rock, Clown City wouldn't be buried right