The four of them reached a corner.
Leike walked at the front, his insectile tendrils silently extending along the edge of the Copper Wall.
The Marching Lamp's light swept over, illuminating a fork to the left.
Lu Yuan saw it.
The fork led to the bottom of a sealed vertical shaft.
The shaft was not very tall, only around four or five meters, with its top blocked by Copper Plates and rubble.
It was filled with Ghoul corpses.
Great Ghouls and smaller Ghouls were piled atop one another, stacked from the bottom of the shaft all the way to its middle.
The corpses interlocked, their keratinous layers gripping limbs as though they had been deliberately arranged into a crude staircase.
The corpses' surfaces were shriveled, as if all moisture had been drained from within.
Their keratinous layers had collapsed against the outlines of their bones, their skin stretched so tight it was nearly transparent.
The air was thick with the scent of death, trapped within the shaft, but there was no stench of decay.
Lu Yuan frowned.
No stench meant that the Flesh inside the corpses had all been Extracted.
The aura of death itself repelled living Ghouls, which was why this stretch of the Pipe Network had been unusually quiet all along.
Bolen spoke when he saw this.
"Using Ghoul corpses to build stairs leading upward, while using the smell of death to drive away living Ghouls and keep them from approaching."
He paused.
"Two birds with one stone."
Klaus offered no comment.
His gaze swept over the shriveled corpses, his expression unchanged.
Leike's tendrils withdrew from the gaps in the keratinous layers of several Great Ghouls.
"Something is gestating inside these corpses. It's weak, but its aura is unusual."
His tendrils hovered above the pile of corpses for