Later that same day.
The gray fog hung thick, and the wind wailed.
At the end of the northern bone slope in Liver Region H-114514, [Tom Pie] lay against the bitterly cold edge of a cliff, spat out a mouthful of bloody grit, and narrowed his eyes at the dead ground below.
The third scarlet coordinate on his map lay right beneath him.
Deep in the sludge of the Deep Chasm Rift, a frail glimmer of dark gold flickered in and out of sight.
But the instant that light emerged, a surge of foul black water poured down from the cliff above, splashing viciously over it like a bucket of murky tar!
Sssss—!
The shrill hiss of toxic corrosion rang out as fine, gray-white foam churned wildly.
The thin membrane of divine flesh instinctively curled inward in agony. Only after the wave of black water had washed over it did it stubbornly pry open another tiny slit in the mud, struggling to breathe.
The sneer on [Tom Pie]'s face slowly froze.
"Well, damn... the first two were stealing its food. This one's pouring arsenic straight into its bowl?"
He squinted and traced the black water back to its source.
An open drainage channel ran down the dead-shell slope towering hundreds of meters above him. Its sewage should have flowed into an abandoned trench below, but several huge pieces of collapsed, weathered shell had jammed the outlet shut. As the water piled higher, the backed-up poison spilled over the rocky lip like a waterfall, repeatedly scouring the tender flesh of the newly revived divine body.
Two enormous creatures resembling armored centipedes lurked at the very edge of the overflow.
Nearly four meters long, they had countless pairs of hooked legs sunk deep into cracks in the rock. Mouthparts on their long