London's underground world was a vast, festering underbelly beneath the gleaming surface of this great city.
This Victorian engineering marvel, designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette and considered one of the era's proudest achievements, was like a network of capillaries burrowing deep underground. It carried away the filth of the city above, while giving rise to countless unseen darknesses.
After Sergeant William used a crowbar to force open the rusted iron grate of the drainage channel, a wave of stale, murky air erupted from the lightless opening.
Marcus, who had followed them the whole way to "observe," couldn't help wrinkling his nose at the smell.
"Damn, this insurance money won't be easy to earn. Barton's screwed me again," he muttered, but still dutifully stood guard outside the entrance.
His job was to meet them aboveground and make sure their movements went unnoticed by idle passersby from the Surface World.
Lin Jie was the first to light his portable carbide lamp without hesitation.
Its steady, bright white beam pierced the darkness, illuminating a narrow passage just wide enough for one person to crouch through.
Green moss and some kind of slimy fungus clung to the walls, while a layer of foul-smelling wastewater ran across the floor.
"I'll go first," William said tersely, breaking his silence. He took the carbide lamp from Lin Jie.
Holding the lamp in one hand and his long-barreled Colt Revolver in the other, he crouched and entered the passage first.
Lin Jie followed close behind, gripping his Heart of Serenity tightly.
The moment he was fully inside the passage, a bone-deep chill from underground seeped through his clothes and crept across every inch of his skin.
The darkness here was unlike the night aboveground.
It was purer, more oppressive.
The two of them moved slowly through the labyrinthine sewers, one behind the other.
William took the lead, scouting and keeping watch. His battle-honed eyes could spot the slightest trace of anything out of place.
Lin Jie, meanwhile, immersed himself completely in the unique perception granted by Touch of Afterimage. Like a moving sonar, he tracked the increasingly distinct "echo of intent" coming from the Gremlins' nest.
"Take the passage on the left," Lin Jie said, his voice echoing through the narrow tunnel. "That 'intent'... that urge to 'build' is coming from that direction."
William didn't hesitate. He immediately turned into the left passage.
After seeing Lin Jie's ability proven in the warehouse, he had come to trust the young man's uncanny "intuition" instinctively.
In this unknown underground world, the young man's "perception" was far more reliable than his own eyes.
As they ventured deeper, their surroundings grew more and more complicated.
They passed through a main drain as large as a church dome, where rushing wastewater rose high enough to submerge a person's shins.
Huge mutated rats that lived underground occasionally darted past their feet, letting out unnerving squeaks.
At a bend, William's hand holding the lamp suddenly stopped. He made a tactical hand signal: "Halt."
Lin Jie immediately held his breath.
Following the beam of William's lamp, he saw pieces of cloth scattered across the ground, their original color lost to the wastewater, along with a rusted brass button.
William crouched and carefully nudged the pieces of cloth aside with his gun barrel.
Beneath them lay several dried, dark brown bloodstains and some white bones gnawed down to scraps.
"It's Billy." William pointed at the button. "A uniform button from a Night Watcher at the United Spice and Textile Company. We've found our first missing man."
Lin Jie looked at the pitiful remains, his heart heavy.
It confirmed his suspicion: the missing Night Watchers had been dragged into the Gremlins' underground kingdom. They might have been offered up as sacrifices—or perhaps the Gremlins had simply disposed of them as "obstacles."
"They're not carnivorous UMAs," Lin Jie said, studying the fine gnaw marks on the bones as he calmly analyzed the scene. "These marks look more like they were left by the mutated rats living underground. The Gremlins killed him, then abandoned him here."
William nodded in agreement.
The young man's composure impressed him once again.
After witnessing such a gruesome sight, he had shown neither fear nor discomfort. Instead, he had immediately extracted useful clues and analyzed them logically.
That kind of mental fortitude was unlike that of a rookie just starting out.
"He should have something on him that we're interested in," Lin Jie said.
He put on a leather glove he had gotten from Barton and began carefully searching through the remains.
Soon, he found what he was looking for: a ring of keys, partly ruined by the wastewater, and an equally soaked, battered notebook.
Lin Jie opened the notebook. The writing inside was blurred beyond recognition, but at the bottom of one page he found a line of hurried writing, pressed so deeply into the paper that it had survived: "...noisy monkeys... clock thieves... they fear... Grandfather's..."
The rest of the writing was completely illegible.
"Grandfather's?" Lin Jie frowned. What did that mean?
"Music box," William suddenly said.
Lin Jie looked at him in confusion.
"When I was young, I worked as a porter at the docks for a few years," William said, a distant memory creeping into his voice. "The old men around there, especially the sailors who fought in the Battle of Trafalgar, liked to carry music boxes shaped like anchors."
"They were their pride, and the only comfort they had in their later years. They called those music boxes 'Old Captain's Lullaby.' I think Billy's 'Grandfather's' probably referred to one of those."
Lin Jie's eyes lit up.
William's seemingly offhand remark matched perfectly with the I.A.R.C. handbook's account of the Gremlins' weakness: their "dislike of regular sounds."
That poor Night Watcher, Billy, had probably discovered the monsters' secret in his final moments, but hadn't been able to pass it on.
Now, they had unearthed that long-buried clue.
"We've found the 'Silver Bullet' we need to deal with them." Lin Jie carefully put away the battered notebook. It might prove unexpectedly useful at a critical moment.
They continued onward, and their surroundings grew stranger by the minute.
Bizarre, meaningless "totems," assembled from brass, tin, and assorted scraps of metal, began to appear on the walls.
Clock parts, taken apart and scattered, "grew" from cracks in the walls like vines.
They also saw a massive mechanical contraption made of countless interlocking gears, turning slowly, powered entirely by the underground current.
The air here was thick with the Gremlins' intense urge to "build."
Lin Jie knew they were very close to the heart of the nest.
Just then, Lin Jie's unique Afterimage perception picked up something unusual.
It wasn't from the Gremlins. It was a powerful, human negative emotion—one that spoke of "resentment" and "despair."
"Wait!" Lin Jie called sharply to William, who was walking ahead. "There's something up ahead. It's not a Gremlin. It's something else. I can feel... immense malice."
At once, William raised his gun and went on alert, directing the carbide lamp's beam into the unknown darkness.
At the end of the passage, on a huge "throne" piled high with discarded parts and scrap metal, sat a... no, three human-shaped figures, bound tightly together with metal wire.
They were the other missing Night Watchers.
Only, they were no longer alive.
The insane Gremlins had subjected their bodies to inhuman "mechanical modifications."
Their arms had been replaced with twisted brass pipes, their chests had been cut open and stuffed with ticking clock parts, and their eyes had been replaced by two crystal lenses glowing with an eerie red light.
They were dead, but the souls imprisoned in their mechanical bodies had been transformed by immense pain and hatred into something far more terrifying and dangerous.
Mechanical Wraiths, driven by both clockwork and resentment, and filled with a dual hatred for the living and for machines!
When the carbide lamp's light fell on them, all three modified corpses stiffly raised their heads at once.
Pain shone in their crystal-modified eyes, along with undisguised murderous intent toward Lin Jie and William, the two intruders.
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