The following night, while the hunters were still basking in the joy of the Apocalypse having been stopped, Wu Heng had already quietly left the guild.
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, outskirts.
Moonlight lay over the wilderness like a layer of deathly white frost. The wind passed through the withered grass, whispering with a faint hiss.
This place was five miles from the nearest highway and even farther from the nearest home. No one had set foot here in twenty years; even wild animals went around it.
Wu Heng stood amid waist-high dead grass, frozen earth beneath his feet.
Three hundred meters ahead of him stood a building.
Or rather, something that had once been a building.
Its steel frame jutted through the concrete walls like the ribs of some enormous beast. Most of the roof had collapsed, the windows were nothing but pitch-black holes, and on the crooked sign by the entrance, a few faded letters could still barely be made out: "Sioux Falls Meat Processing Plant—1947–1978."
The factory had died in a pollution scandal.
The groundwater had been contaminated by slaughterhouse waste and chemicals. Residents from three surrounding towns had filed a class-action lawsuit, the factory had gone bankrupt, its equipment auctioned off, and the building abandoned. Forty years of wind and rain had turned it into a festering sore in the wilderness.
It had stood here all this time, as though it had always belonged.
Wu Heng's eyes glimmered faintly in the darkness. It was not reflected light, but a film of demonic power forming over his pupils, allowing him to see things ordinary people could not.
He saw the currents of energy surging beneath the warehouse foundation.
Like subterranean river currents, pale-yellow, viscous energy flowed slowly along some ancient network. Wherever it passed, the soil had crystallized