Underground City

After breakfast, Daisy expressed her concerns about local public safety while chatting with the hotel attendant. The attendant recommended a gun store to her.

She spent eleven hundred dollars on two Glock 18s and two boxes of ammunition. The guns were easy to carry—one tucked into the small of her back, the other hidden in her backpack. In theory, they would be enough to handle ordinary trouble.

Over the next few days, she combed through local legends, stories, libraries, and online forums for clues about the ancient city.

She went to the San Juan Police Department for three consecutive days. According to her story, she had seen online that a couple had lost a girl here eighteen years ago, and she had come to find her biological parents by following the clues.

The police gave her American passport a second look and patiently cooperated with her search for three days.

The search for her parents was all a cover. Since Daisy had come to Puerto Rico openly, she needed to put on a convincing act. More importantly, she wanted to plant a Trojan horse in the police system.

She found the architectural layout of Old San Juan in the police database. Since she was not an architecture professional, she could not spot anything unusual in many places. Still, by combining it with her memories and making educated guesses, she found several key points.

Old San Juan had originally been called San Cristobal, a sturdy fortress built by the Spanish to control the Caribbean Sea. Over the long years, it had contributed greatly to resisting invasions by the Dutch, the English, and the Americans.

She could now confirm that the ancient Inhuman city lay deep beneath the old fortress.

For a large organization, gathering information to this point meant half the job was done. Next came clearing the site and digging deep with heavy machinery. As she remembered it, S.H.I.E.L.D. had used high-speed cutting machines, while Hydra had been even more extravagant, setting up plasma drills. Poor Daisy, on the other hand, did not even have a shovel, let alone helpers.

As for buying a shovel and digging a robbery tunnel herself, playing an American-European version of Tomb Raiders? No matter how she thought about it, it was unreliable...

The brute-force approach did not suit her.

Daisy plunged into the San Juan Library and searched through all kinds of documents. Pressure truly created motivation—her Spanish improved by leaps and bounds while she researched. Though she still stumbled over her words when speaking, reading and writing no longer posed much difficulty.

Among the local folk legends, she found a piece of information that sounded like an urban ghost story.

Legend said that there was a watchtower on the northern side of the fortress, facing the sea. For a long time, no one had dared to station guards there. Records listed eleven soldiers who had vanished, and local folklore claimed that an ancient demon lurked beneath the tower.

Daisy was a little scared. Did demons exist in the Marvel world? She knew they did, but they should not have been here.

The documents stated that the soldiers had vanished without a trace, neither alive nor dead. That meant there was a passage directly connecting to the Underground City. The soldiers had no Inhuman bloodline, so naturally, they had never returned.

For someone alone like her, this ghost story was actually good news.

August in Puerto Rico was scorching. San Juan was not a large city, and its streets were narrow. She did not see the streetwide shootouts she had imagined. The locals were peaceful, casually setting up parasols to sell things by the roadside, with no one stopping them.

Daisy bought supplies everywhere. She prepared some rope, a dagger, and several glow sticks. She remembered that the Underground City possessed a special magnetic field that could shut down all electronic devices. Many things would be useless, but she still brought a flashlight. It could still be useful at the beginning, even if only as a disposable item.

She also bought some compressed food and water. Things wrapped up in forty minutes on television, but in reality, there was no telling how long she would have to walk. It was an underground city, after all. Traveling on foot would surely take a long time.

Remembering the miserable experiences of military training back then, she bought a large pack of sanitary pads. They could be used as insoles, and now she could use them for their intended purpose too. In short, they were essential supplies...

The existing city map was of little help for the Underground City, but Daisy still drew a copy by hand and carried it with her. She left her laptop and phone at the hotel.

Daisy put on a beige shirt over her tank top and rolled up the sleeves. She wore jeans and sneakers below, a mechanical watch on her wrist, and had stuffed a jacket into her backpack. She looked unbearably hot dressed like that.

Still, she figured the Underground City would definitely be cold and filthy. It never hurt to be prepared.

After eating and drinking her fill, with everything ready and the obelisk in hand, she slipped into the watchtower rumored to be inhabited by a demon on a sunny afternoon.

She had no real counter-surveillance skills. Day and night made no difference to her. If someone followed her during the day, she might at least notice them.

She briskly turned onto a side path. The neglected watchtower had long fallen into ruin, without even a proper door.

The inside was covered in dust and felt chilly. She hurriedly put on her jacket.

Then she began searching with complete focus.

Before long, she found a hollow concealed beneath a pile of weeds. Holding up her pistol, she slowly descended the stone steps.

It was a wine cellar. The soldiers once stationed there must have been unwilling to endure the boredom. They had probably dug out this underground chamber specifically so they could drink here, storing their wine below.

She tapped the floor tiles and walls one by one. In the end, she found a deep hole at the bottom of the western wall. The last guard had likely sealed the breach, but the masonry was sloppy. She opened the entrance with only a few strikes.

Having read a few tomb-raiding novels, Daisy stood outside and waited for a while. Then she reached in to feel around. A faint current of air flowed between her fingers, carrying a trace of cool wind.

She tied her long hair into a ponytail, fitted the flashlight into a miner's helmet, and put it on. Then she carefully crawled down the passage.

The passage had been dug by the watchtower guards back then. Their intentions were not hard to guess. They had probably thought there was treasure below.

The passage was extremely narrow. Daisy crawled for an hour in a highly improper prone position. One word: exhausted!

Outdoor survival really was not friendly to women. She should have bought a sports bra instead of wearing an everyday bra. After crawling for an hour, the misery of it was beyond words.

Fortunately, the passage was not very long. After passing through a slope, the space before her suddenly opened up.

A deeper, smoother downward path appeared ahead.

As expected, her flashlight went out.

Covered in dust and grime, Daisy knew she had entered the bounds of the ancient Underground City.

Facing the pitch-black passage, she felt a silent fear, mixed with a faint trace of joy?

Instead of using a glow stick, she was inexplicably compelled to reach out and grasp the obelisk. Numerous orange-red lines emerged across its formerly mirror-smooth surface. Having spent several days studying San Juan's layout, she recognized at once that the lines formed a map. They eventually converged at a single point—her destination.

The obelisk was still glowing and warm. It sent Daisy a message: follow its guidance.

The feeling came from nowhere, but the obelisk's faint light allowed her to see her surroundings.

Not far from where she stood lay seven or eight skeletons. The moment they had entered the edge of the city, they had been controlled and had ultimately died there.

More bleached bones lay at the edge of her vision. Judging by the clothing, some had been Spanish soldiers, some indigenous people, and some small animals.

After getting her bearings, she began following the obelisk's guidance deeper into the city.