Fallen Paradise

The wind howled, scraping at their ears like ten thousand knives.

Li Wei felt as if he were flying, or rather, falling like a stone.

The acceleration of gravity beneath him made his heart leap into his throat, and countless shards of shattered reinforced glass enveloped him like a diamond rain.

"Grab on!!" Amidst the chaos, Aurelia's gloved hand seized Li Wei's collar in a death grip.

At that moment, they were hundreds of meters below the outer wall of the Crown of Atalos.

This was the Sky Garden—a colossal terrace ecosystem built against the outer wall of the spire.

Bang! Crash!

The two of them slammed heavily into a massive, genetically modified ornamental broadleaf tree.

The dense foliage acted as a cushion, but the tremendous impact still left Li Wei bruised and battered.

He felt as though he had been tossed into a washing machine on spin cycle, then spat out mercilessly onto the ground.

"Cough, cough, cough..." Li Wei curled up on the thick turf, feeling as though his ribs were about to break.

If not for the impact-resistant ceramic fibers lining that damned velvet gown, he would likely be a puddle of minced meat right now.

"Get up!" Aurelia's voice remained calm, despite her hair being disheveled and a gash on her forehead leaking blood down her cold, striking face.

She didn't bother wiping the blood; instead, she immediately raised her bolt pistol, aiming vigilantly upward.

Li Wei struggled to his feet and looked up.

The sight was both spectacular and terrifying.

Several hundred meters above, the breach they had smashed through was billowing with thick black smoke.

The fires of the banquet hall cast a ruddy glow over the pitch-black night sky above.

And along that vertical, mirror-smooth alloy outer wall, a dense cluster of black dots was rapidly moving downward.

Those weren't riot police rappelling. Those were monsters crawling.

More than a dozen hybrid acolytes relied on their razor-sharp bone claws to adhere to the vertical surface like geckos.

They defied gravity, their movements outrageously agile as they emitted piercing screeches and closed in on the terrace garden at high speed.

"They're coming for us," Li Wei gritted his teeth, drawing the las pistol from his waist. "Those things are even more nimble on walls than on the ground!"

"This is the garden district, the terrain is complex." Aurelia swiftly scanned their surroundings. "Run east! My private shuttle pad is over there!"

The two of them broke into a mad sprint.

This place was supposed to be a paradise for nobles to admire flowers and tryst.

A massive fountain sprayed water mist laced with fluorescent agents, glowing exotic plants swayed in the night wind, and exquisite marble statues stood along the paths.

Tonight, however, it had become a hunting ground.

Hisss—! One of the fastest hybrids had already given chase.

It leaped fiercely from a pillar tens of meters high with astonishing explosive power, its target locked squarely on Li Wei, who was running in the rear.

"Damn it!" Li Wei instinctively turned back and raised his gun.

Before firing, however, a realization suddenly struck him.

The reason these monsters could walk as smoothly on vertical walls as on flat ground was because they possessed extraordinary coordination and a sense of balance.

And this coordination relied heavily on the biological instinct granted by the broodmind.

They were perfect biological machines.

Yet this machine feared interference.

Li Wei did not fire.

He halted, spun around, and stared fiercely at the monster gliding and lunging toward him through midair.

"Get down!!" Li Wei roared in his heart, unleashing his void field to the absolute limit.

The moment the monster flew within ten meters of Li Wei, connection severed.

The crash phenomenon that had occurred in the banquet hall manifested once more.

The monster's movements stiffened for a fraction of a second in midair.

A flicker of confusion crossed its compound eyes, much like someone walking a tightrope suddenly having a blindfold thrown over their face.

Its sense of balance vanished.

Its limbs lost that perfect synchronization.

Its originally precise pouncing trajectory deviated.

It failed to pounce on Li Wei, instead flying past his shoulder like a heavy stone.

Bang! It slammed hard into a marble angel statue behind Li Wei.

The statue's sharp wings pierced directly through its chest.

The monster hung from the statue, purple blood gushing forth as its limbs twitched a few times before going still.

"It works!" Joy surged in Li Wei's heart. This was basically an anti-air jammer!

"Don't stop! There's a whole bunch more behind us!" Aurelia fired backward, blowing the head off another monster attempting to close in before grabbing Li Wei. "Move!"

The two of them plowed through the maze-like shrubbery.

The screeches behind them grew closer. Even though Li Wei could disrupt them, their numbers were overwhelming; once surrounded, no amount of interference could stop them from being hacked to pieces.

Finally, they burst through to the eastern edge of the garden.

There, a suspended landing pad held a streamlined silver private shuttle.

"Praise the Emperor!" Li Wei felt as though he had seen salvation.

Yet before they could even approach, boom!

A rocket soared up from the terrace above, striking the shuttle with pinpoint accuracy.

A fireball erupted into the air. The massive shockwave blasted the two of them flat onto the ground.

That expensive shuttle instantly turned into a burning heap of scrap metal, sliding off the pad and plunging into the fathomless abyss below.

"...There's no way out." Li Wei lay on the ground, staring at the ball of fire as his heart turned ice-cold.

"They blew the retreat. That bastard Valerius wants to trap us here to die."

An abyss ahead, pursuers behind.

In the shadows of the garden, a growing number of purple eyes lit up.

Those genestealers did not rush to attack; instead, like a pack of wolves hunting, they slowly tightened their encirclement.

They were waiting. Waiting for the prey to despair, or waiting for the patriarch's command.

Aurelia climbed up from the ground, wiping the blood from the corner of her mouth.

She looked at the burning landing pad, her gaze devoid of despair, holding only a near-manic calmness.

"Since we can't fly out—" Aurelia turned, looking toward an unassuming little shack in the corner of the garden.

It was a maintenance shed used for storing gardening tools and fertilizer.

"—then we get flushed out like garbage."

"What do you mean?" Li Wei was stunned.

"Who am I?" Aurelia retorted. "You're a noble... or the waste management director."

"Right." Aurelia hauled Li Wei up by the collar and sprinted toward the maintenance shed. "Every corner of this hive city has two systems."

"One is elevators and corridors meant for the living."

"The other is gravity pipelines used to flush corpses, waste, and sewage down to the bottom tier."

She kicked open the door of the maintenance shed.

Inside were piles of shovels and fertilizer sacks. Yet in the corner of the room sat a massive, circular metal hatch marked with striking skull insignias and extreme danger warning labels.

"This is the discharge well leading straight to the corpsestarch plant." Aurelia forcefully turned the rusted handwheel.

Creak— The hatch swung open.

A sickening stench, mixed with howling gales, spewed forth from the pitch-black opening.

Li Wei peered down.

Bottomless. He could only hear the roaring wind, resembling the throat of hell itself.

"Jump down this?!" Li Wei's face turned green. "This has to be thousands of meters deep! We'll be smashed into meat paste!"

"This is a gravity pipeline," Aurelia explained. "It has an anti-gravity buffer field inside to prevent garbage from smashing through the processing plant before hitting the bottom. It'll be dizzying and miserable, but we won't die."

At that moment, dense footsteps echoed from outside the maintenance shed.

Several robust hybrid acolytes had reached the doorway, their sharp claws ripping the wooden door apart.

"No time to hesitate." Aurelia glanced at Li Wei. "Trust me. When it comes to garbage disposal, I'm a professional."

Without another word, she clutched her head and plunged headfirst into the dark hole.

"Crazy bitch!" Li Wei cursed.

He glanced back at the ferocious monster that had already poked its head inside, and flipped it the middle finger. "Come on! If you've got the guts, jump down after me!"

Then, he closed his eyes and jumped in after her.

Weightlessness. Head-spinning chaos.

Li Wei felt as though his internal organs had all been flung out of place.

This was no comfortable anti-gravity buffer; this was basically tossing someone into a centrifuge!

Pitch black all around, he could only feel his body continuously accelerating, decelerating, then accelerating again. The shrieking of the wind filled his ears, while the stench of garbage filled his nose.

He knew not how long it lasted—perhaps a minute, perhaps an hour.

Just when Li Wei thought he was going to vomit himself to death mid-air, splash!

He landed in water.

Or rather, into a pool of viscous, lukewarm liquid.

Li Wei struggled to the surface, gasping heavily, only to inhale a mouthful of foul-tasting muck.

He wiped his face and opened his eyes.

The surroundings were dim, illuminated only by red emergency lights flashing on the walls.

This was a massive underground reservoir.

Yet water did not fill this place.

Li Wei lowered his head, aided by the red glow, and saw clearly what he was soaking in.

It was blood.

bloody water mixed with minced meat, bone shards, and some kind of solvent.

This was the raw material pool of the corpsestarch factory.

The trash that perished in the upper hive ultimately returned to the same destination, winding up right here to become rations for the inhabitants of the bottom hive.

"Ugh..." Li Wei finally failed to hold it back, leaning over the edge of the pool to retch.

"Welcome to my kingdom," a cold voice echoed.

Li Wei looked up.

He saw Aurelia standing on an iron gantry by the edge of the pool.

Her expensive gown was ruined, her entire body stained with gore, yet she still stood straight, looking down from on high at the wretched Li Wei.

She held a fire axe she had stripped from the wall.

Behind her stood rows of roaring meat grinders, along with countless corpses hanging from hooks, awaiting processing.

"House Atalos is finished," Aurelia gazed at the rusted axe in her hand, her eyes flickering with the flames of vengeance in the shadows.

"But as long as I still control the sewers of this city..." "...I'll show those monsters living in the clouds what filth really means."

Li Wei climbed out of the blood pool, collapsing onto the iron plating.

He looked at the blood-drenched woman, then at this hellish factory.

A sudden laugh escaped him.

"The Queen of Trash... I suppose we really are in the same boat now."