The past

Inside the deathly silent room, the fish heads packed across the ceiling had stopped crying out. In perfect unison, they stared at the human face embedded in the wall.

"A corpse..."

Lu Mingwang studied it for a moment, then raised his weapon and went back to smashing the wall.

Soon, the face grew clearer and clearer.

The nose, mouth, eyes, eyebrows... each feature emerged before the three of them.

Those hollow, lifeless eyes in particular seemed to be watching them. The liquid seeping from the concrete was nothing other than fluid from the decomposing corpse.

"Ye, I think it's Zhang Jian..."

The words gave him a fright as soon as he said them.

Hadn't Zhang Jian become an Aberrant? Hadn't he come after them through the network cable?

How could he be inside the wall?

"Keep digging," Xu Ye said in a low voice.

Bang, bang, bang!

As time passed, scraps of gray fabric came into view as well. They were Zhang Jian's clothes.

Then his hands, feet, and body emerged.

But his torso had been cut completely open, exposing his intact heart, lungs, ribs, bladder, stomach, and other organs.

The sight was particularly horrifying.

Zhang Rongxuan was scared witless.

He had lived here for three years. Didn't that mean he had been sharing a room with a corpse every day?

Fuck!

Lu Mingwang came from a family of doctors and had been accustomed to seeing corpses since childhood. He was only a little surprised now. "If I remember right, this apartment building was built ten years ago. From the look of him, he was sealed inside the wall during construction."

"But there have been signs of him being active in the outside world throughout those ten years."

"His manifestation ability, combined with being sealed in concrete and his own pollution and Aberration, has greatly slowed his corpse's decomposition." Li Yunyao's voice came through their earpieces.

"We just questioned Zhang Jian's neighbor. They said he's been staying home all these years, and his wife divorced him too. We searched his household trash and found no food at all. There wasn't even any hair or dandruff in his home."

"We can be certain those were all manifestations produced after his Aberration."

"The one inside the wall is the real him."

"I'll have someone pull the records from ten years ago."

Because of the pollution and the lack of air and moisture inside the wall, Zhang Jian's face was still clearly recognizable. It merely had a few more patches of lividity and wrinkles, shriveled like a blackened banana.

"This should be the Pollution Source."

Xu Ye stood up.

"Hey, wake up. Stop pretending. I know you're still conscious. Let's talk."

Xu Ye aimed his gun at him.

No reaction?

He fired a shot into Zhang Jian's heart. Corpse fluid instantly splattered everywhere.

Lu Mingwang stared at Xu Ye as though he were a monster, huddling beside the bed just like Zhang Rongxuan.

Xu Ye gave an unhurried sneer, extended a tentacle, and slapped Zhang Jian hard across the face several times. "If you don't talk, I'll have someone post your chat logs, search history, and those terabytes of 'study materials' from over a decade ago online for everyone to see."

"???"

Zhang Rongxuan gave Lu Mingwang a strange look. "How is your teammate more demonic than a ghost?"

Lu Mingwang gave him a look that said, "You get used to it."

Just then, the corpse embedded in the wall began to tremble. Powder showered down like flour passing through a sieve. As he woke, the crucian carp on the ceiling withdrew their heads.

His internal organs seemed to come alive, beginning to contract.

Even his eyes flared with vitality.

With his current strength, Xu Ye could handle an Aberrant who had yet to undergo even one further Aberration with ease.

He pressed a tentacle against Zhang Jian's neck and asked, "Name? Address? Age?"

Zhang Jian looked at the young man before him, then down at the tentacle pressed against his neck. He answered cautiously, "Sir, my name is Zhang Jian. I'm twenty, and I live in Deer Alley."

His thoughts were clear, and his speech was coherent, but his memory seemed to be faulty. He should have been thirty; some of his memories were still stuck ten years in the past.

"No, no, no!"

"My name is Zhang Jian. I'm thirty! My home is gone, my company is gone! I'm dead! Someone murdered me!"

He suddenly noticed his body and where he was, and began screaming hysterically. With each anguished cry, countless fish heads emerged from the wall.

Their mouths gaped as they sucked up Zhang Jian's blood from inside the wall.

Smack!

Xu Ye slapped him several times with his tentacle, then swept down a swath of fish heads.

Dozens of severed fish heads thudded to the floor and flopped about.

"Calm down and talk properly. Tell us exactly what happened, from the beginning."

Zhang Jian flinched. After stammering for a long while, he finally spoke. "My name is Zhang Jian. When I was twenty, my parents died in an accident and left me a sewage treatment plant."

"But I discovered that the plant barely treated the sewage at all, which had severely degraded the water downstream. I had a sense of justice too. I knew my parents had been unscrupulous about making money, so I decided right away to start treating the sewage properly..."

"After that..."

"My memories get muddled. I only remember that something happened, and I went bankrupt. My family fell apart, and I lost my purpose in life. Every day, I stayed home playing games and reading novels to pass the time. Sometimes I traded insults with people online."

"Then I woke up, and I was like this."

Xu Ye pondered for a moment.

Li Yunyao had found the records as well. "Xu Ye, what he said is true, and the timeline matches. But we don't know why he ended up inside this wall. Pollution may have disrupted his behavior. An Aberrant's abilities and actions can sometimes be extremely unpredictable."

"However, one of the sewage treatment plant's current shareholders did surprise me."

"Han Li."

"Who?" Xu Ye asked.

"Andre's mother, the wife of the nobleman An Lu. She's the sewage treatment plant's largest shareholder," Li Yunyao said.

"This matter ends here. We only handle pollution incidents. Disputes over financial interests like this, especially those involving nobles, aren't under our jurisdiction."

Xu Ye grunted in acknowledgment.

The law did not punish nobles.

Everyone in Sky City knew that.

"Still, the chain of cause and effect behind this pollution incident isn't hard to work out."

"Zhang Jian had always disapproved of his parents' actions. Combined with the failure of his business and family, that turned him into a mass of negative energy after his death, filled with resentment toward reality, hatred, guilt..."

"When that energy spilled out, it affected his surroundings."

"That's what caused the abnormal conditions around the apartment building."

"But he instinctively believed he was still alive, so he manifested himself and carried on living as usual, until we discovered him."

"And those fish contaminated by sewage were manifestations of his own as well."

"..."

Xu Ye stared at Zhang Jian embedded in the wall. He seemed to have no desire to attack.

His brow furrowed deeply. Something wasn't right.

He had a nagging feeling that something was missing.