The steady, dull knocking was mixed with the piercing scrape of hard objects against metal, along with low, suppressed whimpers that seemed to come from deep within a throat.
They reached Ming Xin's senses intermittently through the thick, heavily rusted metal door.
The sounds were not loud, even somewhat muffled, but within this utterly silent abandoned chamber, they were as clear and chilling as a wolf's howl in the night.
Something was deep inside the long-abandoned Ventilation Shaft...? Something alive? Or strange noises caused by some mechanical malfunction?
Or had the derivatives of that abyssal contamination from before spread here through the pipe system?
Countless guesses flashed through Ming Xin's mind. He immediately stopped working on the valve.
He suppressed the presence of both himself and the fragment to the lowest possible level. Though the Stealth Suit's concealment light film consumed energy, he maintained its most basic coverage at full capacity.
At the same time, he carefully extended his heightened post-transformation senses toward the circular sealed door like an invisible spiderweb, trying to capture a clearer signal.
The knocking was not fast, occurring roughly once every five or six seconds. It had a mechanical regularity, yet would occasionally stop for several seconds, as if the knocker needed to catch its breath or adjust itself.
The scraping was even more irregular. Sometimes it accompanied the knocking, sometimes it sounded alone. It was dry and shrill enough to make one's teeth ache.
The whimpering was the strangest of all. It came and went, low and indistinct, impossible to decipher, yet it carried an indescribable pain and... despair?
It did not sound like pure mechanical noise, nor like the mindless roar of a monster.
It was more like... something with basic intelligence, yet trapped in extreme pain or distress, trying to send a