I don't really know how long I stayed in Granny Marta's clinic.
After all, this hellhole called "Hold Seven" has no day and night. It's buried inside the megastructure of Spirepeak City, and above us the layered metal canopy blocks out every trace of natural light. Time here feels like it's been forcibly pinned by an invisible hand at perpetual dusk.
Every sound around you loops and loops again: the distant thud of forge-presses, the nearer hiss of steam, and the shouting and cursing that never truly stops. None of it ever erupts into a sudden crescendo, and none of it ever fades into silence, either.
Back when I first arrived, I probably would've lost my mind over that ever-present sour stink. But now my sense of smell seems to have reached a grudging ceasefire with this environment. Unless something especially "punchy" drifts past to jab my nerves—fresh blood, or a three-days-rotten giant rat—most of the time I don't even register the acidic bite that sits in the air like a constant base note.
This little clinic—built from two abandoned carriage shells, plus all kinds of illegal add-ons and patchwork construction—looks shabby as hell, but its "business" is unbelievably good. It's like some bizarre crossroads that gathers the truest faces of lower-hive life. And yet it was also here that I saw something that existed outside the cold laws of steel.
There was a woman who always wrapped herself in a black veil, with the backs of her hands covered in burn scars. Every few days she would drift in like a ghost.
She never spoke, only silently placed a packet of strange medicinal powder wrapped in old newspaper on the counter, then bowed deeply to Granny Marta and left. Later I learned she was a "compounder" in some underground chemical workshop.
Constant exposure to highly toxic reagents had ruined her face. Granny Marta was the only person who didn't recoil from her, and the only one willing to treat her lung disease and drain the pus from her lungs.
That extremely horrifying "dentist" I'd seen before came by a few times as well. He brought Granny Marta small tools and implements made from teeth and bone. When he saw me, he split into a grin and chuckled, and that shark-like mouth full of screws scared me so badly I clamped my jaws shut—bite strength on par with a fully grown hyena.
One day, from the direction of the "back door," came the heavy scrape of metal being dragged. Five men wrapped in thick black cloth, built like bears, unloaded two enormous blue iron drums from a cart. Their surfaces were stamped with a faded double-headed eagle.
When the leader pulled off his respirator, I couldn't help it—I took a step back in fright. The skin on his entire face had turned into something eerie and semi-translucent. I could clearly see the dense network of blood vessels beneath it, pulsing like purple roots.
"Five antitoxin shots," he rasped, his voice like sandpaper grinding a rusted boiler. "Three brothers dropped again down South Alley. Those damned Ratclaws use poison."
Granny Marta took out five syringes filled with a dark red liquid and handed them over, then pointed at the two drums. "Stolen from the upper levels again?"
"Heh. Boss says it's called resource redistribution." The translucent-faced man grinned, showing a mouth of crooked, rotten teeth. "The fat pigs upstairs flush cleaner water than we drink. This was cut straight off Upper Pump Station Three. Filtered three times. Sweet as anything."
I hauled those two brutally heavy drums into the clinic's back kitchen, panting like an ox. Those gang types—faces like they could crush my skull one-handed—actually patted my shoulder when they left and stuffed a handful of some kind of dried plant fruit into my palm, saying, "Chew it. Keeps you sharp."
Only after their backs vanished at the end of the alley did Granny Marta finally scoop out a ladle of clear water from the drum—so clear it genuinely moved me—and explain, "That's the Blackfire Gang. They make their living killing and robbing, sure.
But if they didn't risk their lives stealing water down from the upper levels, half the poor bastards around here would've died of thirst already. Two drums of pure water like this? A normal household couldn't save up that much in a month."
I stared at that ladle of water shimmering with faint light, my feelings tangled into a knot.
In a hell a hundred times worse than nineteenth-century London slums, the line between good and evil has long since blurred into sludge.
Everyone is struggling to stay alive in this rotten mire. They look like ghosts on the outside, but peel back that terrifying shell and the grease-black grime, and what's often beating inside is a heart hotter than the ones in those well-dressed "important people" up above.
Granny Marta always did everything she could to save whoever came through the door, but a lot of the time she was helpless.
There was a one-eyed boy who always carried a cargo rack taller than he was, along with a scavenger's sack. That day, he brought his younger brother to the clinic on that rack—his brother's body was so mangled it barely looked human.
The skinny little frame was limp like an octopus, as if some heavy machinery or monstrous force had crushed every bone from top to bottom. Rumor said he'd been caught stealing and beaten by upper-hive enforcers.
Granny Marta worked for a while, but in the end she couldn't bring him back.
The boy didn't cry. He just placed several little blocks of bandages on the counter, stained with machine oil, folded neat and square—his only "consultation fee." Granny Marta said nothing, only quietly found a piece of relatively clean coarse cloth and helped him help wrap his brother's remains, tied it tight like a giant rice dumpling, then strapped it onto the rack on his back and let him stagger away with it.
...
One afternoon, the clinic's front room suddenly rang with dull impacts and a woman's desperate pleading. I craned my head to look. A withered old miner was pinned to a recliner by two men. His skin was leaden grey, his eyes cloudy.
Most horrifying of all, he was repeatedly smashing his forehead into an iron medicine cabinet—flesh shredded, blood everywhere—yet he showed no pain at all, like some terrifying command buried deep in his brain was puppeteering him.
His family weren't wailing. Their faces held only the dead calm of people whose grief had been ground down by suffering. They used every ounce of strength to restrain his body.
"…Too late." Granny Marta watched the old miner's ceaseless struggle with calm eyes and said to his family, "I warned him last week not to go back there, but he insisted on trading his life for money…" She sighed, produced a hollow needle ground from a tusk, and continued, "Lead poisoning has completely ruined his brain. All this desperate thrashing is just him trying to suppress pain you can't even describe…"
The haggard woman lowered her head, gently wiping the blood from his face, whispering into his ear, "Sleep, Armando… it won't hurt anymore… never again…"
Granny Marta drove the tusk-needle cleanly into the back of the miner's skull. With a soft pff of sound, his whole body went limp at once, and he fell completely still. The woman buried her face into his chest. Her silent grief was heavier than any screaming.
As Granny Marta carefully wiped the blood from that terrifying long needle, she turned to me and said, "Kid, you had lead poisoning when you first got here too. If those kids hadn't sucked you clean in time, you'd be just like him."
I instinctively touched my chest. Remembering those writhing, leech-like worms, a bone-deep chill of fear swallowed me whole. I finally understood what kind of abyss that savage, horrifying "witch-doctor medicine" had dragged me back from.
Here, death isn't solemn. It's as ordinary as eating and drinking.
I started learning how to live here.
Honestly, once you get past the psychological threshold—and as long as you aren't being dragged down by injury or illness—human adaptability is frighteningly strong.
The short hair I once took care to style has now grown into a messy bird's nest, and like my skin it's taken on the same kind of water-shedding quality most wild animals have—so oily it shines. Granny Marta said that was a good thing: "The oil on your hair and skin helps block all kinds of filth."
I wore a patched-overcoat riddled with repairs, smeared my face with Granny Marta's dust-proof grease that reeked like cured meat, and kept permanent black grime wedged under my fingernails no matter how I scrubbed.
Now, as long as I put on a face wrap and goggles and squat by a wall, I look exactly like some laborer in an old Qing Dynasty photograph. Who could still recognize me as a "fine gentleman" from a civilized world?
(End of Chapter)
[Get +30 Extra Chapters On — P@tr3on "Zaelum"]
[Every 300 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter Drop]
[Thanks for Reading!]