The roar of the Underhive Joyride's engine ceased at the edge of the Acid Swamp. Andy looked out the window through the bulletproof glass, the blue light in his electronic eyes flickering.
Something was wrong here. Very wrong.
In the past, the Acid Swamp was a place of deathly silence, save for the occasional pop of toxic bubbles or the whistle of wind through rusted iron frames. The Plague Doctors usually hid behind their black defensive walls, cold eyes scrutinizing every creature that approached. If a patient lacked money or value, they were promptly sent to have a "heart-to-heart" with the Flesh Golems.
But today, it was disturbingly lively.
Several massive field cauldrons had been set up at the camp gates. Chemical fuel blocks crackled beneath them, heating a thick, strangely neon-green broth. Hundreds of ragged refugees, covered in weeping sores, stood in long queues. Their faces bore a look of near-idiotic bliss.
Beside the cauldrons, the usually fierce Plague Doctors were actually working without gloves. With hands covered in pustules and festering red patches, they personally ladled out the broth to the refugees. As they served, they muttered incantations.
Andy turned up the external audio pickup.
"Drink, drink and the pain will vanish." "This is Grandfather's gift." "Feel the rhythm of life, praise the Great Cycle."
Gamma-9, sitting in the passenger seat, had been fiddling with his autogun. Hearing this, he shuddered violently, nearly misfiring his weapon.
"Her... Heresy!" Gamma-9's voice carried a distinct tremor. "Archmagos, that soup smells... ominous!"
Andy didn't speak. He silently increased the magnification of his visual sensors. He saw the state of the refugees clearly. An old man had a massive gangrenous wound on his leg, deep enough to see the bone. After taking a sip of the green soup, the wound didn't heal. Instead, the granulation tissue inside began to grow frantically, turning into writhing pink meatballs that filled the wound and eventually overflowed.
The old man seemed to feel no abnormality at all. On the contrary, he tossed away his crutch and danced in circles with a laugh, shouting that his leg was fixed.
Andy sighed. Nurgle.
The Chaos God of disease, decay, death, and rebirth—fondly called "Grandfather" by his followers. Nurgle's tenets were bizarre, perhaps the most deceptive of all. He didn't care for slaughter or intrigue. He focused solely on life itself. In Nurgle's eyes, decay was not the end, but the beginning of another form of life. The maggots growing on a corpse and the bacteria multiplying in a wound were all vibrant new lives.
When a person struggles in agony and despair, praying for a way to live on or to stop the pain at any cost, Nurgle casts his gaze upon them. He takes away your sense of pain, grants your flesh immortality through rot, and allows your spirit to find ecstasy in the joy of the virus. For those living in the hell of the Underhive, this "gift" was nearly impossible to refuse.
"It seems the mess the Helios Group made is even bigger than I imagined."
Andy pushed open the car door, his earthy-yellow hazmat suit fluttering in the wind. Helios's activities in the Underhive had destroyed the ecology, forcing the Iron Rust Brotherhood into starvation and depleting the Plague Doctors' medicinal supplies. To make matters worse, their massive chemical stores had been emptied by Andy.
Under extreme resource scarcity and survival pressure, these doctors—who dealt with corpses and viruses daily—had their mental defenses crumble. In their search for a way out, they had conducted reckless experiments in this melting pot of radiation and toxins, unintentionally answering the whispers from the Warp.
"Uh, I guess I can't blame it all on Helios," Andy thought with a hint of awkwardness. "I did it too..."
Reflecting on the past month, the Vault's convoys had stripped nearly eighty percent of the Acid Swamp's raw material reserves. Although Andy had consistently delivered finished antibiotics and purified industrial chemicals in return—and even brought a fresh batch of refined elixirs today—this had satisfied the underwater capitalist, Sisyphus. From Sisyphus's perspective, this was an industrial upgrade and a win-win for trade.
But he had overlooked one point. The doctors above the acid lake were not merchants. With the raw materials taken by Andy, they had nothing to practice on and no work to speak of. Their days consisted only of handing over goods. Combined with the deteriorating environment and mental emptiness, it was "reasonable" for them to find another form of solace.
Since Sisyphus remained satisfied with Andy's supplies, the old fox hiding underwater likely hadn't been corrupted by Nurgle yet; his desires were sated by commercial profits and didn't require the interference of a Chaos God. But Andy couldn't be careless. If he returned alive, the first thing he would do is go underwater to confirm Sisyphus's status.
"Get out."
Andy stepped down from the vehicle. Gamma-9 followed closely behind, not even daring to breathe the external air. A Plague Doctor spotted Andy and immediately approached. The doctor's black coat was greasy and covered in yellow-green slime. His bird-beak mask was cracked, revealing half a face covered in fungal fuzz.
"Ah, the Messenger in Yellow." The doctor's voice sounded wet, as if thick phlegm was stuck in his throat. "Have you also come to receive Grandfather's gift?"
The doctor reached out, attempting to grab Andy's sleeve. Andy moved back a step without a word, avoiding the dripping hand.
"I'm here to see the Chief Surgeon." Andy's voice remained a cold, synthesized electronic tone. "I need to go to a factory. I need the submarine. The Chief Surgeon knows the arrangements."
The doctor paused, his clouded eyes rolling as he struggled to understand the words "factory" and "submarine." Their brains were now stuffed with viruses, plagues, and hymns; their logical reasoning had severely regressed.
"Oh... the submarine." The doctor grinned, revealing a row of rotten black teeth. "The Chief is inside, cultivating a new garden in the Sanctuary."
Andy ignored the madman and strode toward the black spire. The surrounding refugees pointed at him, but none dared to approach because the ring of "steel eggs" hanging at Andy's waist looked far from friendly.
Inside the spire, the familiar chemical stench had vanished. In its place was a cloying, suffocatingly sweet fragrance—the smell of fatty acids decomposing in a highly decayed corpse, mixed with the earthy scent of mold spores.
The main hall, once filled with glass jars, had undergone a sudden change in aesthetic. The liquid in those jars had turned pink. What used to be stitched-up organ chunks suspended inside were now alive. They pulsed slowly in the liquid, sprouting bloodshot eyes and tiny mouths lined with fine teeth. Some even had small green tentacles tapping against the glass walls.
The Chief Surgeon stood before the largest jar, staring at a mass of rotten meat with an expression of obsession. He had removed his hazmat suit, exposing an upper body covered in pustules. Hearing footsteps, he turned around.
"Look, Mr. Andy!" The Chief Surgeon's tone was ecstatic. "Look at this vitality! Look at this perfect mutation!"
"Before, we struggled to cultivate strains, with a survival rate of less than thirty percent. Now, we don't need to! Just add a bit of this holy green water, and they grow and evolve on their own! This is a medical miracle! The ultimate answer to life!"
Standing behind Andy, the aperture of Gamma-9's electronic eye contracted frantically. He saw a chunk of meat in the jar suddenly open an eye and stare directly at him.
Blegh— Gamma-9 couldn't hold it back anymore. He turned to a corner and began to dry heave.
Andy watched coldly. On the STC analysis interface, the Warp radiation index in the environment was slowly rising. In other words, this place was becoming Nurgle's back garden. If the Inquisition were here, they would have already called for an orbital bombardment.
While Andy found it disgusting... as far as an Iron Man's chassis strength was concerned, as long as isolation measures were taken, Nurgle's corruption posed no threat to him. Furthermore, Sisyphus's status underwater was still unclear, and it was far from time for a total fallout. Andy still relied on them to send him to the underground entrance of the Helios factory.
"It is indeed... quite lively," Andy said dismissively. "But my business is more important. Get me to the submarine dock. Now."
The Chief Surgeon seemed disappointed by Andy's indifference, but despite his brain being turned to mush, he still remembered Andy's terrifying combat power. The muscle memory of being swatted away remained.
"Fine, fine," the Chief Surgeon muttered, reluctantly leaving his precious jars. "Mortals can never understand the Great Truth."
Minutes later, Andy stood before a submarine. Gamma-9 refused to go down; he would rather face the laughing refugees outside than crawl into this iron coffin that might already be sprouting tentacles.
"Gamma-9, unload the goods for the doctors and drive back immediately." Andy didn't plan on taking him anyway. In such a high-risk environment, a priest with only an autogun was a liability. "There's no need for the Vault to know what's happening here until we confirm Sisyphus's state."
After handing out instructions, Andy squeezed into the narrow hatch alone. The interior of the submarine was even damper than last time. The pilot was a partially mutated Plague Doctor whose hands had fused with the control levers.
"Dive into the underground river," Andy commanded.
The pilot made an incoherent gurgle and started the engine. With the ear-piercing sound of mechanical friction, the submarine slowly submerged. Murky green acid flooded the observation window. Andy sat in the dim cabin. As they descended, the light grew fainter.
Just as the submarine was about to enter the mouth of the underground river, Andy saw it.
In the thick silt at the bottom of the river—accumulated from thousands of years of industrial waste and skeletal remains—something moved. It wasn't a water monster or a common mutant. The silt seemed to come alive, rising slowly to form a massive smiling face ten meters wide.
The face had no features, only a grinning silhouette made of countless festering voids. It lay quietly at the bottom of the acid lake, offering a kind yet horrifying smile to the tiny submarine and to Andy.
Expressionless, Andy pulled down the shutter of the observation window.
"Nice smile. Don't do it again."