The surface of the Maya District is a jungle of steel, while the city's rotting appendix lies beneath it.
Aaryan followed Dahlia closely, bypassing the surveillance-laden elevators and leaping down the factory's waste disposal ditch. Wastewater churned beneath their feet — a dark green liquid mixed with coolant, excrement and alchemical residue. As they descended, the rumbling from above faded, replaced by a heavier, more oppressive thud — the city's drainage system vibrating in the damp air. The heat and humidity were more intense here than above ground; the air was so thick that it could be cut with a knife. The walls were covered in glowing moss, mutated from absorbing excessive amounts of aetheric waste and emitting a ghostly blue light that outlined a spider's web of pipes and crumbling stilt houses.
This was the Lower City of the Maya District, erased from the map by the Holy Blood Council.
'Don't step in those reddish puddles,' Dahlia warned, not turning her head as she nimbly leapt over a brass pipe spanning the air. 'That's concentrated aetheric acid; it'll melt your steam boots in three seconds.'
Aaryan followed silently; the wound on his back was beginning to itch in the hot, humid environment — a sign of rapid healing. He looked around and saw countless murky, desperate eyes lurking in the shadows, yet also possessing a kind of bestial greed.
They passed a place known as the 'Leftover Market'.
The stalls here were extremely basic, usually just a few rusty iron plates propped up on piles of rubbish, and the vendors were mostly disabled demon workers. They sold some nauseating 'food', such as:
This 'food' was extracted from the scum of the waste disposal ditch and carried a lingering rubbery smell.
It was the only condiment available to the poorest of the poor and was capable of inducing brief hallucinations, making them forget their hunger. Some were even licking lifeless stones, trying to draw the last bit of warmth from them.
'Look at my people,' Aaryan thought to himself, 'while they discuss the arrangement of the stars in the clouds, here they kill each other for a mouldy filter.' After crossing three heavily polluted zones known as 'Death Zones', Dahlia led him to a huge, verdigris-covered, abandoned boiler room. Cleverly concealed behind a complex network of exhaust manifolds, to the untrained eye it would simply be mistaken for part of the city's foundation.
"We're here." Dahlia pressed a seemingly random rust spot and a heavy mechanical click echoed from one side of the boiler as a leaden door slowly slid open.
The world inside was a stark contrast to the filth outside.
Although still crowded and stifling, it was remarkably clean. The walls were covered in yellowed parchment meticulously drawn with lines depicting the energy flow of the entire Maya district. In the centre of the room, a clockwork mechanism composed of countless tiny gears floated silently in mid-air.
'This is...' Aaryan stepped into the cabin, a powerful sense of kinship washing over him once more.
'This is the dream you've had for the past three years, rummaging through the Ironjaw Factory junkyards at midnight, trying to reconstruct it.' Dahlia closed the door, shedding her heavy disguise.
She walked to the mechanism and gently turned it with her slender fingers. With a crisp 'click', a pure purple-gold light shone from the core of the mechanism.
"Brother, you've been hiding in this wretched place for three years. Did you really think you could repair the 'Twin Clockwork Hearts' using only this scrap metal?" Dahlia turned around, her azure eyes flashing with piercing sharpness. 'Without my "Witchcraft Concealment", once your clockwork mechanism is activated, Vane's steamship will reduce this place to rubble in five minutes.' Aaryan walked over to the table and slammed his right hand down on the intricate sketches. His bracelet began to burn again due to his intense emotional turmoil.
"Who are you? How did you know about my plan? And—" He pointed to the broken wing he had brought with him. "Where did this come from?"
Dahlia wasn't intimidated by his anger. She calmly pulled a pendant from her collar — a clockwork core identical to Aaryan's, only silver and a perfect mirror image of his bronze core.
'That wing is the relic of the Royal Guard commander who died three years ago while escorting me away during the Holy Blood Baptism.' Dahlia's voice lowered and trembled slightly. 'I've been searching for you for three years, brother. I thought you had become a cog in this machine and forgotten our blood ties completely."
The atmosphere in the cabin instantly plummeted to freezing.
Only the soft creaking of the clockwork mechanism could be heard.
Aaryan's gaze fell on the repeatedly folded '1969' road map. It wasn't a date or a set of coordinates, but the name of a place beneath this steel city: Lab Zero.
'I haven't forgotten,' Aaryan said hoarsely, slowly closing her eyes. 'Every single second, I hear the gears turning. They're saying, 'Every moment, people die like weeds.' If you really are my sister, you should understand. I want more than just revenge. I want this damned machine to stop completely."
Just then, heavy footsteps echoed outside the boiler room, accompanied by the sound of metal tearing apart.
'Found you, number 9527.'
Vane's confidant was an Inquisitor clad in heavy, steam-powered armour. His heavy mechanical boots crushed the moss outside as he approached the fragile lead door of the boiler room, his red electronic eyes locking onto it.
The lead door creaked and groaned under the heavy impact, instantly igniting the previously stagnant air within the boiler room with a sickening metallic thud.
"Get behind the clockwork mechanism!" Aaryan roared, his hand already on the spinning mechanism.
"Bang!"
With a deafening crash, the lead door ripped apart like paper. A massive mechanical hand, encased in brass and spewing high-pressure steam, swept in and the enormous, heavily armoured body of an Inquisitor squeezed into the cramped compartment. His red electronic eyes scanned the dim light, finally locking onto the bracelet on Aaryan's wrist, faintly glowing with an overload.
'Royal ethereal frequency detected... confirmed as defector target A-01.'
The Inquisitor's cold, emotionless, synthesised voice boomed through the loudspeaker. A sharp hiss came from the steam backpack on his back and the hydraulic levers of his power armour locked instantly. The Inquisitor's other hand flashed like a steel afterimage, aimed straight for Aaryan's throat.
Aaryan did not flinch.
For the past three years, he had hauled tons of magic stones in the factory every day and fought mutated rats bare-handed in the waste pits, all for this moment. His purple-gold bloodline surged, the energy previously suppressed by the bracelet seeping outwards and searching for every tiny crack in his body.
He sidestepped and pressed down, his movements fluid and graceful as he dodged a palm strike powerful enough to shatter rocks. Simultaneously, his right hand transformed into a finger sword and precisely pierced the brass seam under his power armour's armpit.
'Royal Secret Technique — Shattered Veins.'
Although there were no grand visual effects, the instant his fingertips touched the metal, an extremely concentrated shockwave of ether surged upwards along the conduction path of the mechanical arm.
Zzz—crack!
The internal energy channels of the power armour exploded in a chain reaction, blue sparks erupting from the joints. The Inquisitor let out a muffled groan.
The mechanical arm sagged eerily, and hydraulic fluid spilled everywhere.
'Brother, watch out!' Daria's cry of alarm came from behind.
The seemingly paralysed Inquisitor didn't fall. Instead, the power armour's chest cavity suddenly split open. Exposed were not human internal organs, but a glass container filled with fluorescent green liquid. Submerged in the liquid was a heart, still beating and covered in crystal clusters.
'That's... the core of a late-stage Aether Disease?' Aaryan's pupils contracted.
The Holy Blood Council was using the heart of an Aether Disease patient as a bio-battery!
As the green liquid flowed, the damaged mechanical arm was forcibly stitched back together by strands of blue flesh — cursed life force driving the cold steel!
The Inquisitor's power instantly doubled and he swung his fists wildly, creating deep craters in the boiler room floor with each strike.
'Is this the order you seek?' Aaryan's rage finally reached its peak. He stared at the still-beating heart, hearing the desperate cries of its kind being pushed to their limits. 'Using souls as fuel, your kin as batteries!'
He clenched his fist and the already cracked suppression bracelet emitted a crisp, destructive sound.
'Crack!'
A beam of purplish-gold light shot upwards from his wrist, instantly piercing the top of the boiler room. The aura of majesty, holiness and extreme rage caused the subterranean creatures surrounding him, who had been eyeing him greedily, to prostrate themselves, trembling.
Just as Aaryan was about to crush the Inquisitor beneath his feet, Dahlia suddenly rushed forward. The silver clockwork core in her hand resonated with a mournful sound.
"No! It's not time yet! Vane's patrol car is right above us!'
Her slender fingers wound up the mechanism rapidly, causing the previously stationary gears to spin wildly and a powerful spatial pull to wash over them. A black hole appeared in the centre of the boiler room, near the emergency vent to the waste pipes.
"Go!"
Dahlia grabbed Aaryan and, before the devastating final blow from the heavy power armour could reach them, the two of them plummeted into the darkness below like kites with broken strings.
The whistling wind and the splashing of acidic wastewater filled their ears. Aaryan felt the burning sensation on his wrist disappear and be replaced by an emptiness and coldness. He looked down and saw that, though not completely broken, the bracelet was now dull and lifeless. This meant that, for the next few hours, he would lose all his psionic power and become completely defenceless.
"Thump!"
The two of them crashed heavily into a pile of soft, foul-smelling discarded fabric.
They were deeper in the lower city, in an area known as the 'Scraps Pit', where all the city's rubbish eventually ended up.
In the darkness, Aaryan felt something licking the wound on his back.
He pushed Dahlia away and stood up abruptly, only to realise that his surroundings were not deathly silent. In the shadows of the garbage mountains, pairs of dark red eyes lit up.
These weren't Inquisitors or Overseers.
They were thousands upon thousands of demonic workers who had been discarded as 'scraps' and hadn't died as expected. Instead, they wandered here like zombies, chewing on scrap metal containing trace amounts of energy.
In the centre of this horde of monsters sat a man with a missing arm, which was fitted with a massive steam-powered prosthesis. He was poking at a fire with a rusty steel rod. On the fire, a charred, unrecognisable object was roasting.
The man looked up, revealing a scarred face, and grinned at Aaryan.
'Welcome to the deepest level of hell, King. I'm Pau. I heard you made quite an impact up there?"
He pointed upwards where hundreds of red searchlight beams were piercing the darkness and conducting a thorough search of the ruins.
'If you want to live, you'll have to put on this "corpse skin" and come with me to see the mad geologist, Cyrus.'
Aaryan looked at the psychic crystal monsters slowly closing in on him, then looked down at his trembling hands, depleted of spiritual energy. Finally, he understood what Dahlia meant by the 'contract'.
In this gear-driven world, to avoid becoming a prisoner, one must first become a devil.