Falling into the Abyss

However, things never work out the way you want them to. Ethan heard someone mess with the lock at the end of the corridor. He immediately picked up Schneider’s blanket, used towel from the ground, and rubbed his sweat over his neck and body. Samuel was stunned, but he also swiftly thought about what to do after seeing how quickly he reacted.

Hearing the sound of the door opening and closing and the guards’ conversation as they approached the room, Ethan quickly took off his glasses. He then unbuttoned his shirt, pulled down his trousers, laid down on the blanket, and winked at Samuel.

Samuel immediately understood what he meant. He took off his clothes and pressed his body onto Ethan’s, positioning himself in between the other party’s legs. Ethan felt embarrassed from their incredibly intimate position, but then he felt something standing upright against his thigh……

Ethan stared at Samuel with an incredulous expression, and Samuel’s honey-colored face turned red for the first time……

At that moment, the door was forcibly broken into, and the table that had been up against it was pushed to the side. The two young guards stood outside the door and stared at Samuel and Ethan, who were entangled on the ground.

Fortunately for them, the two guards seemed to be newcomers, and Gray Fur hadn’t come.

It was clear that the two newcomers did not expect to break into the scene of an Omega in heat. After all, this sort of scenario was kept extremely private in the Earth Union’s culture, and a law-abiding citizen should never disturb a couple. Once someone was caught peeping, their moral value points would be deducted as punishment. Although seeing a nonhuman in heat would not affect their moral value points, they were used to these kinds of rules, so they could not react in time.

Samuel turned around and let out a deep roar unique to an Alpha, which carried intense aggressiveness and possessiveness. “Why don’t you scram! Can’t you see that I’m busy!”

Ethan also cooperated with him and let out a moan that sounded so honey-coated and horny that he gave himself goosebumps.

The two young guards quickly blushed and shut the door, and they didn’t even realize that they were apologizing to a nonhuman.

A while after the door closed, they heard another guard shout outside, “Go back to your house to be in heat! It’s against the rules here!” They probably had only calmed down after leaving the room and remembered their authority as a guard. Ethan rolled his eyes and immediately groaned rhythmically and loudly. He smacked Samuel’s buttocks with his hands so that slapping sounds rang out. It wasn’t long before they heard the sound of footsteps moving away from the door.

Samuel squeezed a line through the gaps of his teeth. “Do you feel fucking good when you’re slapping me?”

Ethan pushed Samuel away before picking up his glasses from the ground and putting them on. “I suspect that you’re really an Alpha. It seems that you can get hard any time, anywhere?”

“You’re stereotyping. Any man can get hard anytime.” Samuel was reluctant to admit his defeat. As he spoke, he pulled the cupboard door open. The chief security officer’s eyes seemed clearer than they did previously. When Samuel moved to help him up, the other party pushed his hands away and grabbed the cupboard door, standing up slowly.

His black eyes were fixed on Ethan with some hostility and distrust, but Samuel stood at the side, explaining, “Don’t worry about him. He’s on our side.”

Ethan tidied up his clothes and said, “The crisis is still not completely over. I don’t know whether the two guards will remember me, but they may return to check my personal information and find out that I’m actually a Beta. Gray Fur also must know my true gender, so if they tell him about it, they will be suspicious. At that time, we’ll need to find an excuse, or Samuel will be in danger.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m almost better now. As long as I appear, Vasiliev won’t be able to say anything. I’ll press this matter down.” The chief security officer’s eyes and voice remained cold when he looked at Ethan. Ethan guessed that he was still suspicious of him.

“I think that Ethan has a point. If Gray Fur asks, then what should we say?” Samuel asked.

Ethan temporarily suppressed his doubts about the chief security officer and continued, “It’s better to think of a more indisputable excuse. Samuel, Cavin previously told me that you found a new lover. He likely mistook the smell of the chief security officer for another Omega, so we can find a trusted Omega to help us with this lie.”

“You look like you’ve thought of someone?” Samuel asked.

Ethan nodded and pushed up his glasses. “Typhoeus from the West. He used to be my colleague and previously had a problem with Gray fur. He is now with a man named Tito, but he certainly won’t like a man like Tito from what I know about him. Moreover, I heard that Tito has violent tendencies. Compared with him, Samuel, you are a better choice. However, there are two problems. First of all, I don’t know if Typhoeus is still with Tito these days. If he isn’t, then he can’t help us with the lie. Secondly, I don’t know if Typhoeus dares to fall out with Tito completely. Even if he knows that he’ll be protected after joining Samuel’s gang and that the wall dividing the East and the West will prevent Tito from taking revenge, we want him to help us lie, after all, so we may have to tell him the truth. I don’t know if he will believe in Samuel’s strength.”

That’s right……according to a human’s normal way of thinking, how could an Omega be an Alpha’s rival?

“Tito was sent out for an atonement mission last week and hasn’t come back yet,” the chief security officer suddenly said, “But can he be trusted? I think that the less people that know about this, the better.”

Ethan did not dare to guarantee that he was trustworthy, so he hesitated for a moment before replying, “I remember that my father once said, so long as you give someone enough benefits, anyone can be your friend. I think that if matters turn for the worse, then you, the chief security officer, will need to take action.”

Schneider did not reply and instead turned to Samuel and asked, “Is there any water? I want to clean myself up.”

Schneider’s heat was not over yet, but to avoid anything happening, he decided to rest for a while before washing his scent away and going back home. He left the Forbidden City before dawn and went home to wait for his scent to dissipate. After the chief security officer left, Ethan and Samuel cleaned up the rest of the room, ensuring no traces of the chief security officer before they left.

For the next few days, Ethan and Samuel were both worried. After a discussion, they thought it might be better for other nonhumans to feel that Ethan was out of favor. Otherwise, they had no way to explain the Omega scent on Samuel two days ago. Therefore, the two no longer ate together. To be exact, Samuel still sat at his original seat, but Ethan was pitifully moved to a far corner.

Initially, Ethan thought that his life would not change much, but in reality, everything changed after he fell out of favor. He would hold his breakfast and walk past numerous tables, trying to find a seat. Three or four times in a row, he would be stared at by a pair of malicious eyes and told that someone was sitting there, even though Ethan had finally found an empty seat. When his toothpaste ran out, he went to the shopping center to get more, but the nonhuman responsible for distributing things asked him to show evidence that he was running out of toothpaste before he was willing to give Ethan a new tube of toothpaste. As a result, he could only rush back to his apartment in a hurry before digging out the old tube from the garbage can and running back. When he worked, some of his companions also ignored him. Once, his hoe didn’t work well, so he went to take one that no one was using. However, he was almost beaten by someone because of that.

Moreover, the Lord Grace Association’s gathering was held once a week in the sewer. If he found an excuse to avoid participating, he would be excluded by the other nonhumans working with him. In fact, this so-called exclusion wasn’t necessarily apparent. When you met them, they would greet you, but you would find it difficult to join in on their conversations. Also, there were some other passive-aggressive punishments, such as requesting him to work in the dirtiest area full of feces or isolating him to work in the farthest pipeline without any company.

Because of this, Ethan had to traverse through the intricate, dark pipes. The land that the Forbidden was built on used to be an ancient Earth city and its long history had bestowed upon it an equally long and complicated underground drainage system. Even though he had been working here for nearly a year, Ethan had only worked with other people in a small area in the center of the system and had only explored 20% of the pipelines.

And that was precisely why it was normal to get lost in them.

Ethan sighed and placed the shovel and the bucket carrying the dissolving agent on the ground before sitting against the dirty walls, disregarding the water and rubbish. He had been walking around the pipes that all looked exactly the same for more than an hour, but he still hadn’t found the way out. He didn’t even know if he was going the correct way. The darkness enshrouding the pipe was dispelled by a small lamp on his helmet, but the darkness was like a wild animal, waiting for the moment his light was extinguished.

Ethan remembered that Kim Ki-joon had said that some nonhumans had gone missing within the pipes and that no one ever saw them again. They just disappeared, and they still hadn’t been found.

A sharp thorn of fear had begun to poke his tired consciousness, and he couldn’t help but curse. If he had known about this before, then he would have gone to the previous three gatherings. He should have known. Ancient Earth history taught people again and again that religion invaded one’s life slowly, with a tolerant, friendly, and charity-like façade at the beginning. But in the end, it was a commitment, as well as segregated. As the saying went, those who follow me will prosper, and those who oppose me will perish. Hadn’t his actions been tantamount to telling them that he was their enemy?

He secretly called himself a fool, but what was most urgent at the moment was figuring out the right way back.

He rummaged through the tool bag at his waist, but he didn’t have anything to figure out his location or even a basic walkie-talkie. Obviously, the guards didn’t intend to rescue the nonhumans who got lost. Maybe they even hoped to reduce the Forbidden City’s population in this way.

Ethan shouted a few times, but similar to the times before, no one responded. In the silent and dark space, he would occasionally hear the noises of mice, frogs, and some strange insects. Ethan had never heard this kind of sound before. It sounded so dry and harsh, almost like a radio signal.

The longer he listened to it, the more he felt that it was some kind of rhythmic radio signal. Was it possible that instead of insects, there was an ancient radio sending a fixed signal quietly in this dark and uninhabited sewer for the last thousands, or even tens of thousands of years?

Ethan shuddered, and as the trembling traveled down from his neck to his back, a familiar itch began to spread under his skin. Ethan remembered that Tanisiel had said his mutation was easily intensified by fear, but the more he tried to suppress his fear, the more afraid he became. It was not just the instinctive fear of the unknown darkness and claustrophobia butalso the fear that he would accelerate his mutation.

He had lost his tools and continued to stumble through the dark. It was difficult to breathe the dirty air, and his strong sense of fatigue gave him the illusion he was suffocating.

Then, the sound of insects in the ear gradually straightened out and turned into the familiar ringing. The images that once invaded his consciousness became clear again, such as the emerald sun, the huge city, the central palace that was as grand as a pyramid, the black lumps of meat flying in the sky, and the tentacle-like black forest in the distance…… He saw that he was surrounded by insects worshiping the central palace, which appeared like countless thick and long pipes scattered across the long street. Their gray bodies rose and fell, and the countless small legs under them were dancing neatly, the pair of wings on their backs covered with disgusting fur. When he looked carefully, he saw that the gray reptilian wrinkles on their skins were all covered with eyes and stared at him with empty gazes.

Ethan saw an insect close to him rapidly shrinking in front of him, just like a long balloon after leaking air. It crawled over familiarly, and the top of the folds on its face deformed into a human’s face. It gave him a strange, twisted smile and flexibly approached him.

Ethan realized this was an illusion, a dream, but he didn’t know how to wake up from it. He felt as though his body had turned wooden, and he was unable to move.

The bug grew increasingly closer and finally approached his feet. It crawled along his heel and into the bottom of his trousers. The itchy feeling spread up his legs, and it felt just like something was brushing it with feathers, past his thighs, crotch, waist, chest, and finally coming out from his collar. Ethan wanted to scream, but he couldn’t make a sound. His intuition told him that this thing would go into his mouth, or nostrils, or ears, and enter his body!

Help!!! Ethan yelled as loud as he could in his mind.

Suddenly, the image that had controlled his entire brain suddenly disappeared, as did the strange insect. A quiet blue light enveloped his consciousness, and for a moment, he saw Tanisiel’s gray eyes staring at him and heard his ethereal words echo in his brain.

“Ethan, don’t be afraid!”

Ethan suddenly woke up. He found that he had unknowingly lay on the ground in the sewage, and he had nearly choked to death on the smelly liquid. He got up in a hurry and subconsciously reached towards the back of his neck.

He felt a little bump.

Was it a mutation? Or was it just a pimple that had temporarily surfaced?

Ethan felt a chill spread all over his body, and he realized that Tanisiel had pulled him back just in time. He didn’t know that his consciousness was so fragile that a bit of fear was enough to drive him crazy.

Still in shock, he searched his brain for Tanisiel’s aura and exclaimed, “Tanisiel! I’m trapped underground! I can’t get out!”

After a long time, just when he thought that Tanisiel did not hear his call for help, he sensed a thought in his mind. “To the left.”

Ethan walked to the left, as Tanisiel said. After a few steps, he saw a fork in the road. Then, he sensed that Tanisiel once again directed him, “To the right.”

He didn’t know how Tanisiel knew which way to go, and there was a sense of uncertainty from the consciousness. It was not as firm as the previous time, and it was like the consciousness was covered by a fog.

In this way, after following Tanisiel’s command, he finally came to a dead-end……

Ethan looked at the stone brick wall and actually laughed.

He didn’t sense himself receiving another message from Tanisiel, so he began to doubt whether the instructions in his mind just now had indeed been sent by Tanisiel? Or……had he imagined it himself?

After experiencing so much, was his final resting place going to be in this damned place that was full of rat excrement?

Ethan suddenly got angry. He didn’t know if it was because the first 30 years of his life had gone too well, and he had used up all his luck, so every step of his life afterward led him towards a bottomless chasm?

He let out a cry of anger and gave the stone brick wall a good kick.

To his surprise, the brick wall wobbled when he kicked it.

Ethan was stunned and rushed over to check. The moldy wall had rotted long ago, and after he gave it a firm shove, the bricks broke apart.

He created a large hole in the wall using his hands and feet. A humid but comparatively drier breeze suddenly blew in, causing Ethan to shrink back. He looked at the entrance of the black hole, unsure of whether he should go inside.

He turned back to look at the road that he had come from. It seemed that there was no difference between that and this hole.

Ethan braced his heart, and with the mindset of attempting to save a hopeless situation, he lowered his head and dived in.

It was very dry inside, not humid at all. He stood upright and looked up, and the headlight on his helmet swept over the huge space.

Flat floor tiles, faded walls, a few benches, and a few tall columns. Not far ahead, the flat ground split into a few cracks. The cracks occupied about one-third of the hall, with the ground sinking. Ethan took a few steps forward and found that this platform was more than one meter high. On the lower ground, there were two rusty tracks lying side by side.

They were railway tracks, which he had only seen in some photographs in ancient books.

His eyes widened slightly as his gaze followed the railway tracks throughout the hall, which eventually disappeared into the darkness.

That was……a section of an ancient subway car?

This was an abandoned subway station?

T/N: Thank you Terin for your Kofi support!