"They say he was sent over from the south."
"Still alive? That's damn good luck."
"Word is he was hiding in a false ceiling the whole time and didn't get blown to bits. His mentor died, though, and he was left a cripple. If they hadn't stepped in, he wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway."
"Why waste so much medicine on a piece of trash like that?"
"Doesn't he still have hands? Everywhere is short on manpower, and even trash has its uses. Why else would he be banished down here?"
"Shh, keep your voice down... He's looking over!"
"What're you afraid of? Look, he's even smiling at us."
...
Amid rolling waves of heat, deafening rumbles shook the air without end.
Ji Jue offered a dopey grin to the two apprentices. Unfortunately, his scorched face bore not a shred of its former handsome geniality; instead, it was hideously grotesque, scarlet blood oozing where torn scars split open.
It stung the eyes of the two onlookers. Their petty whispering ground to a sudden halt.
Fascinating. Being ugly had its perks—he was really feeling it now.
Ji Jue pulled back his gaze, leaned heavily on his crutch, and hobbled forward clumsily, trying to pick up the pace.
The middle-aged man leading the way heard the tapping rhythm quicken, glanced back at him, and slowed his stride slightly.
Seeing Ji Jue's strained attempt at a smile, the man sighed and simply said, "Most folk who end up here are like that. A bit gossipy. Once everyone gets to know each other, it'll pass."
Ji Jue nodded, wearing a smile perfectly suited to his role—wretched, laced with a hint of servile flattery.
The middle-aged man looked away without the slightest reaction, as if thoroughly accustomed to seeing weakness and groveling.
Inside the colossal, factory-like workshop, they had arrived at the very bottom floor. It was sweltering and humid. The air was perpetually suffused with acrid stenches, punctuated by muffled coughing between the booming thuds of drop hammers.
Operations across every section ran day and night. Countless artisans crouched at their stations around the clock in an endless grind. As for the apprentice workhorses, slacking off and sleeping were out of the question; their faces were universally deathly pale, their eyes bloodshot.
Sun Ci, the middle-aged man guiding Ji Jue, was a low-level supervisor among this floor's apprentice workhorses—a lead beast of burden, as it were. He was also the direct manager of this newly arrived cripple.
"Here. Seeing as you're in such rough shape, start with this."
Sun Ci pointed to a vacant seat, where dried bloodstains remained faintly visible on the chair and scrap was piled like a mountain across the workstation. "Finish all of this by the end of the day."
With that, he turned and left.
At practically every moment, vast quantities of scrap cascaded down from chutes in the corner, an unending torrent like a relentless case of diarrhea.
The job of these bottom-tier apprentices was to pick out and dismantle whatever was still usable from the scrap as fast as humanly possible for recycling and reuse.
No one said what would happen if they didn't finish, but everyone worked with every ounce of strength they had, knowing the consequences wouldn't be pretty.
Back at the Guild, if you had too much work, you could at least cry.
Here, crying ate into your time.
"Ah, fate, you cruel mistress..."
Sitting in the chair and looking around at the chaos and hustle on either side, Ji Jue suddenly felt a wave of daze. At the Guild, he had been stuck in the Recycling Department sorting junk. Then he'd bent over backward to infiltrate deep undercover into enemy territory, and he was still sorting fucking junk!
Had he gone undercover for nothing?
Despite his internal grumbling, his hands moved with practiced efficiency, sorting and categorizing with practiced skill.
Not far off, Sun Ci stole a glance during a brief lull. Seeing Ji Jue's deft motions, he nodded slightly, looked away, and breathed a quiet sigh of relief—looks like they might pull a little less overtime today.
Among the six teams on this floor, theirs was the only one chronically understaffed, yet they were assigned the exact same workload. They suffered extra hardship, endured the same misery, and shouldered countless unseen losses.
Meanwhile, Ji Jue discreetly observed the others' workflow in the reflective sheen of broken iron scraps... mostly to calibrate his efficiency. The last thing he wanted was to get into the groove and accidentally blow through his quota...
As it turned out, the efficiency here was quite a bit higher than the Guild's Recycling Department.
The main reason was that no protective equipment was required, skipping numerous steps. The Guild had to pay lip service to basic human rights, whereas Profound artisans had no tradition of cherishing their tools.
Yet what puzzled Ji Jue was this: if you discounted the omitted protective steps, their efficiency was actually not that much different from the Guild's Recycling Department! Why bother worshipping corruption at all? Had they embraced corruption for essentially nothing?
Whether Guild or Profound, artisans and masters might hold different ambitions, but beasts of burden were always beasts of burden—nothing special about them.
And so, from initial clumsiness to finding his rhythm and finally settling into the groove, three or four hours flew by. Not a single person, Ji Jue included, paused for a second.
And the anxiety Ji Jue had secretly harbored finally eased.
He had blended into the environment.
Infiltrating the Evil Transmutation Cult hadn't been nearly as difficult as he'd imagined. There hadn't even been a formal interrogation for him, the sole survivor.
With the Security Bureau pressing attacks from all sides, everyone was run ragged; who had the time to obsess over trivial vetting and cross-checking?
The bank's core records held his entry and spiritus verification. He was a corrupted one, wearing the apprentice uniform of a Profound artisan. Good enough.
They checked his Aether records, scanned his surface memories, found that he knew nothing and had seen nothing, slapped a few crude healing rites on him, and dosed him with aggressive medicine.
If he had a breath left in him, drag him back to work. Use him if he was usable; if not, turn him into raw material.
Once they confirmed he would survive and could still move, that was that. As for lasting side effects... when everyone worked with their heads tucked into their belts, nobody fretted over such things.
The good news: posing as an apprentice made slipping in easy.
The bad news: once inside, he was still an apprentice—a bottom-feeding beast of burden through and through. And from the looks of it, this was a 24/7 grind, worked like a nuclear-powered donkey.
The working environment was indistinguishable from a sweatshop.
Vast amounts of toxins released during disassembly, enough airborne dust to run a crash course in silicosis, persistent abomination contamination leaking from the scrap, twenty-four hours of punishing labor, and saturated workloads...
Hardcore grinder as Ji Jue was, even he couldn't help marveling at the intensity.
The Guild was only pretending to be human, but you in the Profound have given up on being human altogether, haven't you?
One had to understand: even Profound artisans were still human, more or less. People embraced corruption to advance, not to mutate themselves into some unrecognizable monstrosity.
For those lacking talent, the Path of Sovereign Virtue was an endless trek—winding, torturous, fraught with dead ends and impassable peaks. In contrast, the boons of Vile Folly were like a zipline greased with oil and surging with electricity: slick beyond grip, either shooting you straight up or plunging you straight down. Pure thrills.
Even with an array of secret rites and conversions to boost resistance and mitigate risks, one careless step still spelled complete doom.
Whether to pursue Sovereign Virtue or great corruption was a luxury of choice reserved for the strong; beasts of burden had no say. Every apprentice working here exhibited signs of corruption to varying degrees.
The corruption symptoms of the Path of Embers were the most direct: flesh reification and the loss of sanity.
Excessive internal contamination caused the body and soul to spiral out of control, manifesting abnormal physical traits.
Some had faces rigid as masks; others had withered, shrunken arms marked with wood grain like marionettes; others had all ten fingers warped into tools... Worse still, some could no longer be called human at all.
Excessive distortion and twisting of soul and flesh caused the person to mutate amid the entanglement of contamination and blessing, utterly stripping them of their original form. Just like the grotesque creation in the corner, where flesh and blood had fused completely into a shredder.
It opened its mouth amid continuous wailing, swallowing scrap, chewing, spitting out residue as blood gushed and splattered.
Such sights seemed commonplace here.
Everyone merely gave it a wide berth.
Amid the numbing toil, Ji Jue's hand trembled slightly. A drop of oil slipped between his fingers and fell beneath the workbench.
Down there, in the thick pool of accumulated grease, something suddenly stirred. A spider the size of a pinky knuckle rose from the oil steeped in contaminant residue, creeping silently through the shadows into the distance.
Then another, and another...
Coolly multitasking, he skimmed a fraction of the scrap material while dismantling it. Between the fingers of both hands, an invisible crucible operated in a flash, kneading spiritus, Fluid Alchemy bestowing form, and finally Deus Ex Machina imparting spiritus.
One grease spider after another was created with ease.
As the grease spiders scuttled to and fro, the subterranean workshop—complex as a labyrinth—gradually mapped itself in Ji Jue's mind. Unfortunately, the entire underground was sealed by various secret rites and spiritus circuits, and the distance was too great to spot any opening for an escape.
After all, a recycling department was little different from a garbage dump.
Nobody wanted sewer stench wafting back up, nor did anyone want their beasts of burden sneaking over the railing to flee.
Locked down tight was best for everyone.
Except the beasts of burden.
"One hundred and fifty?!"
As a grease spider crawled through the workshop's ventilation shaft, a familiar voice drifted into hearing.
Not far from the smelting furnace, partitioned off in the quietest, cleanest spot of the entire underground workshop, was a private office, even decorated with two half-dead potted devil's ivy.
Amid office-like furnishings, the man in the chair nodded with a smile.
"S-Supervisor, is there some mistake?" Sun Ci stammered, drenched in sweat. "Why did it suddenly double?"
"Those are orders from above. What can I do?" The supervisor took a sip of tea, smiling nonchalantly. "Besides, your team has been in last place for a long time, hasn't it? How can you have the cheek to complain? Old Sun, you're making things very difficult for me."
"B-But..."
"But what?!" The supervisor raised his voice, his expression abruptly turning cold. "If you can do it, do it; if not, get the hell out! Stop hogging the toilet if you're not going to shit! If you won't do it, plenty of others will! Understand?"
"Understood, understood."
Sun Ci dared not argue further and beat a pathetic retreat.
At the door, a smiling young man of delicate, handsome features was waiting. Savoring Sun Ci's miserable retreat, he patted his shoulder. "Brother Sun, if you can't handle it, step down and make way for someone better."
Sun Ci said nothing, keeping his head down and walking away.
The young man slipped into the office. After the door shut, only muffled sounds could be heard—what sounded like coquettish laughter and groans.
"One hundred and fifty?!"
When Sun Ci returned to his team and announced the news, nearly everyone lost their minds.
Feeling numerous resentful glares, he smiled bitterly. "I..."
An apprentice who had lost nearly all his hair glared at him. "If you can't do the job, don't take it! Why play the hero and hold on for dear life?"
"What the hell did you just say?" an apprentice nearby flared up. "Brother Sun looked out for you in the past! Oh, you took the perks, and now you want to act self-righteous?"
"We're under someone else's roof—what can we do? If he wants to install his own pet as supervisor, just let him have it! Why drag everyone down to be targeted and sabotaged?"
Sun Ci listened in silence to the bickering without chiming in. After passing down the quota, he wanted to offer some words of encouragement or a promise, but no one believed him anymore.
He let out a self-deprecating smile and a weary sigh.
If he could, he too would like to "step down and make way" by giving up the post, but he had no choice.
In recent months, his symptoms of reification had grown increasingly pronounced. If he didn't produce some results and find an opportunity to transfer elsewhere, he wouldn't be able to keep them under control much longer.
Asking him to surrender this lifesaver now was no different from killing him outright.
Only at the very end did he notice Ji Jue slowly rising with his crutch, standing beside him at some point.
"Supervisor Sun..."
"What supervisor? Won't be one tomorrow."
Sun Ci shook his head with self-mockery. Failing his quotas repeatedly meant his days as supervisor were numbered; if he couldn't meet today's, he'd likely be stripped of the title on the spot. "What is it? Speak up. You want to switch teams too?"
"I..."
The newly arrived cripple hesitated for a moment, then murmured, "I might... have a way..."
In that instant, Sun Ci froze.
He raised his head and looked over.
Chapter 222