Steampunk Era: Mad Abield
Chapter 270: Section 197: City of Tears (1)

Chapter 270: Section 197: City of Tears (1)

Opening her eyes, the owner of the ink-black orbs lifted her head. In the distance, light streamed through a broken void, drawing forth the light of eternal day at the bottom of her eyes.

She didn’t know when the burning sun would set, nor did she know when the Lord of Night would draw her curtains.

Tiny songs of solitude echoed through the empty underground.

The princess and the prince, an eternal poem, their hands clasped tight, their hearts pressed close, vowing to vanquish all dragons and Chaos from this world.

She turned her head toward the source of the voice and found nothing.

"Mira," she said, with a hint of questioning and a touch of nervousness, "where are you?"

I am in your heart.

The owner of the singing voice replied.

It was then as if she discovered something, lowering her head to look at her own chest. At the center of her small chest, encased in a shell of pure white chitin, there was a sac resembling a blue gem with a tiny person inside.

"Mira," she said joyfully as she caressed the blue sac, clear as a gemstone, hard as a crystal, "are you feeling a bit better?"

Thank you, Wasp.

The tiny figure in the sac responded, soaked as if in fluid, her limbs twisting irregularly.

Tears rolled down the dark eye sockets of the insect-like girl.

"It must hurt a lot," the girl said, lifting her head to look at the distant light, "Wasp also felt pain when falling, but it surely wasn’t as painful as yours."

Yes, it hurts so much, so much pain, pain enough to make one want to cry, but the tears are dry, the heart dead. I want revenge, revenge against your kind. Won’t you blame me, Wasp?

"Not at all, ever since daddy was gone, Wasp has been bullied relentlessly, abandoned by momma; hungry, cold, and without a home, all taken by my uncle..." As she reached this point, the tiny figure lifted her head to look at the light, "Wasp has not felt warmth for a long time, being with Mira feels warm, and it makes me happy."

Happy, happy, Wasp and Mira, two hearts in one body, we wait, we pray, we shall build the new Holy Nest, and we shall seek vengeance against the wicked!

In the quiet underground, the song continued, like a whisper, like a murmur.

......

Malin furrowed his brow.

Standing on the street leading to the excavation site, Malin realized he had just heard a song.

It was just a moment, but the sound was unmistakably that of a song.

Happy, happy, Wasp and Mira... plural forms of Evil God?

Gosh, what did Silent Hill do to deserve this, how do you fight such a thing, Malin truly dares not expect when external help will arrive—after all, Silent Hill from the outside world must currently be engulfed in dense fog. If the mystery cannot be solved, it’s impossible to be sure whether one can survive the passage through the mist.

This caused Malin to consider retreating—if it wasn’t him standing here, the strong implication of the song might have persuaded someone else to be willing to smash to smithereens for its singer.

Now that the location was found, Malin wasn’t in a hurry to jump in—doing so at this time would likely be no different from suicide. Better to browse around the excavation site, to see if there were any fresh leads.

Inside the largest tent, Malin found half the head of Professor Odum Shelton. The place was blood-washed by insects, but since the tent was well-lit, the insects had not chosen it as their ’residence.’ So, when Malin walked in, he did not stumble upon a nostalgic family reunion scene, just the professor’s head full of bite marks.

Covering the poor professor with a piece of cloth, Malin picked up the diary and flipped it open.

It read from the first day of work—blessed by the goddess, let’s see what we have found in this city, a tomb from the Second Era, filled with secrets unknown to us. The Lord has done an excellent job in protecting these relics aside from one unlucky fellow who fell into a tomb passage by stepping on a sinkhole; no one else has entered, which at least means we don’t need the City Defense Force to chase down any potentially lost artifacts, one by one.

The second day—work is not going as smoothly as expected. Quining Street is a slum filled with people who want to strike it rich. Just this morning, we even found someone who had dug a passage from a civilian residence into the burial chamber. The fellow had actually managed to dig through, proving that even a Transcendent with mere brute strength can be a real headache.

But the good news is... he triggered a trap. We had to dig him out of the tomb chamber, and his death effectively deterred many criminals. "Live to spend or die without that chance" remains the ultimate philosophical conundrum for every miscreant.

The third day, today we received a very interesting child named... Wasp.

The locals say she’s a pitiful child who lost her father in an accident not long after she was born, and within a couple of years, her mother disappeared with the compensation money. No one knows if she ran away with another man or was kidnapped and became a new victim. This child named Wasp became an orphan as her family estate was seized by her father’s brother. If not for the relief from the Benevolent Church and the Harvest Church, she probably would have died long ago.