Chapter 205 | Transmigrated with a Sanity Gauge

Traces of habitation were discovered along the way.

These were mainly concentrated in the slightly raised recessed areas on both sides of the passage, where water did not easily accumulate, making them suitable places to stay.

In the first recessed space, a moldy blanket, a rusted iron kettle, and several shattered ceramic bowls were scattered about.

Newspapers and rags were piled in the corner.

The dates were blurred, but they were clearly recent.

Someone had lived here.

Beside these traces of life was a large dark brown stain.

Bloodstains.

They extended from the corner of the recess all the way to the main passage, then turned into the deep darkness.

Someone had bled a great deal here. Then, they were dragged away.

The second location was further ahead.

It was also a recessed area, with a blanket and an iron kettle as well.

However, on the wall here, someone had carved several lines of text with something sharp.

The light shone upon it...

The handwriting was crooked and became increasingly scrawled further down.

"People are going missing."

"Damn the City Hall, how could they force us out?!"

The last line contained only two characters, carved so deeply that they nearly pierced through the wall bricks.

"Help."

Lu Yuan withdrew his gaze.

Behind him, the veteran who was missing half his left pinky finger cursed under his breath.

No one replied.

These people—drifters, residents hiding from the collapses.

After the lighting system was destroyed by the ghouls, they were trapped in the pitch-black pipe network.

And in the darkness, they waited for something else to arrive.

Furthermore, judging by the scavenger fungus at the entrance back then, they wouldn't have had time to escape even if they had tried.

They continued forward.

The standing water here was sometimes deep and sometimes shallow, with the deepest parts reaching their ankles.

The walls were covered in scavenger fungus.

However, the fungus layer was barely visible on the sections where the copper frame was intact; wherever the copper frame was broken, the fungus layer immediately grew thicker.

They walked for about five minutes.

The passage reached its first fork.

Bolen pressed his palm against the ground, and a flash of light flickered across his body and hands.

"Go right."

The group continued.

After a while longer.

On the edge of Lu Yuan's field of vision, grey-white text flickered.

【Environmental Perception: Weak pollution source detected... quantity increasing...】

Lu Yuan raised his left hand.

Stop.

The light from the sandworm oil lamp cast flickering reflections on the standing water.

The surroundings were so quiet that only the sound of flowing water could be heard.

Lu Yuan slowly raised the lamp high.

The range of illumination expanded.

About fifteen meters ahead.

On the wall to the right of the passage, something was stuck there.

It was two meters above the ground.

A grey-white silhouette.

Its limbs were clinging there in a way that defied human anatomy.

Its knees faced upward, elbows pointed outward, looking like a giant gecko.

Its spine bulged outward, with every vertebra protruding from the skin, forming a row of jagged shadows under the lamplight.

It did not move.

Lu Yuan slowly moved the lamp toward it.

The light shone upon its head.

A face.

A grey-white, wet human face.

Its eyes had degenerated into two sunken pits of flesh.

But the mouth was surprisingly eerie.

The mouth was split from ear to ear, stretched into a huge arc, filled densely with small, inwardly curved teeth.

【Detected Target: Unnamed Mutant (Pipe Network Adapted)】

【Status: A human mutant created after being polluted in a dark, enclosed environment. Its limb joints have softened and reorganized under scavenger fungus pollution, adapting it for climbing pipe walls. Its face retains most human bone structure, and it has completely lost its fatal weaknesses. Note: It feeds on pipe-dwelling fungal colonies.】

【Weakness: Light source.】

【Forbidden Lore: Knowledge Seeker: +0.1...13.1/100】

The moment the light hit it, its mouth slowly closed a little.

It was as if it were cowering.

And under the light, there wasn't just one clinging to the wall.

Bo Er's light swept to the other side.

Another one.

Further away, on the ceiling, there were two more.

Four grey-white mutants were stuck to the walls and ceiling of the passage, limbs bent backward, motionless.

The second one still had fragments of clothing left on its torso.

It was a thick cotton-padded jacket so dirty its original color was unrecognizable, the cuffs worn to shreds, with a rusted iron brooch still pinned to the lapel.

A former resident of the pipe network.

Transformed into this thing in the darkness and pollution.

The third one was huddled in the arched vault of the ceiling.

Head facing down.

That mouth split to the ears was facing the passage.

If someone were to walk underneath in the dark... it surely wouldn't mind having a meal.

The fourth one was the smallest.

Its size was only two-thirds that of an adult.

The clothing fragments on it were unrecognizable.

But judging by the frame...

Lu Yuan ignored it.

"Don't stop!" he barked in a low voice.

"Raise the lamps, stay together, and don't get near them!"

These things feared light.

As long as the lamps didn't go out, they wouldn't dare move.

Lu Yuan had no intention of attacking, because according to the text prompts, these things seemed difficult to kill, and more importantly, they didn't pose much of a threat.

The six of them compressed their formation and passed quickly through the center of the passage.

The grey-white figures on the walls curled up slightly as the light passed, emitting a very faint hissing sound.

But not one dared to come down.

After passing them, Lu Yuan glanced back.

The light couldn't reach that far anymore.

But at the edge of the darkness, those figures began to move slowly.

They changed positions and stuck themselves back to the walls.

Continuing forward.

The passage began to slope downward, the angle slight but continuous.

The standing water grew shallower, flowing along the gradient toward lower ground.

The scavenger fungus all around was thinning out.

The copper frames shifted from appearing occasionally to being continuous.

The stench of decay in the air was weakening, replaced by a cold, metallic scent.

They continued forward for a time.

The walls on both sides of the passage began to change.

Grey-white things were embedded in the brick crevices.

They were fingers.

Human fingers.

Grey-white, withered fingers extended from the brick crevices.

Only one or two phalanges were exposed, the nails had fallen off, and the skin at the fingertips had merged with the surrounding fungus layer.

The light swept across, and on both walls, there was one every few meters.

Some were fingers.

Some were severed palms.

Some were small patches of grey-white facial skin squeezed out from the brick crevices, with sunken eye sockets and shriveled lips.

They were human faces embedded in the walls.

Lu Yuan stopped, the light slowly sweeping over the right wall.

One, two, three.

At a height of half a meter to one and a half meters from the ground, there were a dozen or so densely packed grey-white faces.

Most were completely petrified, merged with the wall.

But a few...

One face still had its eyeballs.

Two grey-white spheres without pupils were embedded in the sunken eye sockets.

The moment the light shone upon them, those two eyeballs moved.

They turned toward the light.

At the same time, a grey-white arm suddenly thrust out from the brick crevice.

The five fingers spread open, reaching for the calf of the youngest Nightwatcher nearby.

"Move!"

Lu Yuan reacted extremely quickly, pulling the young man toward the center of the passage.

The grey-white fingers grasped at empty air, paused for a second, and slowly retracted back into the brick crevice.

【Detected Target: Wall-Bound Mutant (Passive)】

【Status: Human remains fixed in the pipe wall structure by scavenger fungus for a long time. Hyphae have infiltrated and replaced the nervous system, granting some limbs extremely limited autonomous reaction capabilities; they cannot move and only produce a grasping reflex when they sense living breath.】

【Weakness: Flame.】

【Forbidden Lore: Knowledge Seeker: +0.1...13.2/100】

"What the hell is this thing?"

The young Nightwatcher was clearly badly shaken, his somewhat restrained voice echoing in the pipes.

"Captain, should we take care of this thing?"

Bo Er said at this moment.

It was clear that the patches of wall-bound mutants scattered across the pipe walls left Bo Er at a loss as well.

"No need, the threat from this thing is very low, not even as bad as those things we saw earlier."

"Besides, we don't have enough supplies to clear all of them. Walk in the middle, don't touch the walls, we're moving past."

Lu Yuan finished speaking and walked at the very front.

Bolen and Kail followed silently behind Lu Yuan.

The six of them just like that, hugging the center of the passage, trotted through that section.

Behind them, the grey-white fingers slowly retracted into the brick crevices.

Those pupil-less eyeballs continued to stare into the darkness where the light had disappeared.

Only then did those dead, decaying eyeballs return to their original state.

They passed through the wall-bound mutant zone.

Ahead appeared a larger space, a catchment basin, or some sort of inspection junction.

This catchment basin was about a dozen square meters, with a passage opening on each of the three walls.

They had entered from the left.

Directly ahead was the continuation of the main passage.

The opening on the right was smaller and narrower, and the sound of running water came from within.

Lu Yuan was just about to signal to continue along the main passage when his peripheral vision caught something.

It was the walls around the passage opening.

Something was clinging to the surface of the wall.

A kind of slender, damp vine was spreading out from the depths of the small passage.

They spread outward along the edge of the passage opening, clinging tightly to the surface of the bricks.

The surface of the vines was wet, covered with a thin layer of mucus.

And at the tips of some of the vines...

Lu Yuan saw it.

Eyes.

Not human eyes.

Pea-sized, grey-green spheres embedded at the tips of the vines, slowly rotating.

They were watching their group.

But the vines did not extend out of the passage opening.

They stopped when they reached the edge, as if something was preventing them from entering the catchment basin.

It was clearly the copper.

The frame of the catchment basin was entirely copper.

They were blocked by the copper in that passage.

They were merely observing from a distance.

【Environmental Perception: Anomalous biological activity detected... advise keeping distance...】

‘Biological?’

Lu Yuan did not speak.

He simply moved the light away from that direction slowly.

Then he used hand signals to tell everyone not to look in that direction. Do not make a sound.

Take the main passage.

Bo Er hadn't seen the vines.

But he saw Lu Yuan's hand signals.

Without a word, he turned and walked toward the main passage.

The six of them silently passed through the catchment basin and entered the main passage directly ahead.

No one looked back.

Behind them, deep within the small passage opening, the grey-green eyeballs at the tips of the vines slowly closed in the darkness.

The main passage continued downward.

The slope increased.

The standing water began to flow.

A faint current of water trickled in from behind.

Bolen, after entering this area, walked while keeping close to the right wall, his fingers never leaving the wall.

They continued forward like this for a time.

【Environmental Perception: Small amount of pollution source detected....】

At the same time, strange sounds came from ahead.

It was the sound of claws scraping against the copper surface.

Skritch... skritch...

Lu Yuan lowered the lamp light.

Everyone crouched down against the left wall of the passage.

The sound drew closer.

Then, at the edge of the light barely covered by the sandworm oil lamp, a figure emerged from the darkness.

On all fours.

Its size was equivalent to a large dog.

But it was not a dog.

The torso was human, stretched and flattened, with every vertebra of the spine bulging from the skin.

The limbs were also human arms and legs, but the joints were all bent in reverse, in a strange posture adapted for quadrupedal walking.

The palms and soles of the feet were wider and thicker, the nails had fallen off, replaced by a layer of thick keratin pads, making a skritching sound as they stepped on the copper surface.

It lowered its head, sniffing something along the right wall of the passage.

Then it lifted its head.

The light shone on its face.

A human face.

A complete, whole human face.

Growing on a canine-shaped body.

The expression was frozen, devoid of any emotion.

The only thing that could move was its mouth.

The mouth opened slightly, the tongue lolling out, panting like a dog.

It saw the light.

It did not pounce.

It froze in place, its degenerated eyes narrowing.

Then it turned its head and made a sound toward the darkness behind it.

It was not a dog's bark.

It was a human cry squeezed out from the depths of its throat.

Intermittent, as if its vocal cords no longer remembered how to produce sound normally.

And the moment it wailed, Lu Yuan realized what it was.

What this thing wanted to do. The revolver fired.

‘Bang!’

The silver-plated bullet accurately opened a hole in its head.

Black blood, mixed with unknown fluids, splattered everywhere.

But this thing did not fall; instead, a fierce look appeared on its face.

At the same time, outside the pitch-black pipe network, it was answered by more of the same sounds.

Coming from the darkness ahead.

Two sounds, three sounds.

And not just the eerie creature in front of them.

Further away, mixed in with the crying, was another sound.

Hiss...

There were also ghouls.

【Detected Target: Unnamed Mutant (Captivity/Gregarious)】

【Status: Humans deliberately polluted; their brains have been destroyed until only hunting instincts remain. Because of the higher hardness of the facial bones, they have instead retained the most human characteristics. They operate in groups.】

【Weakness: Holy light, copper weapons, neck.】

【Forbidden Lore: Knowledge Seeker: +0.1...13.3/100】

"Fire at the necks! Light the lamps first!"

When Lu Yuan gave the order, the revolver had already been pulled again.

This time, the neck of the eerie creature in front instantly exploded, emitting a whimper, and then it fell to the ground.

Bo Er reacted extremely quickly, splashing sandworm oil onto the copper floor and throwing a match...

Boom.

The moon-white flames spread, leaving nowhere to hide in the narrow pipe.

Three eerie creatures with human faces were followed by two ghouls.

These were not the thin-framed ones from the surface; these two were huge, their grey-red flesh membranes intact, covered in a layer of red keratin.

Inside their huge mouths, three layers of teeth shone with an eerie luster.

They were greater ghouls!