Chapter 222: Reborn as a Drudge in the Depths

“I heard they sent him over from the south.”

“He’s actually still alive? Talk about luck.”

“Apparently, he hid in a concealed compartment the whole time and escaped the explosion. His teacher died, though, and he was left crippled. Without treatment, he wouldn’t have lasted much longer.”

“They wasted that much medicine on a useless wreck like him?”

“He still has his hands, doesn’t he? We’re short-staffed everywhere. Even a cripple can be put to use. Why else would they have shipped him off to a place like this?”

“Shh, keep your voice down. He’s looking this way!”

“What are you afraid of? Look, he’s even smiling at us.”

***

Amid the rolling waves of heat, machinery thundered without pause.

Ji Jue grinned foolishly at the two apprentices. Unfortunately, his badly burned face was no longer handsome or approachable. It was hideous and twisted, and crimson blood seeped from the cracks in his scars. The sight made the two apprentices wince. Their whispered conversation came to an abrupt halt.

How fascinating. Being ugly had its advantages too. Now he knew.

Ji Jue looked away, leaned on his crutches, and hobbled forward, doing his best to pick up the pace.

Hearing the uneven rhythm of the crutches tapping against the floor, the middle-aged man leading the way glanced back and slowed his pace slightly. Looking at Ji Jue’s strained smile, he let out a sigh. “Everyone who ends up here is the same at first. People gossip too much. Once you get to know each other, it’ll get better.”

Ji Jue nodded and put on the smile his role called for. It was a pitiful smile tinged with just the right amount of subservience. The middle-aged man looked away, utterly unmoved, as though he had long since grown accustomed to seeing weakness and submission.

The enormous workshop resembled a sprawling factory complex. They were now on the lowest level, where the air was hot, humid, and permanently saturated with harsh, acrid fumes. Between the deafening crashes of power hammers came the occasional muffled cough.

Every department operated around the clock. Countless craftsmen remained at their stations day and night, working without rest. As for the drudge apprentices, they couldn’t even dream of slacking off or sleeping. Every face was deathly pale, every pair of eyes bloodshot with exhaustion.

The middle-aged man who had brought Ji Jue here was Sun Ci. He was a junior manager among the apprentices on this floor and one of the senior drudges, and he was also directly responsible for Ji Jue, the crippled newcomer.

“Here. Considering the state you’re in, start with these.” Sun Ci pointed at an empty workstation. Dried bloodstains still marked the chair, and the workbench was piled high with scrap. “Get it all done by the end of the day.”

With that, he turned and left. Nearly every moment, more scrap came pouring down through a chute in the corner. It flowed without end, like a bout of explosive diarrhea.

The apprentices at the very bottom of the hierarchy had only one job: sort through the scrap as quickly as possible, salvage anything still usable, dismantle it, and send it for recycling. No one ever said what would happen if they failed to finish, but everyone worked with desperate intensity, as if their lives depended on it. Ji Jue could only assume the consequences were unpleasant.

Back at the Craftsmen Association, there had been too much work too, but at least they could cry. Here, even crying was considered a waste of time.

“Oh, fate... you really know how to screw with me.”

Ji Jue sat down at his station and looked around at the chaotic bustle surrounding him. For a moment, he felt dazed.

Back at the Craftsmen Association, he’d worked in the Recycling and Processing Department, sorting scrap every day. He’d gone through all that trouble to infiltrate the enemy as an undercover agent, only to be back to sorting scrap.

Wasn’t this undercover operation starting to feel a little pointless?

Ji Jue grumbled to himself, but his hands never slowed. He quickly fell into a familiar rhythm, deftly sorting and classifying the scrap.

Not far away, Sun Ci happened to glance over. Seeing how practiced Ji Jue was, he gave a subtle nod before looking away, relieved. Looks like I won’t have to work quite so much overtime today.

Among the six teams on this level, theirs was the only one that was perpetually understaffed, yet the workload was exactly the same. They endured more hardship, suffered just as much, and somehow always got the worst end of the deal.

Meanwhile, using the reflection in a piece of broken sheet metal, Ji Jue discreetly observed everyone else’s workflow. More specifically, he was gauging their efficiency. He had to be careful not to work too fast and accidentally shatter the team’s productivity record.

Fortunately, things looked fine. The efficiency here was noticeably higher than in the Craftsmen Association’s Recycling and Processing Department. That was mainly because they didn’t bother with protective equipment, allowing them to skip a great many steps. The Association still cared, at least a little, about workers’ rights. The craftsmen of the Depths, on the other hand, had no such tradition of taking care of their tools.

What puzzled Ji Jue was this: even after cutting out all the safety measures, they were only marginally more efficient than the Association’s recycling department. In that case, what was the point of worshiping Abominations? Had all that devotion gone completely to waste?

Whether it was the Association or the Depths, the goals pursued by craftsmen and masters were probably different, but drudges were drudges, no matter where they went.

And so, Ji Jue went from awkwardly feeling his way through the work to getting the hang of it, and finally to adapting completely within three or four hours. Not a single apprentice stopped working throughout that period.

After a while, the tension that had been hanging over him finally eased. He had finally blended into his surroundings. Infiltrating the Heretic Cult had turned out to be far easier than he’d imagined. They hadn’t even bothered to give him, the sole survivor, any special interrogation.

With the Security Bureau attacking from all sides, everyone was swamped. No one had time to nitpick over every little detail. His records and spirit matter authentication were already stored in the bank’s central system. He was also an aberrant, and he was wearing the apprentice uniform of a craftsman from the Depths. Apparently, that was good enough.

They checked his Aether records and skimmed through his surface memories. After confirming that he knew nothing and had discovered nothing, they had crudely subjected him to several healing procedures and pumped him full of powerful drugs. As long as there was still a breath left in him, they would drag him back from death and put him straight back to work. If he remained useful, they would keep using him. If he didn’t, they would use him as material instead.

Once they confirmed he would live and could still move, that was the end of it. As for whether he was still suffering from any lasting complications, everyone here was already risking their lives just by showing up to work, so there was little point worrying about such things.

The good news was that posing as an apprentice had indeed made it easy to infiltrate the place. The bad news was that, after sneaking in, he was still an apprentice, basically a genuine bottom-rung drudge. Judging by the workload, they intended to keep him working around the clock, seven days a week, like some nuclear-powered mule.

The working conditions were no different from those of a sweatshop. There were toxic fumes released during dismantling, enough dust to start a crash course in silicosis, lingering aberration contamination leaking from the scrap, twenty-four-hour shifts, and an endless mountain of work.

Even Ji Jue, who was no stranger to working himself to the bone, couldn’t help but marvel at how extreme it was.

The Association merely treated people as if they were tools. Here in the Depths, they had stopped treating them as humans altogether. After all, even the craftsmen of the Depths were still human, more or less. They worshiped Abominations to advance themselves, not to corrupt their bodies into some shapeless monstrosity.

For those without sufficient talent, the path of Supreme Benevolence was a long and winding road, full of endless hardship, wrong turns, and obstacles that were often impossible to overcome.

The blessings of the Foolish Abominations, on the other hand, were like a zip line suspended high in the air, except the cable had been greased, electrified, and made impossible to grip. You either shot upward or plunged straight down. The thrill was the entire appeal. Even with all kinds of esoterism and conversion techniques to build resistance and reduce the risks, one careless mistake could still mean the end.

Whether one reached Supreme Benevolence or became a Great Abomination was something only the strong had the luxury of considering. Drudges rarely had any choice at all. Nearly every apprentice working here showed signs of corruption to some degree.

The symptoms caused by the Ember Path were the most straightforward: the flesh underwent materialization, while the mind gradually deteriorated. Once too much contamination accumulated within the body, both flesh and soul began to slip out of control, developing traits that should never have existed.

Some had faces frozen stiff, like masks. Some had withered, shrunken arms covered in wood grain, like the limbs of puppets. Others had their fingers twisted into tools. And some had gone even further, to the point where they could no longer be called human at all.

When the distortion of body and soul became too severe, the victim mutated beyond recognition under the tangled influence of contamination and blessing, erasing every trace of what they had once been.

One such creature was sitting in the corner. It was an unnatural creation in which flesh had completely fused with a crushing machine. It opened its mouth again and again as it wailed, swallowing scrap and grinding it apart. Blood gushed and splattered everywhere before it spat out the mangled remains.

No one here seemed to find the sight unusual. They simply walked around it.

As Ji Jue worked with numb, mechanical efficiency, his hand suddenly trembled. A drop of grease slipped between his fingers and fell beneath the workbench.

There, in a pool of thick grease saturated with lingering contamination, something stirred. A spider no larger than the last joint of a little finger crawled out of the sludge. Keeping to the shadows, it silently scuttled away. Then came another one, and another.

Ji Jue calmly divided his attention between two tasks. While dismantling the scrap, he skimmed off a small portion that could pass as routine material loss.

An invisible furnace sprang into action between his fingers. He kneaded the spirit matter into shape, gave it form with Fluid Alchemy, and finally awakened its spirit intelligence through Deus Ex Machina.

Like this, the grease spiders were created with effortless ease. As they traveled back and forth, the sprawling underground workshop, which had seemed as complex as a maze, gradually unfolded within Ji Jue’s mind.

Unfortunately, the entire underground complex was sealed by layers of esoterism and spirit circuits. The distances involved were also too great, making it difficult to find any opening through which he could escape.

After all, a Recycling and Processing Department like this was little different from a garbage dump. No one wanted the stench of the sewers backing up, and no one wanted the drudges quietly climbing over the railings and escaping.

Keeping everything securely locked down was better for everyone. Everyone except the drudges.

As one of the grease spiders crawled through the workshop’s ventilation ducts, Ji Jue heard a familiar voice. “One hundred and fifty pieces?!”

Not far from the furnace was the quietest, cleanest place in the entire underground workshop. A small office had been partitioned off from the rest, even decorated with two sickly pothos plants that looked half-dead. Inside the office-like room, the man seated behind the desk smiled pleasantly and nodded.

“S-Sir... are you sure this isn’t a mistake?” Sun Ci was drenched in sweat, his voice shaking. “Why has our quota suddenly doubled?”

The supervisor casually sipped tea, smiling as though this were none of his concern. “Those are the orders from above. What can I do about it? Besides, hasn’t your team been sitting at the bottom of the rankings for ages? How can you still complain? Mr. Sun, you’re making things very difficult for me.”

“B-but...”

“But what?!” the supervisor snapped, expression darkening. “Either get the job done or get out! Don’t cling to a position you can’t handle. There are plenty of people willing to take your place! Understood?”

“Understood. Of course.”

Sun Ci didn’t dare argue any further. He lowered his head and left in humiliation.

A young man was waiting outside the door with a smile. He was quite attractive, with delicate, handsome features. Watching Sun Ci’s humiliation with obvious enjoyment, he patted him on the shoulder. “Mr. Sun, if you can’t handle the job anymore, why not step aside and let someone more capable take over?”

Sun Ci said nothing. He simply kept his head lowered and walked away.

The young man entered the office. Once the door closed, only muffled sounds could be heard from within, such as soft laughter mingled with suggestive moans.

“One hundred and fifty?!”

When Sun Ci returned to the team and announced the new quota, almost everyone lost it. Feeling the resentful stares directed at him, he forced a bitter smile. “I...”

An apprentice whose hair had almost completely fallen out glared at him. “If you weren’t up to the job, you shouldn’t have taken it in the first place! Why force yourself into a position you can’t handle?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” another apprentice snapped. “Mr. Sun has helped you plenty of times! You were happy enough to take advantage of that, and now you’re standing there acting all righteous?”

“We’re at their mercy. What else can we do? If they want to install one of their own people as the manager, then let them! Why drag the rest of us down with you and get the whole team targeted? They’ve been making life harder for us every chance they get!”

Sun Ci listened as the arguments flew back and forth without interrupting. After passing on the new quota, he wanted to offer a few words of encouragement, or perhaps make some kind of promise, but no one believed him anymore.

With a self-deprecating smile, he let out a weary sigh. Given the choice, he would have gladly stepped aside and handed the position to someone else, but he didn’t have that choice.

Over the past few months, his symptoms of materialization had only grown worse. Unless he achieved something soon and found a chance to transfer elsewhere, he feared he would lose control completely. To make him give up this last lifeline now would be no different from killing him outright.

Only then did Sun Ci notice Ji Jue. At some point, the crippled newcomer had slowly risen to his feet with the aid of his crutches and was now standing beside him.

“Manager Sun—”

“Manager? I won’t be one by tomorrow.” Sun Ci shook his head with a bitter laugh. After failing to meet the quota so many times in a row, his days as manager were clearly numbered. If they failed again today, he would probably be stripped of the position immediately. “What is it? Don’t tell me you want to transfer to another team too?”

“I...” The cripple hesitated before lowering his voice. “I think... I might have a way.”

Sun Ci froze. He slowly raised his head and stared at him.