Chapter 275

“You saw it with your own eyes—the hell where they locked up ordinary people just to use them to vent their lust. And you’re telling me Hybris isn’t that bad?”

“It’s just... a kind of side effect.”

Siron couldn’t stand it anymore. He shot to his feet.

“Are you insane? I almost got dragged back there myself. I almost became one of them!”

He stared at Lewis, bewildered, then finally asked,

“What happened to you? What the hell did they do to you?”

Lewis loved Hybris. But when he tried to recall when or how he had started craving their approval, a crushing fatigue pressed down on his mind like a heavy stone. After countless forced rut cycles in the dark, after all that coerced repentance, the truth he’d engraved into his brain felt too precious, too sacred, to ever doubt.

“It’s too late to get out now.”

“Too late?”

Lewis closed his eyes, inhaled deeply as if catching a scent on the wind, and then opened them slowly.

“Bebe. If you don’t want another unpleasant incident, you’d better hide your pheromones.”

Unpleasant incident? Siron didn’t understand—but the meaning dawned on him, faint and cold.

“You called them, didn’t you? Here?”

Lewis shook his head. But it was no relief. What he said next turned Siron’s face white.

“Ted didn’t seem to know, but the boat had a tracking device attached. It transmits its location every thirty minutes.”

“Get up. I’m leaving.”

But Siron never made it to the door. The front window exploded in a shower of glass, and men in black poured in from every side. Before he could even think of running, they were on him and Lewis, forcing them to the floor, twisting their arms behind their backs and binding them.

When Siron looked at Lewis’s face in terror, he saw only a vacant calm, an expression detached from everything. It was a hollow mask—like his soul had been torn apart into a thousand shreds and disappeared, leaving nothing but a shell behind.

For the past two days, Anna had been paying for her impatience. She’d been scammed repeatedly on the hacking exchange—buying files from dark-web sellers with crypto and getting nothing but junk. She’d lost coins worth sixty thousand dollars that way.

Discouraged, she’d drowned herself in liquor all night and woke late the next day. She downed a handful of herbal antidepressants, took a sip of fresh coffee, and sat back in front of the computer.

“I’m going to see this through.”

She logged into the coin exchange and checked the real-time price of DeepCoin. Two days ago it had been around forty-seven dollars; now it hovered near twenty-three. She shut her eyes, feeling her stomach twist.

“Shit. I’m just burning money in thin air.”

When cash lost its value, at least paper bills remained. Coins were nothing but intangible data. Furious but defiant, she bet again like a gambler who knows she’ll lose—buying ten thousand DeepCoins, worth over two hundred thousand dollars.

And ironically, the gamble paid off immediately. On her first retry, she got what she’d been after.

After paying three thousand coins for the file, she downloaded it through a maze of encryption steps, praying it wasn’t laced with malware. The computer didn’t crash; no infection warnings popped up. The data seemed real. The problem was, she didn’t have the skills to interpret it.

“What the hell is all this?”

Going through it carefully, she realized the files were neatly sorted by category. She entered the IP address Daniel had once scribbled on paper for her into the search bar—and her confusion only deepened.

Client Name: Helso CellGuard Research Laboratory

Service Address: 808 Parkside Road, Riverland Southhill, Baggers City, Helso (3369X)

Contract Number: MRL-4528-209X

Exactly twelve hours later, when she finally reached Daniel and explained the situation, Anna was scrolling back through the purchased files at a slow, deliberate pace.

“A statue listed as the internet service subscriber? Yeah, that’s weird.”

Daniel slurped noodles on the other end of the line. The sound grated on her nerves, but she bit her tongue; she needed his help.

“I checked Google Maps too. There’s no building at that address—just a statue.”

Anna zoomed in on the Street View. The screen showed a large bronze mermaid statue, its surface tinged with blue-green patina, solemn and heavy. In the 1920s, the Riverland district had been flooded, killing hundreds. The bronze mermaid had been erected in memory of the victims.

It was indeed strange, as Daniel said. The statue stood on a quiet riverside trail. The base was the size of a door, solid stone, with no structure that would allow anyone to enter. It wasn’t a Trojan horse—and there was no way Kelly Welch could be trapped inside, sending Help me, I’m imprisoned messages through the internet.

“Maybe that hacker scammed you again. The format looks legit but the contents are garbage.”

“It’s not that. When I searched the Linhart police station and my own IP, both addresses came out correctly.”

Daniel inhaled sharply on the line.

“So what’s Helso CellGuard Laboratory? What do they even do?”

“I don’t know. Nothing comes up in search.”

Anna stared at the mermaid statue on the monitor.

“What if the IP address is disguised?”

Daniel brushed it off at first but corrected her gently.

“IPs assigned directly by an internet service provider can’t be faked. There’s really something at that location.”

“Really there?”

She rotated the virtual view around the statue, checking it from every angle—ground level, underground, skyward—but found no sign of an entryway. Within a twenty-meter radius there was only the Nathan River, the path, and the bike road.

Suppressing a sigh, she reached for her half-finished coffee. Just then, a black-and-white photo flashed in her mind.

“Oh, that? My uncle took it... it’s the Deep Drainage Tunnel.”

“What?”

“Stormwater system. There’s a massive drainage passage running eighty meters under central Baggers City.”

“Eighty meters down?”

“Yeah. It’s deep and about eleven kilometers long.”

She suddenly remembered the photo hanging in Rachel’s living room—the night she’d stayed over at the house of Rachel, a clerical worker at the Traffic Violation Center and a fellow member of the Slhan Society. Over morning coffee, Rachel had told her about her late husband, who’d worked twenty-one years digging tunnels underground.

“...No way.”

“No way what? Did you think of something?”

The thought was absurd. A gang kidnapping people and imprisoning them in storm drains under the city? That was urban-legend nonsense. The place was a flood-control facility, built to protect Baggers City from overflowing rivers.

And yet she couldn’t shake the unease. Before saying it aloud, she decided to test the idea.

“What if there’s an underground facility beneath that statue? The internet line could run from ground to underground.”

Daniel chuckled on the other end.

“Come on, what are you saying? Like there’s a hidden underground city under the park?”

He laughed, but she muttered defensively, embarrassed.

“It was just a thought.”

Silence. Then Daniel’s tone changed—more thoughtful now.

“Actually... it’s not impossible. Underground bunkers, subway systems—fiber cables get run down from the surface. If the ISP extended a conduit underground and assigned the line there, the IP would show the surface address.”

Anna rubbed her temples, exasperated.

“Put it in plain language.”

A pause, then Daniel sighed and explained as simply as he could.

“Basically, someone could register a normal address for the ISP, then extend the cable far away to use the internet at a totally different location.”

In her mind, Anna pictured cables snaking down from the mermaid statue, plunging eighty meters into the earth to link up with the drainage tunnel below.

“Why’d you ask, anyway?”

Anna told him what she knew about the deep drainage tunnel.

“But that’s a floodway, right? It’d get submerged all the time. Who the hell would wire internet down there? It’s insane.”

It was a reasonable point, but she still couldn’t shake the suspicion. An inescapable structure, underground chambers suited for confinement—if Kelly Welch was imprisoned belowground rather than above, it would explain why her messages traced to the statue’s location.

But how could anyone reach such a place?

Then Anna thought of Rachel—the stout red-haired woman with a country accent. Her husband, before dying in an accident, had spent twenty-one years working like a mole inside that very tunnel. Maybe, among the belongings Rachel still couldn’t bear to throw away, there was a copy of the tunnel’s blueprints.