old dream

Chapter 191 Sewer Insects

A few days later, Elena walked in the dark sewer again.

The hunting group has conveyed their news to the Principality of Sheng Province, but there is no reply yet.And Nancy said that her subordinates don't support idlers, and if they want to be taken in for a period of time, they have to help the hunting group.

So, Elena followed Nancy back here.

Then she was able to see with her own eyes that the number of insects in Stade was far more than she had imagined.

Looking at the dense shells, fallen off limbs, and uncured shellac on the side of the road, Elena suddenly remembered that she had slept here for a few nights before, and she couldn't help feeling her stomach churn.

She had also heard some rumors about the sewer worms.

It is said that in the past a negligent slave owner accidentally let a female beetle fall into the Seber River.At that time, many people salvaged, but in the end there was no result.Because the female worm had already entered the intricate underground drainage channel against the water flow before suffocating, and built a nest in it. After a few years, it reproduced a large number of offspring.

At first I thought it was just a folklore, or even if there was a nest of insects in the sewer, it should have been cleaned up after all these years.But unexpectedly, some places have become like this.

Noticing Elena's discomfort, Nancy, who was holding a lantern, stopped and looked back considerately, waiting for her to follow up:
"Of course, if it only occupies the original drainage system of Stade, there is not much space in total."

Nancy continued to use her unfamiliar Anhe to describe why this place became like this:

"But the worms can use their forelimbs and jaws to dig through the masonry of the sewer, digging into a wider and deeper underground world."

"They work forever in their lives, as if they never stop for a moment."

The soil in the lower plains of the Seber River was originally very loose, but the shellac secreted by the worms glued these nests and the inner walls of the passages extremely firmly.Now every building and road in Stade may have already been dug to be riddled with holes.

After so many years, no one knows how many insect nests are hidden under the bustling surface of this city.

Elena grew up in Stade, but this was the first time she heard of this fact, and she felt her scalp tingle for a while.The beautiful hometown suddenly becomes strange. This strange feeling is like suddenly knowing that there are hundreds of catties of insects living under the familiar quilt.

The insectoids on the surface are completely isolated and work outside the human community, and ordinary people rarely interact with them.And these bugmen who have entered the ground are extremely afraid of humans, and will never come to the ground on their own initiative.Their constant digging behavior is more like trying to escape to the depths of the ground where there are no humans.

Even though they live in the same city, it seems like they are completely in two worlds.

"But what can they eat here?"

After accepting it a bit, Elena began to think about it more realistically.According to common sense, food is the biggest limit to reproduction, so as long as you know their food source, you can more or less guess the population size.

But in this kind of sewer, how much food can there be in total?
"Maybe it's human corpses, the ones that gang members chop up and rush into the gutter every day." Nancy said slowly.

Elena was slightly taken aback, her stomach that had already calmed down the convulsions was suddenly about to roll again.

Seeing that Elena couldn't straighten up, Nancy reached out to take off the heavy satchel on her shoulders, picked up the lamp again and walked forward.

"Don't believe me, I'm just joking."

This nightman from a foreign country seemed to have a strange sense of humor. Maybe she was quite satisfied with the joke. After turning around, she was still laughing at Elena's reaction, her shoulders couldn't stop shrugging.

"...The real food is probably the food residue left in the sewage, and the feces."

After a while, while suppressing her smile, Nancy said intermittently:
"But this is not the complete answer, because there are too many insects underground now, and it is impossible to feed them with these alone." She said:
"Although it sounds ridiculous, what the insects eat to survive has always been a mystery."

"People from the academy also captured some samples here for dissection, and it turns out that their digestive organs are indeed only mud, rotting garbage, shellac and feces, but the heat generated by these things alone is definitely not enough."

The conservation of energy was violated, but at the same time no trace of Lingsu was found.

Does not fit any kind of logic and cannot be explained by known frameworks.

"The worms in the farm had plenty of feed, but they died of disease and starvation in large numbers for no reason. In this barren land, they can't stop multiplying."

Nancy staccato, the spooky surroundings and her jerky accent making the subject all the more eerie:

"It's not that important, but no one has ever been able to explain why."

Therefore, the risks of the insect economy have always been difficult to control.

But as non-human races, they are already relatively easy to communicate and understand.

If you don't consider the night people.

"Shh."

Nancy suddenly gestured to Elena.Immediately stop.She held the upper cover of the lantern, and silently turned the gear knob with her fingertips, slowly increasing the brightness of the lantern.

The dilapidated masonry of the sewer is full of viscous unknown substances.A small spot of light cast by Nancy's lantern was reflected on the ground and water.

The edge of the spot stretches as she turns the knob, and then hits something.If you look closely, it is the pair of arthropod feet, which seem to be still moving slightly.

Elena, who was following behind, held her breath involuntarily.

The bright spot continued to expand, illuminating the entire body of the bugman.It has three pairs of hands, the middle pair has been severely degenerated, like two shriveled baby arms uselessly left beside its chest.Slender limbs support a segmented torso, giving the bugger a somewhat human-like silhouette.The surface of the body is a dirty carapace, but it is as thin as a layer of soft and transparent skin, and the body fluid wrapped underneath can be seen.

Its eyes were dull, and its pupils did not change when facing the light, and there seemed to be countless appendages in the complex mouthparts.

The worm crawled on the ground, not knowing what it was doing.

And in a place a little farther away, where the light cannot reach, there are still vaguely surrounding its companions.

The insects hadn't responded yet, Nancy quickly turned back the knob on the lamp cover, and the light disappeared.Then, Elena heard the metal impact of the bullet being loaded, and the operator's movements were extremely calm and crisp.

The next moment, dense gunfire sounded immediately.

"Da da da da-"

The tongue of flame from the muzzle continued to expand and flicker, illuminating the scene again.Amidst the hissing screams, bodily fluids flew from the insect man's body.The bullets not only shot through the body, but also easily caused their limbs to fall completely, because the joints composed of exoskeletons are very fragile in the face of impact.

"Crack."

The drum that was emptied within 20 seconds fell to the ground, and the barrel still had a faint red glow due to overheating.

"Looks like I found the right place."

Nancy lowered the heavy muzzle of the gun in her hand, and turned on the light on her finger again:
"There should be at least one lair near here."

Elena looked at the corpses of those worms. Under the light, they all turned their backs to her.That is to say, when encountering humans, the first reaction of these insects is to run away.

"why……?"

They seem to be harmless, but the slave owners on the ground are still spending money to buy bugmen from other places.

"Insects are useless if they don't start training from larvae." Nancy said, looking for traces that might point to the nest:
"And the order that the hunting group is now receiving is population control."

If these worms were allowed to proliferate indefinitely, no matter who they were, they would feel terrified.

Although it is cleared with firearms in this way, the efficiency is indeed too low.

Some people have suggested the use of poisonous gas, but unfortunately the drainage system is connected to the outside in all directions, and it is very likely to cause collective poisoning on the ground.

"Now they are indeed harmless, but if the number increases, who can guarantee what will happen to them?" Nancy said with a smile.Her accent is still a little stiff, but her diction and sentences are almost indistinguishable from those of the Southwestern Confederates:
"Not to mention anything else, if they collapse the entire city, then the people who live above us will feel bad too."

"Is this really such an exaggeration?"

Knowing that Nancy was joking again, Elena was a little distressed.However, the originally heavy heart was also relieved.

She has just experienced a major change in her life, and she will no longer be as sentimental as she used to be.So he quickly packed up his emotions, packed his backpack, and continued to follow Nancy.

……

The truth is of course not that simple, Nancy thought silently as she advanced on the increasingly dense shellac.

Otherwise, there is no need to come here with the "lantern" used to detect Lingsu.

The academic circle is still unable to determine whether the insects have wisdom.However, recently, there has been an absurd and disgusting saying that has been quietly circulating:
There is a certain kind of worship among the bugs in the sewers.

Or, it may be some kind of more incomprehensible behavior called "worship", which is just an analogy made by human beings with similar concepts in themselves, a kind of arrogant guesswork.

However, Nancy recalled a moment.

Just now those insect people crawled in a circle, and they really seemed to be worshiping something.

At the beginning of thinking in this direction, she couldn't stop her thoughts for a while, because the more she recalled the scene just now, the more she felt that it was true.

They do revolve around something, but what exactly is it?
I clearly came here for this, but why did I ignore the most important thing?

With countless questions circling in her mind, Nan Xi followed the inconspicuous traces to find the bugman's lair.The shellac at the entrance was still very new, and a young queen must have taken heavy drum cartridges from the leather pouch and dropped them at her feet for easy access.

Still thinking silently in my heart:

Check back later.

…………

The strange witchcraft that can make the dead speak is preserved in Aresio's past laboratory.

Colin and Giovanni had mastered this technique a month earlier and used it several times in confrontations with the Northern Organization.

So this time, they also managed to get the attacker with only his head to speak.Colin wrote down several addresses, somewhere in the slums of the old city, that should be the location of the fraternity.

But in addition to these, the attacker also said one more thing.

A thing that surprised Colin, but it should have been thought of long ago.

The aged Bohr is also the master of the "Mystery of the Hearth".

The "secret" in Ke Lin's current hands came from under the bed of Horst, the envoy of Fengmao, but this young soldier should have obtained the remnants of "The Slave King's Wedding Ring" through the Brotherhood.

The Boer Brotherhood has existed in Senal for many years, and it is most likely to acquire the mysterious "Wedding Ring" about the "Slave King" Gloria.Following the defeat and withdrawal of the Justus family, the surviving Brotherhood brought the Nale Modern Theory, which had been neglected and underestimated, back to the territory of the Alliance.

As the leader, Bohr himself should have a more complete version.

At this time, Ke Lin suddenly remembered the female dead person he had seen in the hell in the 36th district of Chierxingtian.

If there is only one method in this world, "The Mystery of the Hearth", which can allow people to stably enter the frequency where the Urju devils are.

So is it possible that the person who signed the contract with the ancient dead was actually Bohr?

This guess made Colin feel faintly uneasy. The enemy he is facing now may be stronger than he imagined.

But it also means that if he can kill Pol, he can end the pact with the ancient dead and let her renew the pact with him.

So in addition to stopping the carnage, defeating the Brotherhood might have some bonuses.

In addition to perfecting your own "mystery".It may even be the only person who can enter and exit hell in Area 36 by killing other hearth owners.

But the premise is to kill Bohr, whether it is on a supernatural or mundane level.

Now it was entirely up to Ricardo to act as the lieutenant and attract the attention of the enemy.Colin completely hid himself and concentrated all his energy on how to defeat the Brotherhood.

Colin had already lost faith in the ninth inning after getting the roster from Benny.For the Stade establishment, the lieutenant is no longer irreplaceable.Therefore, the betrayal of the ninth game may come at any time.

In order to deal with them, it is necessary to seek the cooperation of stronger people.

But in the city of Stade, is there really a stronger force than the Ninth Bureau?
In the past few days, Marizio has been running between the old city and Danaro.After making countless promises, he finally got an opportunity from the mayor of Stade and other dignitaries and friends.

This opportunity is extremely precious at this point in time, but it is so ethereal that it seems to be grasped at all.

"At four o'clock in the afternoon, after Archduke Edmund finishes his sword practice, you can talk to him on the phone for five minutes."

In just 5 minutes, the Grand Duke may hang up at any time, which feels more like perfunctory to his subordinates.

"Sorry, I only won this condition for you." Marizio said with some shame.

It is impossible for the Caruso family to provide something that can make the Grand Duke's heart flutter.

So the person who wants to talk to the Grand Duke is of course Colin who is in the center of the whirlwind.

(End of this chapter)