Strange game designer.

Chapter 738 People Living in Darkness
The deeper Gao Ming went into the underground water network, the more abnormal his mental state became. What was even stranger was that he himself did not notice anything amiss, as if everything was normal.

Walking across the wooden planks covered with instructions, sewage dripped down their trouser legs, and Gao Ming and the driver seemed to have become one with this dirty world.

In his eyes, the garbage floating on the underground river slowly grew flesh and blood, carrying people's past memories; thin roots grew in the cracks of the walls, like long rat tails, swaying gently, and disappearing quickly when touched.

The world behind the iron fence is devoid of light; reality is shut out. This place belongs only to darkness, and everything here is connected to darkness.

Flowers that looked like baby mouths bloomed on the thick moss, fish with human faces swam in the water, the air became viscous, and each breath felt like swallowing something, making my lungs feel very uncomfortable.

Without Gao Ming urging him, the driver proactively grabbed the rope, afraid of being too far from Gao Ming, but even so, an accident still occurred.

The driver slipped on something and fell to the ground. He groped around with his hands and his fingertips touched a thigh wrapped in wet plastic.

"A corpse! There's a dead body here!"

Holding the driver's hand, Gao Ming squatted down next to him, looking at the corner of the wall where a sanitation worker in a hazmat suit was leaning against the wall. His work badge on his chest had seven different stamps, indicating that he had worked for the cleaning company for a long time and had cleaned seven restricted areas. He was a true senior employee, but such an experienced guy actually died in the sewer.

The hazmat suit was not badly damaged, the man's body was well preserved, and his facial features were frozen at the moment of death.

Peaceful and gentle, without any fear of death, but rather like a child seeing its mother.

Picking up the flashlight and walkie-talkie carried by the cleaner, Gao Ming tried turning the knob on the walkie-talkie. After a crackling sound of electricity, a man's voice suddenly rang out: "Captain! Captain! Thank you... for escaping... for finally coming to rescue us!"

The man was overjoyed, shouting loudly.

"Are there other living people deep in the water network?" Gao Ming said into the walkie-talkie, "Where are you? Tell me your location."

"Captain? You're not the captain? Who are you? Who are you?!"

"I was sent by the higher-ups to rescue you."

"Hahaha! How could the higher-ups possibly come to save us! You killed the captain, you're a monster! A ghost! You tried to trick me into revealing my location so you could come and kill me! ***!" A mix of insults and maniacal shouts erupted as the man on the other end of the walkie-talkie seemed to have collapsed: "You killed the captain, the captain is dead! You ghosts!"

Since entering this gang city, Gao Ming has rarely heard rumors about ghosts or monsters. It seems that insane patients are more dangerous than ghosts.

Have you ever seen a ghost?

"I won't fall for it. I won't trust you like everyone else does! Stop pretending! Live forever in that dark, stinking ditch, and don't even think about taking away a sliver of our sunshine!"

Communication was interrupted, but Gao Ming didn't care. He continued walking forward with the driver and soon saw a second body.

It looked like it had been transported from a hospital morgue. Its ankles were wrapped with identification information and details of its illness. There were some knife wounds on its body, and twisted tubes were growing out of its flesh, pulsating rhythmically.

"The internal organs have been removed, and there are still bloodstains on the ground. Did they encounter a monster that eats internal organs?" The driver was slowly getting used to seeing corpses. Following the bloodstains, the underground river widened and the current slowed down. At the crossroads, they saw a strange person wearing a tattered cotton coat.

Wearing a black felt hat and with plastic bags wrapped around his legs, next to him was a small cart with missing wheels, filled with various kinds of trash.

The strange man held a thin rope in his hand, and at his feet lay human entrails that emitted a foul stench.

"You can even find people fishing here?" The driver frowned as he looked at the organs, feeling acid reflux.

Not long after, the strange man seemed to sense something and suddenly yanked the thin rope out of the water. A strange fish was hanging from the iron hook at the end of the rope.

Its body is a translucent pink color, and it has two heads, one large and one small. The large head is a normal fish head, while the smaller head next to the gills is somewhat similar to a human head, except that the facial features are all covered by a membrane and it has no hair.

Laughing, the strange man drooled as he grabbed the fish.

He lifted the dirty cloth covering the cart, revealing various bottles and jars that looked somewhat like condiments, but none of them made one hesitant to try them.

After tossing the fish into the cart, the strange man kicked the unused "bait" into the dark river. He wiped the blood off his shoes before reeling in the line and glancing at Gao Ming.

"Outsiders? Wanted criminals? Debt dodgers? Patients?" The strange man raised his head, revealing a face covered in tattoos beneath his tattered felt hat. The dense, overlapping tattoos obscured his original appearance and marred his face, leaving no unsightly patches. "You're lucky to have met me so soon. You can call me the cook. I only eat garbage, not people."

"Are there man-eating creatures in these sewers?"

"Hehe, there's everything you can eat." The strange man pushed the cart in one direction and didn't chase Gao Ming and the others away when he noticed them following behind.

After crawling through several large pipes and crossing a floating bridge made of garbage, the strange man led Gao Ming and his companions to an abandoned sewage testing station.

The original equipment was smashed, and the makeshift dam near the site used to divert sewage was piled with garbage. The space here was much larger than other places, and several large holes had been dug out in the center of the garbage mountain, where other strange people seemed to live.

“Every month, citizens flee here, but very few survive more than a week.” The cook opened the station door and heard a noise. Several children crawled out of the garbage dump. They were tied with ropes, seemingly to prevent the garbage mountain from collapsing and burying them while they slept, or perhaps to prevent them from falling into the underground river and being swept away.

Pulling out a knife, the cook placed the freshly caught fish on the cutting board, cut it open while it was still alive, and without lighting a fire to heat the oil, he simply processed it, then opened the bottles and jars in the cart and sprinkled all sorts of strange seasonings on it.

"Eat them raw? Eat fish that live in this water raw?" The driver couldn't bear to watch any longer. He thought he was already having a hard time surviving in the gang city, but he never expected there to be such a forgotten group of guys in the underground water network.

"What are you complaining about? You're probably not as clean as this fish." The cook was a little angry, and the plates he was about to hand to Gao Ming and the driver were taken away and placed outside.

As if drawn by the aroma, the children who crawled out of the hole ran across the garbage, grabbing at the fish and eating with great joy.

Looking at the children, Gao Ming noticed that they all had tattoo-like scars on their bodies, like the roots of a flower of life spreading out.

(End of this chapter)