Chapter 365: Death, Inescapable

The worker’s death was gruesome. He had plummeted straight from the scaffolding, his body twisted into an unspeakable posture, blood splattered across the ground.

By a cruel twist of fate, he had fallen directly before the eyes of his closest friend, who was nearly scared out of his wits.

The five deaths terrified the site foreman.

Work ground to a halt. Fear gripped the construction site.

Yet the five deaths seemed to mark an end to the string of bizarre occurrences.

During the stoppage, no further abnormal incidents happened.

And so, the foreman’s vigilance slackened. Work resumed.

What followed was, indeed, a long stretch of smooth and uneventful days.

Until yesterday—

It was the most devastating incident recorded in the files.

Late that night, deep on the third subterranean level, over ten workers—moments away from completing the final stage of construction—were simultaneously struck by an unknown force.

The ground collapsed.

Through the swirling dust, a buried chamber was revealed.

It was a vast cavity, its stone walls carved from floor to ceiling with indecipherable runes. Under the workers’ headlamps, the symbols reflected back a dark, muted luster.

At the chamber’s center stood a black stone pillar, bound tight by massive chains.

The pillar was roughly thick enough that two grown men could barely wrap their arms around it. It was inky black through and through, its surface unnaturally smooth.

The chains, coiled from the pillar’s top all the way down to its base, had links as thick as an infant’s arm, and they too were etched with countless dense runes.

Black mist swirled around the pillar.

It seeped through the gaps of the stone column and slithered slowly across the floor, like a black tide.

Then, something dark and fibrous—alive—burst forth from the ground!

It was the same black hair found inside the bodies of the previous victims, but thicker, longer, packed far more densely!

It erupted from the floor, from the stone walls, from every crack and crevice, like thousands of black serpents, piercing through the bodies of dozens of workers in an instant!

The black hairs entered their bodies and grew with mad abandon!

In a single breath, nearly every spark of life was ravaged and drained.

Before the workers could even scream, they collapsed into pools of their own blood.

Only one survivor was left on the scene…

“That’s… that’s about it. Everything I know, I’ve told you.”

“Can I go now? My family’s still waiting for me back home…”

The speaker was a worker.

A middle-aged man. His skin was coarse and sun-darkened, his hands riddled with calluses. He wore a dust-stained work uniform.

He was the sole survivor of the last incident—the strange occurrence that had claimed dozens of lives.

Some of the details had come directly from his own account.

At this moment, he showed no trace of fear.

The relief of a man who had narrowly escaped death gleamed in his eyes, so natural it could not have been faked.

He understood that the people around him were special. He could tell from the way the rescuers and police who pulled him out had deferred to these young people during the handover.

They had addressed them with utmost respect, their tones cautious.

The red-haired woman before him, in particular, was clearly someone of immense status.

And so, the worker’s voice took on an almost groveling note.

But—

His caution and deference never once changed the way the woman looked at him.

That gaze troubled him throughout.

It was not disgust. Not disdain. Not contempt.

It was… pity.

Pity from on high.

………………

Poppy watched the man before her, so careful to please, so desperately hiding his own discontent. She let out a soft sigh.

It was so faint it was nearly swallowed by the hum of the fluorescent lights.

The auxiliary squad members all avoided meeting his eyes, to varying degrees.

Some buried their faces in their files. Some stared blankly at the tabletop. Some simply turned away, pretending to organize their equipment.

None of them wanted to meet the eyes that still held that glint of relief.

But she was not like them.

What had to be faced would be faced, sooner or later.

Before her, the worker’s upper body was largely intact.

He was dressed as a typical laborer, his face smeared with only a few traces of blood—one might even call it “clean.”

However, the lower half of his body… had long since been lost.

He had become the sole survivor not because of courage or luck.

But simply because, at the time, his position had been the furthest from the stone pillar.

During the collapse, a falling steel bar had crushed his lumbar spine, flinging him to the edge of the cave-in.

That patch of ground just happened to escape the terror that erupted moments later.

Therefore, right now…

Everything below his waist was a mess of torn flesh and blood.

His limbs beneath the pelvis had been reduced to pulp—shattered bone and mangled meat indistinguishable from the ground beneath. There was no telling where leg ended and earth began.

His blood had long since drained. The wounds had taken on an unnatural, grayish-white pallor.

The only reason he could still sit here and speak was the life-support equipment deployed by the cleanup squad. They were using technology and supernatural methods far beyond this Fragment World to forcibly lock in his final breath.

But he was unaware of his condition.

Or rather, he had been deliberately avoiding it.

From the moment he was rescued, he had kept his upper body tilted slightly forward, his eyes never once dropping downward.

He had refused, all this time, to look at what had become of his lower half.

Due to instant nerve necrosis and a flood of adrenaline, he felt no pain.

He believed himself to be the true lucky one in this incident.

But in truth—Poppy included—everyone’s eyes as they looked at him… had already said it all.

He was only an ordinary man.

With an ordinary person’s vitality, it was impossible to survive long enough for organs to regenerate or limbs to restore.

If he were a member of the cleanup squad, potions might give him a sliver of hope.

But as a common human, he could not even withstand the potency of healing elixirs.

The very medicine potent enough to heal a Rank-3 apprentice and grant them new life would be, to an ordinary person without any supernatural foundation, like wildfire poured upon dry grass.

As things stood, he was being kept alive by force.

Perhaps a day. Perhaps a few hours. The moment the life-support equipment was removed, he would die for good.

This was not a possibility. It was a certainty.

Poppy drew a deep breath. Her expression remained utterly impassive—even that trace of pity had been wiped away.

As the only Rank-3 present, she demonstrated the resolve expected of her.

She stepped forward, holding a glass of water.

The liquid shimmered with an almost imperceptible shade of blue, nearly invisible under the dim yellow lighting.

“Of course. What you’ve told us is very important. Have some water first. They’ll take you home soon.”

“Thank you… thank you…”

A glimmer of gratitude flickered in the eyes of the man who had toiled at construction sites his entire life.

He took the glass and drank it all without the slightest wariness.

His words of thanks gradually faded. The glass slipped from his loosening fingers and fell to the floor with a soft clatter.

Yet he was not disturbed by the sound. Instead, his eyelids slowly closed, his breathing eased into a steady rhythm, and his expression relaxed by gentle degrees.

That serenity was unmistakable—identical to the serenity that had graced the face of a certain corpse.

Only this time, the peace was genuine.