The Decaying Dream of America: I Assemble Corpses and Confront Madness

Unable to stay on the ground, Lin Zheng had no choice but to return to the sewer pipes.

The icy, bone-chilling sewage washed over his ankles, instantly soaking through his shoes and socks; the stickiness and dampness went straight to his heart.

The air was thick with a stench, a mixture of grease, rust, and excrement.

The smell was like a rotten stench that had been lingering in the house for a long time, which you couldn't find until you stumbled upon it and discovered that the sewer pipes had been leaking for a while, and sewage had soaked the entire house.

The first whiff seems acceptable, but once you open your senses, you're immediately overwhelmed by the intense aroma that permeates every corner of your body.

He desperately wanted to hold his breath and return to the ground, but he couldn't. He could only force himself to breathe slowly and adapt as quickly as possible.

Lin Zheng recalled a theory he had read somewhere, which said that smelling a scent is actually ingesting a certain amount of the substance that emits the scent.

Lin Zheng didn't know if the theory was true, but he could certainly say that he was now completely covered in it.

Because he has to push forward while carrying these substances.

He hunched over, bracing himself against the slippery inner wall of the pipe, trying to walk as quietly as possible, each step careful not to step on the paving stones scattered everywhere—

shit.

Behind them, the alarms on the ground had long been swallowed up by the heavy manhole covers and the winding underground space, leaving only a distant, indistinct hum.

Lin Zheng turned on his phone's light, and a faint beam of light barely tore through the darkness, illuminating the wriggling, unidentified fungal carpet on the inner wall of the pipe.

They were a layer of ugly gray moss, covering most of the pipe's surface, seemingly still undulating slightly, ever-growing, and emitting a damp and rotten smell.

He leaned against the wall, breathing heavily, his lungs burning from lack of oxygen and tension, his heart pounding in his chest.

Oh no, I've inhaled all the air I was holding back unconsciously.

Tired, let it all end. It's no longer clean. Lin Zheng wanted to give up and drown in this pile of shit.

The city’s vast and complex sewer system is a living, sickly organism, now laid bare before Lin Zheng.

They weave through the labyrinth of reinforced concrete, carrying all the city's waste and secrets.

Ancient cast-iron pipes crisscrossed overhead, emitting a low groan. Water droplets seeped from the cracks, striking the surface of the water with a monotonous and jarring "drip-drip" sound, amplified infinitely in this deathly silent space.

These pipelines were not originally designed to be so orderly. With the disorderly expansion of the city, new pipelines were crudely built on top of the old ones, forming layer upon layer of chaotic superposition. Some have even been abandoned and become the nests of unknown creatures, or worse.

He had heard people say that beneath every big city lies an unseen, silently expanding monster, the city's own excrement, the product of every citizen's daily consumption.

From the fryer oil poured into special recycling bins daily from the kitchens of fast food restaurants, to the waste oil poured directly into the sinks of many small restaurants, motels, and even ordinary households, all of it slowly cools in the cold pipes, eventually solidifying into lumps and adhering to the pipe walls.

One spoonful, two spoonfuls, one bucket, two buckets—the city's consumption grew larger and larger, day after day, year after year, and the grease piled up like mountains.

This was not a disaster that suddenly occurred overnight.

Grease, hair, hygiene products, and even scraps of clothing dumped in by some families, all tangled together, forming a huge, indestructible mass.

Of course, there are also corpses, not just human ones, but also animal ones. Gundams and cats and dogs are on equal footing here, fulfilling the delusions of those hypocritical animal protection organizations.

A tall sewage pipe stretched out in front of them, with water swirling at the bottom of the pipe.

Lin Zheng felt his body temperature gradually decreasing, his fatigue worsened, and his body began to tremble involuntarily.

He gripped the scalpel tightly, the metallic feel offering him a meager sense of reassurance.

Just as he was about to turn a wide corner and prepare to go deeper, the glimmer of light ahead suddenly disappeared.

Not a single ray of light could penetrate; the darkness ahead was deeper than the abyss itself.

Immediately afterwards, a cloyingly sweet and foul stench, a hundred times stronger than the surrounding environment, swept over everything.

It wasn't just rotting; it was a mixture of putrid fat, chemical waste, and a nauseating, sweet, greasy taste that shot straight to his head, causing his stomach to contract instantly and a bitter taste to rise in his throat.

A mountain of fat? A mass of body parts? Or something else entirely?

Lin Zheng abruptly stopped in his tracks. His senses were heightened by the sudden scent, his hair stood on end, and his adrenaline surged again, pulling him back from the brink of exhaustion.

He turned off the light, held his breath, tensed all his muscles, and cautiously peered into the darkness that swallowed all light.

He gently rubbed the side of the scalpel against the tube wall, and the vibrations transmitted back from the blade allowed him to better "hear" everything in front of him.

He strained with all his might, trying to encompass every inch of space within his sight, attempting to capture even the slightest outline from that thick darkness.

Before my eyes, a huge, writhing, amorphous mass of flesh blocked the entire pipe in an incredible way, sealing it tightly and leaving no room for air.

It was so enormous it was suffocating, occupying all of Lin Zheng's vision. It stretched from the bottom of the pipe to the top, almost level with the pipe wall opposite him, forming a living, ever-growing wall of flesh.

Under the faint reflected light of the phone's lamp, Lin Zheng was able to see the most terrifying details of this "slime".

That "door" is giving birth—squeezing newborn but decaying organs out of the placenta, revealing hundreds of repeatedly opening and closing stomach sacs inside.

Its surface is a gelatinous substance between translucent and milky white, occasionally emitting an unnatural green glow, resembling a giant preserved egg made of filth.

Beneath this viscous, gelatinous shell, countless layers of fat are stacked one on top of another. As the inside moves, the fat squeezes against each other, making unsettling gurgling sounds.

Within these fat deposits, twisted, grayish-white human tissue and incompletely dissolved clothing fibers can be clearly identified, some even bearing faded, faintly discernible patterns.

They were enveloped, devoured, and twisted by this mass of flesh, eventually becoming part of its body, proclaiming the existence of what once belonged to its owner in a morbid way.

Embedded deep within the mass of flesh, the outlines of human skeletons, some broken and some intact, some with fractured ribs, some with spines bent at bizarre angles, were encased in translucent fleshy glue, shimmering with a wet, reflective sheen.

Like an insect trapped in amber.

And then there are those faces, floating with unresolved emotions, their eyes filled with murky tears.

The cradle of chaos is not a container, but an eternal process of conception, in which countless forms simultaneously decay and grow.

Pickling agent? No, pickling will turn the corroded material black and mushy.

Strongly alkaline drain cleaners are the real culprits in corroding and shaping it. The saponification reaction between the cleaner and human fat, along with the dissolution of proteins, contributes to this bizarre slime-like form.

Lin Zheng was unaware of this knowledge before, but after 40 tons of slime were flushed out of the sewer, his colleagues told him about the origin of "them".

Lin Zheng inexplicably recalled a novel he had read: Lord of Mysteries.

If Lin Zheng were to give this monster a name from an evil god, he would call it: Filthy Flesh Corpse Embryo.

Add three more sections to his divine name—

The greedy throat, intoxicated by the collapsing tunnel,

The wriggling gate where fat remains and decaying dreams unite and manifest.

The indescribable being conceived in the cradle of chaos.

Its existence proves that those lives that were consumed, forgotten, and dissolved by the city did not truly disappear, but rather, in a more terrifying and eternal form, have been integrated into the city's bloodline.

This is Emerald Dream City, a bustling metropolis secretly nurtured underground, a monster formed from the solidified matter of consumed and abandoned materials.

Every inch of its body is made up of the garbage generated daily by this city and the flesh and blood of the abandoned. Every writhing texture is engraved with the despair of those swallowed up by the city.

Faced with such a greasy, foul-smelling, and enormously disgusting entity that is within reach.

An unnamed fear rose within me, not the fear of death, but a purely physiological nausea and trembling at this incomprehensible, indescribable, and illogical existence.

His reason was once again brutally crushed and distorted when he saw this living wall of despair, a product of humankind itself.

He felt as if he had seen the city's stomach, a bottomless pit that constantly devours and digests everything, and he and all the people at the bottom were just the dregs that could be disposed of at any time in this huge cycle.

Lin Zheng quietly backed away, trying to avoid alerting the monster and escape through another passage.

But at that moment, from the pipes in the distance behind them, came a clear and rhythmic echo of military boots stepping on a metal ladder.

The pursuers are coming; their voices are rapidly approaching.

The sound was not a hazy illusion born of fear, but the real footsteps of death.

Forward, however, was blocked by this indescribable, nauseating wall of flesh and blood, reeking of the sweet stench of death.

Retreat is a group of well-equipped, ruthless professional assassins, armed with deadly weapons, solely to drag him back into the abyss.

The cold sewage swirled, creating ripples at his ankles. Lin Zheng instinctively gripped the scalpel, its blade reflecting a faint, cold light in the dim light.

The sound then activated the filthy corpse embryo.

It wriggled, squeezing out a sobbing sound of fat mixed with bone marrow with each movement.

It roared, yearning for an endless cycle of devouring and satisfaction.

It's coming.

He was trapped in the center of despair, listening to completely different yet equally deadly sounds coming from both ends.

In that voice, it seemed to be a dead end he was destined to never escape.