Chapter 56: The Doors to a New World Are Opened

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The lights went out, and the night deepened.
The towering black pillar merged completely with the night, losing even a shred of its striking presence.
Most of the shops along the street were shuttered, leaving vehicles and pedestrians sparse.
Many of those who had been anxiously waiting outside the snack street eventually gave up and went home to await news, leaving only a few stubborn figures behind. Even they could barely stay on their feet, retreating to find stone bollards slightly further away to sit and wait.
Wang Xiuli sat on a curbside stone bollard, her eyelids drooping with sleepiness.
Suddenly, she heard the sound of multiple vehicles approaching, accompanied by a foul, rancid stench drifting through the air.
Rubbing her eyes, she looked toward the street. Garbage trucks from the sanitation department, followed by trucks covered with black canvas, were rolling in from the night in a long, unbroken procession.
Like a bloated, stench-ridden arthropod, the convoy slowly crawled into the snack street.
The cordoning soldiers moved the roadblocks aside to escort the vehicles inward, while sternly blocking a few people who stepped forward to make inquiries.
The terrifying sound of guns being cocked frightened away any lingering thoughts of questioning.
Hiding further away in a darker, more secluded diagonal alley, Feng Mu watched the procession of garbage trucks with deep suspicion, his mind filled with confusion.
It wasn't until he saw the slightly bulky trucks covered in black canvas that everything suddenly clicked.
Those were the corpse transport vehicles from the crematorium, and they had all been brought here.
Then, though his iron-forged body no longer feared the cold, he suddenly shivered right where he stood, seized by a creeping horror that made every pore on his body ooze with chill.
With a mixture of shock and disbelief, he thought, "Just how many people had to die for the regular corpse trucks to be insufficient, forcing them to use garbage trucks instead?"
A standard corpse transport vehicle could hold six bodies, but a garbage truck could pack in... dozens?
A chilling dread gripped Feng Mu's heart. He didn't even care about the disrespect of using garbage trucks to haul corpses, because against the sheer scale of the death toll, that detail seemed utterly insignificant.
With this many vehicles, they could probably pack the entire residential compound into them... right?
"Wait a minute, you don't suppose *everyone* died, do you? Could it be that the whole neighborhood was populated entirely by heinous members of [Destiny], and they were all just delivery couriers who got lost on their way to drop things off for me?"
Feng Mu could only use such dark humor to suppress the surging emotions in his chest—was it fear, or anger? He couldn't even tell.
He merely raised his head to gaze at the black pillar blended into the night sky, feeling in a daze as if not only that pillar, but the entire night sky had transformed into a bloody dining table.
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And the colossal shadow overhead was sitting at the table, picking scraps of meat and blood from its teeth—a monster of unprecedented horror.
The black pillar vanished without a sound.
The barrier that had sealed off the air disappeared, and a sickening wave of the stench of blood swept across the street—a smell that even the fermented, aged rot of a dozen garbage trucks could not mask.
Wang Xiuli and the others felt as though an invisible hand were choking their breath, their complexions turning deathly pale.
Through the night and the distance, they could not see clearly, but they could vaguely make out soldiers lifting heavy objects in pairs and tossing them into the garbage trucks.
Some sanitation workers stepped out of the vehicles holding large brooms and shovels. Moments later, the scraping sounds of "swish, swish, swish" and the splashing sounds of water began to echo from the ground of the residential compound.
The cleaning sounds were mundane enough; Wang Xiuli made similar noises when cleaning her own home.
Yet this time, her mind involuntarily conjured up a nauseating scene. Her stomach, empty all night, churned violently, and her throat contracted as if she were about to vomit.
The others waiting alongside her seemed to share the same telepathic horror, imagining the exact same scene. One by one, they fled in panic, no longer daring to linger.
Wang Xiuli, being terribly timid, hesitated for a moment before retreating even further away.
Inside the compound, severed limbs and broken bones were strewn everywhere, indistinguishable from one another.
Soldiers of the Investigation Corps, constables from the Police Bureau, heinous members of [Destiny], and rootless, identity-less ordinary citizens—the moment they were hacked into pieces, they finally lost all animosity and class divides, melting together into indistinguishable pools of rotting flesh, harmoniously swept up by brooms and shoveled into the garbage trucks.
The rows of old apartment buildings seemed to have been repainted overnight, as if beautified for free in a municipal project, drenched in a uniform shade of red.
"People have this one flaw—no matter what skin they wear in life, the blood they shed after death is always the same color," the Special Envoy remarked inexplicably, standing before the building entrance.
He looked at the stacked piles of corpses. Right at the top was a scarred woman clutching a sword hilt even in death, her fierce eyes glaring angrily upward.
"These people were so desperate to crawl into the sky before they died. They were mere ants crawling on the ground—why did they insist on wanting wings?" The Special Envoy stroked the badge on his chest, his tone dripping with contempt.
Wang Yilin stood to the side, keeping his mouth shut and offering no reply. He, too, was an ant crawling in the lower city, but he had never fantasized about the sky. Weren't the buttocks of the upper city far more colorful than the sky anyway?
Seeing that no one answered, the Special Envoy did not get annoyed. He smiled and said, "Gather and piece together the corpses of the heinous members, then take photos for the record so I can report your achievements upward."
Wang Yilin understood this part clearly and hurriedly agreed.
Gesturing to Feng Ju, he ordered, "Piece together the bodies of those seven heinous members."
Feng Ju stood his ground, not moving immediately. Instead, he cast a subtle glance at the Special Envoy's furrowed brow and, mustering his courage, asked, "Director Wang, aren't there more than seven bodies here?"
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Wang Yilin froze, and before he could speak, he heard the Special Envoy ask with an ambiguous smile, "By your count, then, how many should there be?"
Knowing he had placed a winning bet, Feng Ju saluted and replied in a loud voice, "Reporting to the Special Envoy, there are a total of 14 bodies of heinous members here."
The Special Envoy pursed his lips: "Do tell."
Feng Ju recited smoothly: "Seven overt targets under close surveillance, and seven covert operatives deeply embedded within the residential compound. In the end, all of them were ferreted out, and following a joint operation by my Police Bureau and the Investigation Corps, after a bloody and arduous battle, every single one of them was executed on the spot."
Standing nearby, Investigation Corps Commander Zhou Jian cast a sideways glance at Feng Ju, a faint trace of a smile touching his lips as he thought to himself, "A smart fellow. Much more sensible than that blockhead Director Wang."
The Special Envoy gave Feng Ju a deep, lingering look: "What is your name?"
Feng Ju snapped to attention: "Reporting to the Special Envoy, my name is Feng Ju."
With another profound look, the Special Envoy said indifferently, "Get to work."
Feng Ju's breathing grew slightly heavier as he turned to summon several constables to piece together the corpses.
Only then did the Special Envoy lean in and murmur in Wang Yilin's ear, "Director Wang has capable constables under his command as well. This Feng Ju seems quite competent; Director Wang should lean on him more heavily in the future."
Wang Yilin nodded in profound agreement.
By this point, through hindsight, he understood everything. The real reason behind the directive to cordoning off the neighborhood in red and slaughtering everyone wasn't just the "kill them all" policy—it was to manufacture enough bodies to make up those extra seven corpses.
With everyone in the compound dead, the covert operatives of [Destiny] hidden among them were naturally butchered right along with the rest.
Who could possibly say they weren't here? Would it be you, me, or the corpses on the ground?
Heh—
Think about it: by sacrificing a mere thousand or so breathing-waste ordinary citizens, they could piece together seven corpses of heinous criminals. Where else under heaven could one find a more cost-effective deal than that?
As expected of a Special Envoy from the upper city, his method of earning merit was truly... breathtaking to us folks from the lower city.
Wang Yilin felt his ideological height undergo an unprecedented sublimation. His vision and perspective on the world had fundamentally shifted, and a brand-new gateway had swung open before him...
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