Chương 58: Chapter 59: Returning to Dust

The run back up the rocky switchbacks was a brutal, lungs-tearing ascent. Ethan lunged through the winding cliffs with his teeth grit, his boots kicking up a powdery trail of gray limestone dust as he navigated the sharp shale ledges entirely alone. He had left the old priest resting deep inside the shadows of the mudbrick cistern down the pass.

His perception was dialled into the earth, tracking the heavy, low-frequency thrumming that had been pulsing through the mountain, but as he neared the lip of the upper ravine, the vibrations suddenly flatlined. The screaming had stopped. The valley was dead silent. No, Ethan thought, his chest heaving as his heart hammered against his ribs. Don't tell me everything is gone.

He bypassed the standard tracks, sliding down a steep, gravel-strewn ridge to reach the narrow, concealed fissure that served as the backdoor to his hidden fault lines. He didn't pull his tool-bag off. He didn't check his status interface. He simply wedged his shoulders through the dark stone gap, slipping into the cold gloom of his private workshop cavern. He stopped dead in his tracks. The silence inside the cave was absolute. The entire workshop was a caved-in graveyard of ruined mud and shattered glass.

The hidden mud-brick barricades at the front entrance had been completely pulverised, the floor scored with the deep, jagged gouges of hundreds of heavy, armoured scorpions that had torn through the bottleneck hours ago. His clay racks were reduced to nothing. The raw, crimson clay collection troughs were overturned, their thick, viscous contents leaking out across the grey gravel like clotted blood.

Ethan walked slowly toward the center of the ruin, his boots crunching softly over the sea of broken mahogany-red glass teeth. Down in the mining pit, his three automated units were gone. They weren't sentient entities; they possessed zero combat instinct or survival intelligence. When the resonance wave had turned the storage racks into a screaming magnet for the map's hatred, the golems hadn't fled or fought.

They had simply stood in their designated workspace like mindless machinery, continuously executing their production commands until the rampaging monster wave systematically trampled them into the bedrock. All that remained of his clockwork factory line were three shapeless, crushed heaps of dark silt dust. Ethan dropped to his knees in the white dust. He picked up a fragment of a shattered khopesh insert, his fingers tracing the jagged, white-fissured edge before it dissolved into un-craftable slag in his palm.

Technically, the raw clay had cost him nothing to extract. He hadn't spent a single copper on his materials. But as he looked around the ruined cavern, a heavy, suffocating weight settled into his chest. He had spent dozens of hours manually mapping these geological parameters, configuring the silica-to-flux ratios, and perfectly optimizing his automated units to build a seamless industrial pipeline.

He had worked through his stamina limits to build a path out of the Singapore sumps—and his own shortcut had just broken his toys. A sudden wave of cold, real-world panic rushed through his mind, sharper than any in-game setback. If this factory was dead, his timeline was shot. Images of Room 12-04 flashed before his eyes: the flashing crimson mandate on the wall terminal, the sixty-day eviction clock ticking away, his grandmother's medical pod hum growing weaker under the neighborhood power caps.

He was supposed to be grinding out the cash downpayment for that private pylon pod over Jurong East. He was supposed to buy their way out of the toxic, mesh-covered lowlands before her lungs collapsed entirely. Instead, he was sitting in a heap of dirt with a grand total of twenty-five silver shekels to his name. He was functionally bankrupt. His entire capital infrastructure had been liquidated in minutes.

Ethan stood up slowly, his fingers trembling slightly as he wiped a thick layer of greasy charcoal soot from his forehead. He unbuckled his empty canvas tool-bag and threw it against the cave wall. He couldn't stay here. The workshop was a mess. He had to abandon the site completely. His mind turned back to the old man down in the cistern. Hilkiah was a liability, a weak character with zero health points. But his cryptic haunting words still echoed in Ethan's mind. The old priest knew why the stone had broken.

He knew what the earth was rejecting. If Ethan wanted to rebuild his business from the ash, he needed the old man's knowledge resolve this crisis. Ethan tightened his linen tunic, gripped his bronze trowel, and stepped back out into the blistering glare of the ravine. He had to go back to the ditch.