Standing over the dead rat king, Damien looked up, a slight frown on his face.

Although he had easily defeated the rat king, but now he had another issue to take care of

With the death of the King, the swarm instantly went wild.

The ten thousand smaller Abyss Rats, which had been a terrifying tsunami of teeth moments ago, suddenly lost their cohesion.

Without the dominant will of the Tier 6 Alpha driving them, their instinct for self-preservation kicked in.

They screeched in terror, scrambling over each other to escape the white-glowing predator standing over their leader's corpse.

Even if he wanted to stop them ,there was no way to stop them from escaping, the only good thing was that without a leader, maybe most of them would leave the sweres making them ascessible again

In less than a minute, the cistern was empty, save for the mountains of dead vermin Isabelle had crushed.

"However, none of that is my bussiness as I don't plan to stay in abyss heaven long after this" Damien noted, sheathing his sword.

Thinking of this, he knelt by the bisected corpse of the Rat King. Plunging his hand into the chest cavity, ignoring the slime, and grasped the object he had seen earlier.

After a few seconds, he pulled it out with a wet squelch.

[Item: Corrupted Rat King Core (Tier 6)]

It was the size of a melon, pulsing with a chaotic, toxic green light. The mana density was heavy enough to distort the air around his fingers.

"Tier 6," Damien whistled, wiping the gore on the Rat King's fur.

"I wonder what kind of good equipment I can get with this"

"Well it doesn't matter, I'm sure the deeper we go, the better the stuff we can find in this Gods forsaken abyss"

Just as he was talking to himself, Isabelle jumped down from the catwalk, landing softly beside him. She looked at the core with wide eyes.

"We're done?"

"Indeed" Damien corrected, tossing the heavy crystal into his Void Gem.

"with this in hand, we can go to the bonehall and exchange for what we need before going deeper"

He stood up and looked around the massive, hollowed-out nest.

"However, there's something off about this place, it doesn't look like a place that was just build to house seweage" Damien muttered, walking toward the back of the cistern.

"if anything, it looks more like dwarven tech, do I need to stop by the rust bucket again to ask about this?"

"Though I'm sure that old foggy would want me to pay an arm and a leg for any more information"

He kicked aside a pile of bones.

Behind the Rat King's throne of filth, hidden by centuries of grime, was a massive metal wall.

And in the center of the wall, a sealed vault door.

Damien wiped the sludge off the metal surface. A symbol was etched into the steel, a hammer crossed with a lightning bolt.

"The Runehammer Clan," Damien whispered. "Guess I have to go the the rust bucket after all"

The vault door was sealed, but unlike the main gate, the locking mechanism had corroded over time.

Damien jammed his Pantheon Sword into the crack and pried. With a groan of ancient metal, the door popped open.

Inside was a small, dusty control room. It was untouched by the rats, preserved in a time capsule of stale air.

Slumped over a rusted metal desk was a skeleton. It was short and stout, a Dwarf. He wore a rotted lab coat over rusted chainmail.

Damien walked over to the desk. Under the skeleton's hand lay a leather-bound logbook.

He picked it up. The pages were brittle, but the ink was magical, still legible after hundreds of years.

[Log Entry: Year 450 of the Golden Era]

"The experiments are failing. The surface shipments arrive daily now. 'Failed Flesh,' they call it. The Empire's mages are trying to breed soldiers, but they only create monsters."

Damien's eyes narrowed.

[Log Entry: Year 452] "We cannot burn them fast enough. The 'Chimera Protocol' subjects regenerate too quickly.

The High Council ordered us to dump them into the Abyss. 'Out of sight, out of mind,' they said. We are poisoning the well. Sector Zero is full."

Damien closed the book. A cold realization settled in his gut.

"The Flesh-Crafters," Damien murmured.

"Master?" Isabelle asked, looking at the skeleton.

"The Lyra I fought on the surface... the Prince... probably the same technology he used to turn his soldiers into beasts," Damien explained, his voice hard.

"I thought it was new tech. But it seems the Empire has been dumping their failed experiments down here for centuries."

He looked around the room.

The Abyss wasn't just a prison for demons. It was a garbage chute for the Surface World's sins.

The monsters roaming the darkness out there, the chimeras, the mutants they were the descendants of the Empire's mistakes.

"At this rate I won't be surprised too find some cultists down here" Damien scoffed.

He tossed the logbook into his storage. It was valuable intelligence. The Dwarven King, Durin, would pay a handsome price for the history of his lost clan.

He looked around the vault. It was filled with shelves of rare materials, ingots of Abyss Iron, crates of Black-Gold, and tools made of refined Mithril.

"Isabelle," Damien said, a greedy grin returning to his face. "Time to stock up"

He pointed at the shelves.

"We'll take everything. Make sure to leave nothing behind."

He walked back out to the main cistern and pointed at the massive chains hanging from the ceiling, the ones he had sliced earlier.

"And grab those chains too."

Isabelle blinked. "The... rusted chains?"

"That's refined Abyss Iron," Damien said, with the help of the system he had identified that they too were vuable

He spread his arms, embracing the filthy, treasure-filled room.

"Perhaps with this, all our equipment can get a full upgrade"

He picked up a heavy bar of Black-Gold.

"what a harvest!"

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