Chapter 12 — Sacrifice
Don Shapiro and his circle were the humans who had unsettled Bell the most since awakening the memories of his future self through his dreams.
After gathering information from Sole and conducting his own quiet research, Bell had reached a clear understanding.
These people were not merely bad apples. They were branches of a rotten tree whose roots went far deeper than the surface suggested.
And he had not even needed to dig very deep.
Don Shapiro stood as the public face of multiple businesses across the city. At least three verified nightclubs operated under his name. Seven buildings were either directly owned by him or managed by men loyal to him.
Across these infrastructures, people frequently died — inside the establishments or in their peripheries. Fingers were often pointed, yet nothing ever stuck.
To ordinary citizens, the incidents appeared unrelated.
To those who operated in the underground, those who truly observed, the pattern was obvious.
Everything circled back to Don Shapiro’s network.
At first, Bell had not been overly surprised. Men who walked that path inevitably stained their hands with blood.
But later, he uncovered something more disturbing.
Several young women, after visiting these establishments and offering certain “peculiar services,” had later developed grotesque afflictions.
A rare few survived.
Most did not.
Bell had found footage buried deep in a dark forum. A girl lay on a luxurious bed, convulsing violently, her body arching unnaturally as something writhed beneath her skin. Then the movement burst outward.
Worms.
Dozens of them.
They crawled across silk sheets and pale flesh in silent frenzy.
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The video ended abruptly.
Many viewers speculated about drugs, infections, staged horror.
Bell knew better.
A memory surfaced within him like a corpse rising from black water.
“The Corpse Sequence…” he murmured.
A series of nefarious abilities acquired at a wicked price.
It was said that even before the apocalypse, the Abyss had begun breaching the fabric of reality. Some humans had glimpsed it.
Some learned to resist.
Others chose to embrace it.
Bell silently classified Don Shapiro and his associates.
Feeding rituals. Hidden exchanges. Patterned deaths.
He exhaled slowly.
“I will avoid them for now. Confronting them would waste time… and time is the one thing I lack.”
After speaking with Sole, Bell did not immediately leave the restaurant. He remained seated long after Sole’s departure, eyes unfocused, mind calculating.
Later that night, he moved.
He visited several sites where strange incidents had occurred.
Now, in the middle of the night, he stood within an industrial zone in the eastern part of the city.
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he stood within the familiar hall of the dream domain.
Since discovering this particular building , the one where Dream Dust floated at chest height in the center of the first-floor hall, he had not dared to ascend further.
Each time he even considered climbing the next floor, a dark premonition pressed against his heart.
Bell trusted his instincts.
The first floor’s rooms had yielded nothing of importance. Only the central hall held significance.
The building felt familiar.
Uncomfortably so.
At the center of the hall, Dream Dust hovered in silence, its purplish glow casting a muted light over the surroundings.
To one side, a dense layer of grey mist floated motionless.
It had appeared after the nightclub incident.
Bell had experimented repeatedly.
Unlike the Dream Dust, which seemed bound to him and allowed him to borrow its power within the hall, the grey matter remained inert.
He had attempted binding contracts. No response.
He had tested physical interaction. No reaction.
It simply existed.
Waiting.
“What does the Dream City represent? What is this building? This hall?”
Questions multiplied without answers.
For now, he could only move forward.
In the real world, Bell’s perception expanded outward.
He located a blind spot along the perimeter wall — an angle untouched by security cameras and lightly patrolled.
He climbed.
His movements were fluid and silent as he landed on the other side.
Crickets and nocturnal insects masked his steps as he advanced through the industrial grounds.
His target was already chosen.
He slipped inside a warehouse.
Soon, he stood before an enormous industrial shredder.
Outside the range of human perception, he extended his awareness.
Something pressed against reality here.
A density.
A weight.
Like a veil drawn too tightly over existence.
The inspection was brief. Bell retracted the Dream Dust’s power.
“The Abyss’s influence is present here… dormant, but rooted,” he noted calmly. “A sacrifice took place.”
Days ago, according to reports, a factory manager had halted the machine and ordered a worker to enter it for cleaning. The moment the man stepped inside, the machine roared back to life, shredding him into pieces.
An accident, officially.
But Bell had uncovered more.
This was the third similar “incident” within the same company this year.
And comparable events had occurred repeatedly in prior years.
The enterprise was one of the largest in the city.
No managers had been punished.
No investigations had progressed.
As Bell reviewed the data, a familiar concept surfaced in his mind.
“Don Shapiro… and now this.”
“A coherent understanding of the Abyss. Regular feeding.”
His eyes darkened.
“This resembles the work of a consortium.”
From the fragmented memories of his future self, Bell knew what consortiums truly represented.
In the apocalypse, they claimed to offer support, protection, knowledge, fairness, civilization reborn.
In truth, they embodied exploitation, experimentation, slavery, and betrayal.
Bell stood in the darkness, silent.
The city slept.
But something beneath it was very much awake.
Alternative title: investigation
