Born from the Ashes, with No Way Home: The Blood Scab on the Lead Reporter’s Press Pass

The underground world is a placenta corroded by surface civilization, a mass grave for its people. Every mote of dust is wrapped around a soul that has yet to rot.

Fetid pus seeps from every crack between the bricks.

The neon lights of the surface swell into bloated corpses in underground waterways. Cracks in the asphalt roads stretch downward into the feeding tubes of giant serpents, crushing the sounds of traffic and people into bubbles that gurgle into the stomach of the abyss.

The skyscrapers on the surface grow into a forest of upside-down gravestones in the depths of the rock strata. Their glass facades shatter into countless diamond-shaped tombstones, each engraved with a forgotten date of death.

The subway tracks become the feelers of corpse worms, groping through the darkness for the shadows dropped by the living above. Those shadows are dragged into the first layer of the “Double Hell,” soaked in the brine of regret until they become transparent specimens, then hung like lanterns at the mouths of caverns along the underground rivers.

The resentment bred by the surface world seeps into the Earth's crust like humus, spawning devouring “Shadow Domains” in the abyss. Beneath lands steeped in violence, greed, and discontent, rootlike veins of darkness are growing, gradually dragging the buildings, crowds, and memories of the surface into the muddy “Prototypical Graveyard.”

When the density of negative emotions in a city exceeds a critical threshold, the underground Shadow Domain will surge over the surface like black floodwater, folding the real world into its own rotting flesh and eventually forming a “Double Hell” made of resentment.