Chapter 55: Underground Exploration

August 3rd, 1998. Raccoon City Main Municipal Sewer.

A damp, fishy stench wrapped in icy vapor hit her face, mingled with the sour, rotting smell of decaying matter. Chloe gagged, desperately covering her mouth, forcing the urge to vomit back down her throat.

Her back was pressed tightly against the slimy, cold concrete pipe wall. Her shoes were submerged in filthy water up to her ankles. Every slight movement produced a sickening, sticky sound of her soles scraping through sludge, amplified endlessly within the vast, winding tunnel.

From the age of eight, when she was taken from The Orphanage by the Umbrella Corporation and locked in an isolation chamber beneath the Arklay Research Facility, the identity of Test Subject S01 became her only one.

For eight long years, she was like a lab rat at the mercy of others. William Birkin repeatedly injected her with viruses, drew her blood, and recorded experimental data. Every day was lived in endless darkness and pain.

It wasn't until half a month ago, when the Arklay Research Facility exploded, that she finally escaped that hell and was taken in by Jill.

Jill was the first person in her two lifetimes to have ever shown her warmth. She bought her clean dresses without identification numbers, made her warm breakfasts that weren't passed through an isolation chamber hatch, and would sit by her bed, gently patting her back when she woke from nightmares at night, saying, 'Don't be afraid, Chloe. I'm here.'

Yet, she had still brought trouble to Jill.

Irons' men had come looking, their target being her, the test subject who had escaped from an Umbrella laboratory. Without a word, she ran. Then, like a coward, she left a note saying 'I don't want to burden you' and plunged headlong into this sunless network of underground pipes.

She didn't even know how Jill would react when she returned to the apartment and saw the note.

Would she be angry? Would she be scared? Would she be held accountable by Irons? Would she lose the police badge and identity she was so proud of because of this trouble she brought? Or... would she feel relieved?

These questions stabbed at her heart like needles. Each time she thought of them, the pain stole her breath. She wanted to go back, to stand by Jill's side and face it together, but she didn't dare.

She knew Umbrella's methods all too well. As long as she was by Jill's side for even a day, neither Umbrella nor Irons would let Jill go. This city's doomsday countdown had already begun. She couldn't drag the only person who had ever shown her warmth down into hell with her.

Chloe took a deep breath of the cold, damp air, suppressing the sob in her throat. She raised her hand, wiped the wetness from the corner of her eye with her sleeve, and tightened her grip on the flashlight.

She couldn't panic. She was a transmigrator, a speedrunner who could recite the entire map of Raccoon City with her eyes closed. She knew the future plot, knew all of Umbrella's plans. She had to survive first.

Using the faint, flickering green light from the emergency lamp overhead, she looked down at the crumpled Raccoon City tourist guide tucked in her arms. She had grabbed it from a newsstand at a street corner on her way out. The pages were already soft from being soaked by rain.

The map only marked surface streets and shopping centers. For the underground pipe network, there was only a general layout of the wastewater treatment plant, not even complete markings for branch paths.

In her previous life, when playing the Resident Evil series, she had memorized Raccoon City's underground pipe diagrams and the NEST's structural layout until they were second nature. She could find the ventilation ducts from the wastewater treatment plant to the NEST with her eyes closed.

But now, captured immediately after transmigrating, most memories from her past life had faded, except for some key game plot points.

But she knew this underground wastewater treatment plant was a blind spot in Umbrella's surveillance, and one of the few places in all of Raccoon City where she could hide temporarily.

Sewage flowed at her feet with a splashing sound, accompanied by faint scratching and crawling noises from somewhere deep in the distant pipes. It sounded exactly like the background sound effects from the game. Chloe's nerves instantly tightened, and she instinctively aimed her flashlight toward the darkness where the sounds came from.

Rounding a bend, the space opened up before her. This was the abandoned control room of the wastewater treatment plant. The heavy iron door was rusted but still maintained its intact locking mechanism. The room had an independent ventilation shaft, a dilapidated iron table, and a pile of discarded maintenance tools and empty paint cans in the corner.

Chloe's eyes lit up slightly. This place perfectly met all the requirements for a temporary base: a single entrance/exit, easy to defend and hard to attack, a ventilation shaft to prevent suffocation, and a remote location where no one would ever come.

She didn't enter immediately. First, she pressed her ear against the wall and listened for a full three minutes, confirming there was no movement inside. Only then did she cautiously peer in, checking every corner, even under the table, to confirm there was no danger. Then she closed the iron door behind her and used a thick iron rod she had pried from a pipe to securely bar the door from the inside.

With a 'clack' as the iron rod fell into the slot, Chloe's nerves, which had been stretched taut for an entire day, finally relaxed for a moment. Exhausted, she leaned against the cold door panel, sliding down to sit on the floor. She gasped for breath, her entire body soaked in cold sweat and filthy water, shivering uncontrollably.

She spent a full hour thoroughly cleaning the abandoned control room.

She covered the dusty floor with discarded waterproof tarps, reinforced the ventilation shaft with iron plates, leaving only gaps for air, and set up a simple early-warning device behind the door—stringing several empty soda cans together and hanging them from the doorknob. If anyone touched the door from the outside, the cans would fall and make noise.

It was a trick she learned from movies, but in this real-life hell, it became her only security measure.

Only after finishing all this did she sit on the dilapidated iron table and begin taking stock of the meager equipment she had on her.

One emergency flashlight, half a bottle of mineral water, a small packet of compressed biscuits, and in her inner pocket, the last remaining, cold, original specific S01 Inhibitor.

Chloe took out the metal-cased inhibitor and placed it in her palm. The icy sensation transmitted through her skin made her shiver involuntarily.

This was her last safeguard. Once this inhibitor was used up, the T-Virus inside her could go berserk at any moment. Would she then turn into one of those mindless monsters? Would she become a target under Jill's gun sights?

The moment this thought surfaced, she forcibly suppressed it. She couldn't panic, and she couldn't resign herself to fate. She knew the plot. It wouldn't be long before Umbrella headquarters dispatched the USS squad, Wolfpack, led by Hunk, to raid the NEST beneath City Hall and forcibly retrieve the G-Virus. Then, the NEST would descend into complete chaos. William would be on the verge of death, inject the G-Virus, and the entire NEST's defense systems would be completely paralyzed.

She could enter the NEST then, retrieve her complete eight years of experimental data, obtain enough specific inhibitors, and truly take control of her own destiny.

And now, what she had to do was survive in this sunless underground.

For the next two days, Chloe stayed inside the control room, gradually exploring the unfamiliar power within her body. She could clearly feel the virus had granted her superhuman perception and destructive force. She tried attacking a thick iron plate; it dented immediately, while her knuckles only turned slightly red without any pain.

But this power frightened her. She was afraid that overusing the virus-granted abilities would cause her to prematurely use her only remaining inhibitor, meaning she wouldn't last until the day the NEST collapsed.

She could only carefully control the threshold, gradually honing her physical skills, turning the combat techniques she had learned for fun in her past life into practical, life-saving abilities in reality.

Over the following ten-plus days, Chloe thoroughly mapped out the complete structure of the wastewater treatment plant and the surrounding main sewers. She only moved during the deepest hours of the night, relying on her memory of the maps to slowly explore every branch path. On the back of the tourist guide, she hand-drew a complete map of Raccoon City's underground pipe network, marking safe zones and temporary hideouts with supplies.

Every day, between 2 and 3 AM, she would slip out through a remote exit of the underground network and go to 24-hour supermarkets and pharmacies in the old city district to steal survival supplies: compressed biscuits, mineral water, batteries, first aid kits, water purification tablets. She used a found baseball cap to conceal her identity, keeping each operation under ten minutes—in and out, never lingering a second longer.

The perception granted by the virus was a passive skill. Each time, she managed to withdraw perfectly just as others were about to notice, as if she had transmigrated not into the world of Resident Evil, but into a thief simulator world. (Stealing is immoral; readers, please do not imitate ^ω^)

Whenever she passed near her old apartment, she would stop at a distance, hiding in the shadows of an alley entrance, watching the people moving back and forth on the street corner, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jill.

Late on the night of August 12th, deep in the sewers, inside an abandoned pump room, she encountered infected creatures for the first time.

They were three giant rats the size of wild cats. Their fur had fallen out, their skin an unnatural bluish-gray. Their eyes were blood red, and they bared sharp fangs. The moment they saw her, they hissed and lunged.

These weren't game models. They were real infected beings carrying a foul stench. As they lunged, Chloe could even see the drool dripping from their mouths.

Her body reacted before her mind did. The reflexes granted by the virus became her instinct in that moment. She sidestepped, pressing against the wall to dodge the charging rats, then wielded a steel pipe, smashing it frantically toward them.

The three giant rats were beaten until their heads split open, dark red blood splattering everywhere.

Chloe stood there, gasping for breath, her hand holding the steel pipe trembling slightly. This was the first time she had killed a T-Virus infected creature in reality. She looked down at the rat corpses on the ground, then up at the scattered garbage in the corner of the pump room, a chill running through her heart.

The spread of the T-Virus was faster than she remembered. It was only mid-August, over a month before the full outbreak, and infected creatures had already appeared in the sewers. It wouldn't be long before this place became a true living hell.

She found a piece of waterproof tarp in the pump room, covered the rat corpses, then turned and left. Back in the control room, she marked this location on her hand-drawn underground map as a red infected zone, circling it in black pen.

That night, she stayed up until dawn, marking all the pipes she had explored with infection status, patrol routes, and escape routes, compiling it into a complete underground survival map.

Days passed, and in the blink of an eye, it was August 16th.

Late that night, Chloe completed the exploration of the final pipe section, establishing a complete safe route from the wastewater treatment plant to the ventilation ducts on the NEST's periphery. She cleared all rat infected from the route, marked escape paths at every turn, and left markings only she could understand at the entrance to the ventilation ducts.

Back in the control room, she leaned against the cold iron door, looking at the densely annotated underground map in her hand. Her fingertips lightly brushed over the two characters marked 'NEST' on the map.

She was no longer that Test Subject S01, confined to an isolation chamber, at the mercy of others.

She was Chloe, and she was also a B.O.W. She knew the future plot. She had the power to protect herself and a complete survival plan.

Even if Raccoon City's doomsday was destined to arrive, even if the road ahead was an endless hell, she would carve out a path to survival for herself amidst these ruins.

She just didn't know how Jill, up on the surface, was doing now.

Chloe raised her hand, touching the photo of Jill in her inner pocket—the one she had taken from the apartment. It was Jill's S.T.A.R.S. ID photo, smiling with curved eyes and a bright gaze. She clenched the photo tightly in her hand, silently repeating Jill's name in her heart.

Just wait a little longer. Wait until I get the inhibitors. Wait until I have the power to protect you. Wait until I can completely resolve these troubles.

I will definitely come back to find you.