The city wakes up, breathes deeply and ignores the rot below that chokes the inhabitants. Their deaths and subsequent decay continue to fuel it so nothing is done to end the rot, only the bare minimum required to stop it from reaching the surface.
As the old saying goes: out of sight, out of mind. So it went that the rot coexisted alongside progress and the city thrived from the surface and up to the very limits of the sky while mere feet below ground the world was a mesh of strained ligaments patched together with rope and hair in a million desperate attempts to hold everything together.
It was bound to collapse sooner or later, as all rotting things do. The warning signs had been so violently apparent for so long that they'd long since faded away like red flags through rose-tinted glasses. Everything was fine on the surface while everyone below had long since evacuated.
Rats flee a sinking ship and so the subterranean workers fled the sinking city as the sewers filled with its pus and its veins ruptured in great rivers of clotting blood that swept their life's work deeper and deeper and still the world above drank champagne and laughed like the world could never end.
It happened overnight. A colossal roaring as the ground gave way like a dry twig underfoot and every beautiful, glistening tower fell into the stagnant fluid-filled chasms that had kept it afloat for hundreds of years. By noon there was only a vast lake of rot surrounded by the bones of the city and those who called it home until the very end.
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