'These two people are sending something.'
Meng Chao noticed that Three-hands' shoulders and arms were twitching slightly.
It was as if something had slid down from the elbow to the wrist, and then into One Tuft of Hair's hand.
Perhaps it was because Three-hands' arms had not completely recovered from more than ten years of atrophy.
When he slid down and shot out, it was a little strenuous, and the range of his movements was a little too large.
In the eyes of a clan warrior who had no experience in counter-espionage, this was naturally not a flaw. In fact, it was not even an oversight.
But Meng Chao's Eyes of Fire caught it.
'So, this butcher shop is the rat people's information relay station?'
Meng Chao observed his surroundings with great interest.
Once Three-hands finished sending the message, he quickly left the market with his two companions.
Meng Chao was not interested in continuing to follow him.
The reason was simple. Three-hands was a native of Black Corner City, and he had been there for more than twenty years. It was impossible for him to be a spy set up by the rat people's revolutionary army a long time ago. At most, he was just a small fry that had been developed recently.
As for the owner of the butcher shop, One Tuft of Hair, Meng Chao did not think that he was the person he was looking for.
For someone like him, who had a good reason to stay in the market where all sorts of people lived and often played tricks with others, it would be a waste if he didn't serve as an intelligence relay station.
The thing that Three-hands had sent through his sleeves should not be for One Tuft of Hair.
He was just a second passer.
Just as he expected, after Meng Chao stared for half an hour, he locked onto his target again.
It was a tall, crippled rat person.
The entire left side of his face, extending all the way to his left shoulder, was covered with shocking scars.
It was as if a fierce beast had once bitten off the left side of his body.
Even his left leg was stiff, like a burnt stick. It dragged behind him as he limped forward.
However, the undamaged right side of his body was much stronger than most of the rat people.
His muscles were also very uniform. With Meng Chao's vision as a Ghost Assassin, he could tell with just one glance that this sort of flesh and bones could not only deliver brute force, but could also accurately find the gaps in the enemy's skull and cut off their brains.
This rat man used to be a warrior.
Even though he was wearing a large cloak that covered most of his body and movements, it could not hide the faint murderous aura that leaked out from the gaps.
But other than the murderous aura, his body was also surrounded by the smell of heavy labor and exhaustion.
His hair was curled up from the heat, and there were many burn marks on his face and hands that were exposed to the air. Even the originally very thick hair of a high-ranked Beastman had been burnt clean.
It was like a tree that had been burned and its sap had been burned dry. It could collapse at any time.
"A warrior in the past, but because of his injuries, he was reduced to slave labor in some kind of heavy, high-temperature work?"
Meng Chao wondered.
Of course, those who were qualified to leave their workplace and come to this market were definitely not ordinary slave workers.
Perhaps he was the leader of the slave workers, just like how Three Hands was once the Chief Odd-Job Manager of the Blood Skull Arena.
This identity was probably a "reward" for his scars.
But the resentment on the lame rat's face was still clear on his face.
It was especially so when he stared into the eyes of the butcher shop's owner, One Tuft of Hair. When he glared at him, he was just short of carving the word "traitor" on his forehead.
The lame rat and One Tuft of Hair also pulled their sleeves together and shook hands.
A Tuft of Hair's shoulder and elbow also made a very subtle sliding and ejecting motion. He flicked something into the lame rat man's sleeve.
Hence, Meng Chao's next target became the lame rat.
As a former well-trained warrior, the lame rat man's vigilance was much higher than the three-handed rat man's.
When he passed a corner, he intentionally stopped and waited for a moment to see whether there was anyone chasing after him in a hurry.
But that was all.
This anti-tracking method from the era of the ancient clans was like child's play in Meng Chao's eyes.
Soon, he followed the crippled rat man to the murky Forging Zone.
Black Corner City was like a huge military camp. Based on different functions, it was divided into more than ten different regions.
The coliseums, casinos, taverns, and markets were all gathered together, so it was easy to manage them.
The forging area was a place where weapons craftsmen gathered, where metal splattered everywhere and molten steel flowed everywhere.
To the rat people, the forging area was different from places like the coliseums, where they still had a chance of survival. The forging area was a living hell.
There were thousands of chimneys that spewed out suffocating smoke day and night.
To increase the sharpness and sturdiness of their weapons, the craftsmen were used to mixing a lot of totem beast bone powder into the molten steel, along with rainbow ores that shone with a faint light, which Mandala's roots rolled up from underground.
The powerful radiation contained in it made the smoke that it spurted out emit a gloomy, ghostly light. If they were inhaled into the stomachs of the rat folk who never wore any protective masks, their throats and lungs would completely rot from the inside out in a year and a half.
And most of the rat people would not even be able to wait for their throats and lungs to rot.
They would be scalded to death by the flying molten steel.
They would be squashed to death by the collapsing raw materials.
Or die of exhaustion in front of the bellows and the iron-felt, day after day, in the never-ceasing heavy toil.
Meng Chao moved through the fog in the forging area. He did not even need to pay attention to hiding his body.
Since there was spirit energy in the area, the radioactive fog was so thick that he could not even see his own fingers.
The rat people who crawled out of the fog were all emaciated. Their eyes were dull, and their bodies were covered in burns, scalds, and smashed wounds. Each of their pores was blocked by black powder, and they looked like wandering ghosts who had forgotten their names and did not even remember that they were still alive.
The crippled rat people in front of him stopped moving.
Meng Chao quickly moved to the side and hid behind a pile of coal that rose up like a small hill.
He also smeared some soot on his face.
Then, he heard the sound of a whip cracking in the fog.
There were also a few faint screams of pain.
There was also a sharp voice that hissed through gritted teeth.
"Get up, you lazy bastards! If you can't bring out five thousand sabers in half a month, I'll tie all of you to the front of the army and make you fill the trenches!"
Meng Chao heard the crippled rat people's breathing, and it instantly became heavy.
He could even hear the sound of the rat people clenching their fists and cracking his knuckles.
The sharp voice seemed to have noticed the crippled rat people's arrival, but it did not care about his reaction. It continued speaking arrogantly, "Half-face, it's good that you came back. Hurry up and drag these lazy bastards into the Corpse Pit and bury them!"
The crippled rat people were known as Half-face.
It matched the ugly scars on the left side of his face.
Meng Chao could sense that Half-face's fists had been clenched into two sturdy warhammers.
But in the end, he did not smash the owner of the sharp voice.
He just said gloomily, "They're not dead yet."
Whoosh! Slap!
It was the sound of a whip wrapped in spikes and vines striking Half-face's body.
Even the crippled rat people who were as strong as bulls could not help but grunt in pain.
"These lazy bastards aren't as tough as you. With just a few lashes, even their bones are exposed. What's the point of keeping them alive?!"
The sharp voice shouted. "By the time you send them to the Corpse Pit, they'll definitely be dead!"
Meng Chao listened to the whips.
Half-face no longer tried to defend himself.
In an instant, Meng Chao could vaguely see a group of silent rat people crawling out of the fog.
With Half-face in the lead, they pushed carts used to transport coal.
The carts were filled with bloody and squirming slave workers who were still struggling.
Half-face led the rat people into the depths of the forging area with his back hunched and his teeth clenched.
In the fog on both sides, the furnace easily heated the air to a temperature that could burn their throats. The molten iron shone with a faint, phosphorescent light. Clanging sounds, wheezing, and weak, pained moans could be heard everywhere.
It was as if they had stepped into hell one step at a time.
Countless ferocious demon silhouettes appeared in the fog ahead of them.
They were mandala trees with intertwined roots and branches. They grew wilfully and covered the sky.
They were different from their counterparts in the wild. The mandala trees here looked as if they had absorbed smoke that was filled with powerful radiation.
From the tree trunks to the branches to the flowers that opened their mouths wide, they were all dark. They looked like black skeletons.
Around one hundred mandala trees were clustered together.
The area around them was a bubbling swamp.
There were also a large number of battered and shattered skeletons floating in the swamp.
"One, two, three!"
Half-face and his companions shouted in low voices and tossed a rat person's corpse into the swamp.
"Slurp, slurp, slurp, slurp" came from the swamp. It was a sound that made one's scalp go numb.
The roots of the black mandala trees were like man-eating pythons lurking in the swamp. In an instant, they wrapped around the rat person's corpse, which did not have much flesh or blood left, and dragged it into eternal darkness.
All the rat people who died tragically in the forging area were tossed into the swamp known as the Pit of One Thousand Corpses, and the savage mutated mandala trees could deal with them.
After the mutated mandala trees devoured a large number of rat people's corpses, they did not waste any of them. Their branches were both tough and soft. They were not afraid of sabers and flames, and they also contained extremely fierce corpse poison. They were excellent materials for making whips and meteor hammers.
It was a good opportunity for the brave and fearless warriors to wield the weapons made from the corpses of the rat people to win supreme glory for the sacred ancestral spirits!
"Half-face —"
After tossing three corpses into the Pit of One Thousand Corpses and letting the mandala trees devour them, one of his companions said hesitantly, "The remaining two are still alive."
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