A thought appeared in Meng Chao's mind.
The men had come to the temporary settlement to force Ning Lang to pay his debt.
Since they could not find him in his house, they would naturally go to the other pathfinders to get information about him.
Meng Chao did not stay in Ning Xing's house for long.
If they didn't find Ning Lang's whereabouts, they would probably continue to ask Ning Lang's companions one by one. They wouldn't leave so easily.
Judging by how hurried they were and how they had a clear goal in mind, they should have obtained some information.
Meng Chao thought about it for a while.
The lair, Blood Flowers, and Deification Capsules. These clues were enough for him to spend some time following them to investigate the matter.
With this thought in mind, Meng Chao calmly followed behind the men.
Once they left the temporary settlement, the men brought out foldable 3D mobile gear from their backpacks, opened it, and put it on.
For a period of time, their speed increased by ten times, and they charged forward on the special road outside the skyscrapers.
Meng Chao did not bring any 3D mobile gear with him.
But with the great mobility of a Heaven Realm superhuman, even if he was taking a stroll in the park, he would not lose track of his target.
However, it was already past the peak hour at night, so there were not many pedestrians on the road. The men gradually headed to the suburbs.
Meng Chao had to suck in a deep breath. His spirit energy stimulated his olfactory cells and locked onto their scent. Then, he widened the distance between them so that they would not discover him.
Half an hour later, a foul stench came from ahead of him.
It was a trash treatment center in the suburbs.
The men disappeared behind the rising and falling trash mountains.
Meng Chao frowned a little.
He endured the stench that gushed out of the fermented trash and assaulted his nostrils.
His tears and snot threatened to overflow.
He had no choice. Once he reached Heaven Realm, his senses became much sharper, and it might not be a good thing in all situations.
He could somewhat understand how Lu Siya, who was a Spirit Sensor, felt.
"I hate trash sites," Meng Chao mumbled.
He bent his back and ran into the depths of the trash site.
While he carefully avoided the eyes of the scavengers, he sniffed the foul stench that came charging at him. He managed to identify the men's scents among more than one thousand different scents.
After circling around the entire junkyard, he did not find any sign of these brawny men.
'Strange. Where could they have gone?'
Meng Chao stood at the highest point of a trash mountain. He narrowed his eyes and scanned the area with his gaze.
Suddenly, his pupils constricted. He sensed a faint fluctuation of spiritual energy.
Meng Chao moved like a black cheetah. Under the cover of night, he jumped down the mountain of trash and arrived at a row of abandoned buildings at the edge of the trash dump.
Soon, they found a maintenance shaft here.
This garbage dump originally used the incineration method to dispose of the garbage and output electricity and heat.
Later, with the introduction of advanced technologies such as sandworms' devouring and microbial fermentation, there was a more efficient way to convert waste into energy. The incineration workshop and generator set, which were attached to the landfill, were gradually abandoned.
The cover of the maintenance shaft that led to the underground incineration workshop was rusted, as if it had been corroded for decades.
However, a large amount of rust had been rubbed off from the edges. It seemed that someone had opened it recently, or even just now.
Meng Chao knelt on one knee and sniffed.
A faint smell of blood came from the depths of the maintenance shaft.
"Not good!"
Meng Chao's pupils shrank swiftly. Without hesitation, he lifted the manhole cover and jumped in.
As light as a feather, he landed at the bottom of the shaft more than ten meters below.
While there was still a signal, he called Ye Xiaoxing and Lu Siya.
However, their phones were still turned off.
By the looks of it, they were carrying out an urgent mission together or were in an area with severe signal interference.
The smell of blood ahead of him grew stronger.
Meng Chao could only turn off his phone, tense up his muscles, and carefully explore the area.
The maintenance tunnels were as complicated as a maze.
They led to a few black trash incinerators.
Each incinerator was as silent as death. It was like a crematorium that had been magnified ten times.
Meng Chao blinked, and faint golden rings soon appeared around his eyes.
The golden rings continued enlarging and shrinking, allowing him to use his spirit energy to scan everything around him in the darkness where he could not even see his own fingers.
For the time being, he did not see the men.
But he had indeed smelled their scent.
There was a stench of sweat that he could not get rid of.
It seemed like they were sweating a lot.
There were only two situations in which a person would sweat so much.
The first was strenuous exercise.
The second was extreme fear.
Suddenly, Meng Chao stopped moving and knelt on one knee. He brought out a pair of tweezers from his pocket and carefully picked up something from the ground.
It was a finger.
It was a finger that was soft to the touch, warm, and bleeding.
The finger was thick and short. The fingerprints were practically polished off, and the skin was rather rough. It should be the finger of a man who had received professional fighting or shooting training for a long period of time.
The cut section of the finger was a mess. It did not look like it had been cut off by a cold weapon or bitten off by a person. Instead, it had been snapped off forcefully and torn off.
Meng Chao searched the severed finger, and he noticed spots of blood.
The blood was in a radial pattern, and it covered the entire underground incinerator.
Even though they had practically become one with the cold metal around them in the darkness, they were as clear as fireflies in Meng Chao's eyes.
The fireflies danced about madly.
They formed an incredibly brutal scene.
"These few burly men … should have found Ning Lang's hiding place.
'They came with an aggressive momentum and went straight for their target. They ran into Ning Lang here, and the first thing they did was fight against him.
'Logically speaking, they were just forcing him to pay his debt. There was no need for them to kill him, so it was impossible for them to kill him right away.
'So, Ning Lang was the first to attack.
'Based on the distribution of the blood, the carotid arteries of the first two men were instantly torn by Ning Lang or someone else hiding here. Their blood spilled all over the walls and the ground.
'The remaining people were caught off guard. One of them must have had his chest pierced through, which is why this sort of bloodstain was left behind.
'When the other men saw how brutal Ning Lang was, they were so scared that they peed their pants. They wanted to turn around and run, but Ning Lang caught up to them and killed them with heavy blows. It's highly likely that he struck the back of their heads with a hammer and crushed their brains. That's why aside from some blood gushing out of their orifices, they didn't bleed too much.
'I came here right after these men, and the time difference between us shouldn't have been more than half an hour. Ning Lang might have only used one minute to get rid of these men, and in three minutes, he took care of the corpses and left quietly.
'Since these men were sent here to force him to pay his debt, they must be brave and ruthless. They're people who aren't afraid of death. I just ran into one of them, and he made me feel as if I was bitten by a mosquito. Their physical qualities are at the peak of a normal person's. Even a normal one-star superhuman might not be able to kill so many people quietly within a short minute.
'Is it … because of the Deification Capsule?'
He remembered the superhuman who had mutated into a human ape in the wild during the day.
There was also the superhuman who was surrounded by flames and burned to a crisp in the end.
There was also the mummy whose blood had evaporated and whose organs had been burned.
He stood in the dark and tried to figure out what Ning Lang had.
Logically speaking, even if he owed a lot of money, there was no need for him to kill his creditors the moment he saw them.
Debts were financial disputes.
Killing people was a vicious crime.
Chaotic times required severe punishments, and Dragon City had the death penalty.
Even though these fierce-looking men might not be good people and had a few cases on their backs, killing them might not mean that they would be sentenced to death immediately.
But there was a high possibility that they would be sent to the most dangerous mine in the wild to serve hard labor. They might even be sent to a "suicide squad" to explore the satellite cities and the nests of Apocalyptic Beasts in Monster Mountain Range, which was hundreds of kilometers away from Dragon City. It was the same as being immediately executed.
Scum were also a type of resource.
Dragon City was a place that lacked resources, so they had to squeeze out the most value from the criminals sentenced to death.
Ning Lang had been a hooligan for a few years.
Hooligans were people who made many minor mistakes but did not commit major ones. They might be even more familiar with the laws regarding vicious crimes than lawyers and judges.
Why did he want to kill these debt collectors the moment he met them?
Hatred?
It didn't seem like it. Even though these people had come to his house to cause trouble, he had been hiding here and had not contacted his family, so he should not have known about it.
So … Ning Lang had been hiding here and doing something that he absolutely could not see the light of day, and these debt collectors had accidentally seen him?
This explanation seemed to make a lot more sense.
While Meng Chao thought about it, he searched around. Soon, he found some empty cans, high-calorie nutritional fluid packaging, and a few sleeping bags that were almost brand new.
By the looks of it, Ning Lang and some people whose identities he did not know had been lurking here over the past few days.
Meng Chao also found some solid steel bars that had been twisted into a dough twist and metal plates that had been torn into pieces in a corner.
The thickness of the metal plates was more than five centimeters.
He was certain that they had been torn apart by force because he found deep fingerprints on the metal plates.
By the looks of it, the steel bars that had a diameter of five centimeters had also been twisted into a ball.
Normal people definitely did not have such great strength.
'Did Ning Lang and his companions cultivate or test their strength after they took the Deification Capsules?'
The ominous feeling in Meng Chao's heart grew stronger.
In the end, he found a pile of ashes in the ventilation duct of the incinerator.
He used his finger to test it. The ashes were still slightly warm.
By the looks of it, after Ning Lang killed someone, he was prepared to leave in an emergency, so he burned a lot of paper documents.
Since he was in a hurry to leave, he did not have time to burn all the documents.
The air in the underground was stuffy, and when the incinerator was shut down, the ventilation in the ventilation duct was not smooth. The documents above had all been burned, but there was still a pile of scattered, charred, and black pieces of paper in the ashes below.
'This is …'
Meng Chao carefully picked up all the pieces of paper that had not been burned and pieced them together.
At first glance, it looked like a map.
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