"Did you hear? Even Meng Chao, who's been in the limelight recently, was corrupted by an abnormal beast!"
At that moment, Meng Chao heard a homeless person say to his companion while winking at him. "The abnormal beast turned Meng Chao into a monster with a green face, fangs, and three heads and six arms. He's no longer human, and he even killed a few of his companions!"
"…"
Meng Chao spat in his heart.
Even if he thought with his toes, he would know that if Red Brows Su Lun had not fanned the flames in the dark and stirred up trouble, this sort of rumor would not have appeared.
"I heard it too. He wasn't corrupted by an abnormal beast, but …"
Quite a number of homeless people curled up in a corner and listened to and spread all sorts of rumors with great interest.
Every time a person spoke, the rumor would be upgraded, and in the end, it would become completely unrecognizable and terrifying. It made people feel that a disaster was about to descend on them and that they had nowhere to run.
Besides, Meng Chao noticed something else.
The coughing became more frequent.
"Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough!"
Practically all the homeless people were coughing, and no one could calm down for more than half a minute.
In fact, even the armed gang members who were maintaining order nearby coughed and grumbled softly.
Meng Chao could not blame them.
The explosion and fire in Leprosy Village were too powerful. All sorts of poison and chemical impurities burned fiercely and turned into thick, ink-like smoke that continued spreading through the lair.
Aside from blocking sight and interfering with the wireless network, it also caused countless heavily polluted particles to float in the air.
Most of the buildings in the lair were underground, so the poisonous gas contained in the particles was much heavier than the air. Once it sank, it seeped into the ground through all sorts of openings.
After decades of development, Dragon City's population had increased abnormally, and the lair was no exception.
The narrow space was filled with people who were three to five times more than the maximum capacity, so the air was naturally really polluted.
The underground space already stank to begin with, and now, a large amount of highly polluted flames and smoke crawled in. It entered the residents' nostrils and throats and invaded their tracheas, lungs, and esophagus, which naturally stimulated their immune systems. They coughed so much that their eyes turned bloodshot, and they could not stop coughing.
This was definitely not a good sign.
For a long time, the lair had the highest population density and the dirtiest environment in Dragon City.
But amazingly, while quite a number of residential areas in the outside world were tormented by the zombie virus and Blood Flower spores and turned into infected areas, there were very few cases of large-scale cluster infections in the lair.
The gangs used ruthless methods and did not care about the casualties or the feelings of the lair citizens. Once they discovered people who were suspected to be infected, they would use the cruelest methods to "treat" or even "purify" them. Of course, that was one of the reasons.
The most important reason was that the law of survival in the lair was much crueler than in the outside world. Over the decades, the people whose immune systems were not strong enough and were easily infected by the zombie virus died a long time ago.
The people who survived, no matter how dirty, deformed, and ugly they looked, their immunity was far higher than that of the citizens in the outside world who seemed to be living in a noble community.
It was as if they were naturally vaccinated against dozens of zombie viruses.
Those who could not withstand the corrosion of bacteria and viruses died prematurely when they were still in their mothers' wombs.
This was one of the reasons why the Survival Committee could tolerate the lair managing itself.
If the lair was a ticking time bomb that could erupt with more than ten thousand zombies at any moment …
Even if they had to pay a huge price, the Survival Committee would have long since cleared the lair.
However, no matter how strong a person's immunity was, there was a limit to it.
When a human suffered serious external injuries or their organs were invaded, their immunity would naturally fall to rock bottom.
Many of the bacteria and viruses had been lurking in the lair citizens' bodies for a long time. They were just waiting for a crack to appear in their originally impenetrable immune systems. Then, like a monster breaking through a dam, they would unleash an incredibly terrifying "outbreak".
Granny Wang, Meng Chao's neighbor, had never come into contact with zombies. Her stomach wound was just contaminated by a Demonic Halberd Pig, which destroyed her immune system, and the zombie virus lurking in her body surfaced and turned her into a zombie.
Leprosy Village was burning, and the heat waves and smoke it released constantly tormented the immune systems of all the lair citizens.
Meng Chao noticed that as they coughed violently, many people's eyes turned slightly red, and snot flowed out of their noses.
Some people already showed signs of fever, chills, and even twitching slightly.
There were also some people who kept scratching the abscesses and festering wounds on their bodies as if they were itching unbearably.
"As the fire in Leprosy Village grows stronger and the smoke containing unknown impurities continues spreading and descending, the lair citizens' immune systems become weaker.
"Before long, their immune systems will fall below the critical point, and they will become the same as the citizens outside. In fact, they will be even more susceptible to viruses and spores compared to the citizens outside.
"The living environment in the lair is really bad. The underground space is like a hornet's nest, and humans coexist with pests. If they don't have the firewall of powerful immune systems, the abnormal beasts intentionally releasing a large number of new zombie viruses and Blood Flower spores, and the Deification Capsules wreaking havoc …"
Meng Chao did not dare to imagine just how terrifying that would be.
Half a year ago, he had experienced the Noble Descent Hotel ambush. The zombies and the undead that filled the entire city were nothing compared to the future that might happen to the lair.
The solution to take drastic measures was naturally for the lair and Leprosy Village to work together and trust each other. Then, they would gather all their manpower and resources to get rid of the fire in Leprosy Village.
But after listening to them for a long time, Meng Chao realized that there was a deep divide and prejudice between the lair citizens and the villagers.
On one hand, the lair was the largest slum in Dragon City. Aside from a handful of the middle and higher management members of the gangs, the lair citizens lived at the lowest level of society in Dragon City.
They had to look down on the villagers to obtain peace in their hearts and be certain of their status as humans.
Otherwise, when the dirty, ugly, poor, and even homeless lair citizens faced the superhumans who stood above them and shone brightly, it would be difficult for them to find their place in the entire civilization.
On the other hand, the lair's industries overlapped with Leprosy Village's industries.
There were only a handful of lucky people who could work as waitresses in monster coliseums, stackers in casinos, or those who were slightly pretty enough to work in humanity's oldest service industry.
If most of the lair citizens wanted to survive, they had to do hard, dirty, and tiring work that no one outside wanted to do.
Things like sorting trash, harvesting monsters, creating special weapons, recycling waste and excrement, and developing underground spaces were all highly polluted, dangerous, and poorly paid jobs.
More than ten years ago, the lair citizens could still rely on these hard, dirty, and tiring jobs to survive.
But over the past ten years, as the population of Dragon City exploded and the competition became intense, the citizens living at the bottom of the social ladder became more willing to endure hardships. Their demands for work became lower and lower. It did not matter to them whether they had insurance, overtime pay, rest days, or how dirty and dangerous their work was. As long as they had food to eat, everyone was willing to work like animals.
And in the lair, the survival of the fittest among the villagers was even faster than the normal lair citizens.
The new generation of villagers had higher work efficiency and could withstand high radiation and high pollution.
The result of the internal and external pressure was that the lair citizens lost a large number of jobs. Aside from the lucky people who were attached to the gangs and could use the tertiary industry to support their families, the number of homeless people who had no jobs and no home to go to increased.
When faced with this situation, many of the lair citizens were naturally filled with resentment.
They could not understand why this was the case.
Wasn't Dragon City supposed to have developed for more than half a century and was in a golden period of development that only appeared once in a century?
The nine great mega corporations, the cultivation families, and the entire superhuman circle were like flowers blooming in brocade, and oil was being poured into a raging fire.
Why was it that aside from not having to face zombies and monsters all the time, their lives were no different from ten or twenty years ago? In fact, it was even worse than before?
Including the lair citizens, the tens of millions of Dragon City citizens had been fighting for half a century, but where did that blood flow to?
The lair citizens could not understand this question.
They could only target the villagers in Leprosy Village, who seemed to be even more lowly and lowly than them.
They believed that the villagers had snatched the jobs that should have belonged to them.
Even when the gangs introduced the jobs they had subcontracted from the mega corporations, they often used the excuse that the villagers were more willing to endure hardships than they were, and their wages were lower as a reason to bargain for them.
There were indeed some lair citizens who had been transferred to Leprosy Village because of their jobs. They had no one to rely on and turned into squirming lumps of rotten flesh in the dark corners of the lair.
Many of the unemployed had died a long time ago.
But before they died, the hysterical curses directed at the villagers still lingered in each of the ventilation pipes in the lair like ghosts that would never rest.
The estrangement between the lair citizens and the villagers was too great.
It was not easy to make them work together!
When Meng Chao heard this, he could only sigh in his heart. He originally thought that the fire in the lair that killed hundreds of thousands of people in his previous life was just an accident.
Even if it was not an accident but a scheme of the abnormal beasts, as long as they killed the abnormal beasts, they could completely solve the problem.
It was only at this moment that he understood the current situation of the lair and Leprosy Village. It was only then that he learned that Golden Tooth Lair was the place with the most intense and deepest conflict over the past half a century of Dragon City's development.
The lair was like a volcano filled with crystal bombs.
It was easy to put out a tangible fire.
It was not impossible to kill the Vortex.
But it was harder to get rid of the anger that had accumulated in the villagers and the lair citizens' hearts for decades, completely resolve the conflict in the lair, and change the future of Dragon City!
As the coughs rose and fell, Meng Chao sank into deep thought.
But A 'Ji was like an oiled rat. He used his hands and feet to crawl through a few homeless people.
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