Volume 1 Animal World Chapter 10: Others are the butchers and I am the meat
Without wasting any time, the two of them quickly and quietly ran along the top of the wall and climbed along the brick cracks again. This time it took longer and was a more severe test of their physical strength. Fortunately, Ke Xun followed very steadily without any mistakes. They finally successfully climbed up to the vent and got out with Mu Yiran.
Standing on the edge of the vent and looking into the distance, the visibility is unexpectedly high on a moonlit night. Unlike the polluted world of humans, the air here is so transparent that it doesn't even seem like a monster world.
So in such a clear and transparent night, Ke Xun saw a forest of tall buildings on the horizon.
That's the city.
It was also different from other paintings they had entered before. The edges of the central picture were all low-pixel backgrounds. Even the Ganxiong Plateau in "Faith" and the modern city in "Breaking Ground", the outermost edges they could see were also blurry.
But here, there seems to be a city at the end of the city, and there seems to be a sky at the end of the sky, so deep and vast, so boundless.
It's like a real, living world.
"Does this mean that we can go to a wide range and move within this range without being restricted by the 'Law of Death at Night' even at night?" Ke Xun casually gave a name to the rule in the painting: "You must not leave the designated range at night, otherwise you will die."
Mu nodded happily, but his expression was a little gloomy.
"What's wrong?" Ke Xun asked softly.
Mu Yiran lowered his eyes and looked at him: "This also means that the signature is located in a wider area, and our search will be more difficult."
Ke Xun also lowered his eyes, then raised them, with an optimistic arc at the corner of his lips: "Although the 'painting' has always shown endless malice towards us, you see, every previous painting has traces to follow. The clues it leaves for us, no matter how difficult or easy, will always be within our reach, and will not give clues that are absolutely impossible to think of or do, so..."
Mu Yiran had been staring at him intently. When he heard this, he suddenly smiled, but stopped smiling immediately: "So, no matter how vast the world shown in the painting is, the clues must exist somewhere within our reach."
Ke Xun's eyes still showed the amazement of the moment just now. His expression hesitated for a while before he smiled again: "Yes, be optimistic, we will definitely find it. Continue?"
"Yeah." Mu Yiran withdrew his gaze and looked around.
The farmhouse's lawn was large but irregular, and was surrounded by a tall wooden fence that skirted some bushes and low rocks. Looking down from above, it looked like a crouching big dog. Outside the fence, stretching all the way to the edge of the city in the distance, was a dense grove of trees.
Nearby, there were several tall houses on both sides of the farmhouse. Through the windows, they could see the furnishings inside the houses. The two men identified which was the administrator's office and which was the slaughter room and food processing room.
Since climbing takes a lot of time, the two men did not have time to explore these places at night and run back and forth, so they had to give up. They just walked around the walls of the partitions in the farmhouse and checked every corner. Unfortunately, they did not find anything pleasing.
It was almost dawn when they returned to their cubicle.
After breakfast, everyone was let out of the farmhouse for some fresh air.
However, there was no opportunity to carry out yesterday's plan for the time being, because several giant cows were also on the lawn, carrying out a huge low-rimmed wooden basin and filling it with water using a pipe.
"It's time to take a bath!" Several people in the painting shouted happily, chasing and playing around the wooden tub.
"..." Ke Xun glanced at Mu Yiran. In this situation, suddenly wanting to take a mandarin duck bath or something... emmm... although there were dozens of mandarin ducks entering the water at the same time.
While Ke Xun was feeling mixed emotions, the water in the wooden basin had already been filled. The giant bulls bent over and began to pick up humans and throw them into the water. Some people did not seem to like taking a bath. After being thrown in, they struggled to flip out of the wooden basin. However, they were unable to resist the huge bulls and were thrown back into the basin again and again.
"Moo." A giant bull roared at the shepherd and pointed at the wooden basin and asked him to go in.
Judging from the pronunciation, it seems like he also has a nickname, "Mumu".
Ke Xun inexplicably wanted to laugh, but he didn't want "Mu Mu" to be thrown around like a piglet by the giant bull, so he quickly pulled him and jumped into the basin.
Water splashed as Ke Xun popped his head out of the water, his hair fluttering like a big golden retriever. He then turned his head to look over and captured a picture of a domineering president emerging from the water .
Mu Yiran emerged from the water with his face slightly tilted back. His soft hair was pushed back by the water, forming a stylish and abstinent president's hairstyle. Water droplets slid down his round and smooth forehead, some hung on his eyelashes, sparkling with diamond-like light, some crossed his straight nose wings, sank into his slightly parted lips, and some wiped over his slender neck and fell on his perfectly lined collarbone.
...It's just too lustful.
The worst part is that he still had a stern and handsome face, which was both lustful and abstinent, simply...
It's the devil.
When Mu Yiran walked out of the basin, Ke Xun was still soaking in the water and silently singing the national anthem when he felt a hand reaching out from behind and pressing on the top of his head. The fingers curled up and grasped his messy dog hair.
"Don't delay business, come out ." President Mu's voice sounded coldly behind his ears.
Ke Xun came out obediently and saw Qin Ci, Wei Dong and the others were all there, watching the surroundings carefully.
The giant bulls seemed to be moving equipment again, taking out a long thin tube and several strange utensils from the food processing room.
"Follow yesterday's plan," Mu Yiran whispered to the others, "divide into groups and slowly approach the house you want to go to. Don't be too obvious. I will lead the giant bull away, and you will take the opportunity to go in. One of you will go inside to look for it, and the other will keep watch outside. Remember, don't linger too long, get in and out quickly, and safety first."
Everyone nodded and immediately dispersed.
Ke Xun took Wei Dong towards the slaughter room, strolling slowly as they got closer and closer.
As soon as he got close, he heard a scream. He thought that Mu Yiran had already started to take action, so he looked in the direction of the sound, but saw that it was not him, but Bi Jing.
Bi Jing was being strangled by a giant bull on its hooves, with his cheeks clamped and his mouth forced wide open. Another giant bull took the thin tube that he had just seen and inserted one end of the tube deep into Bi Jing's throat.
Ke Xun and Wei Dong were shocked by this scene. Wei Dong was stunned for a long time, and trembled as he spoke: "This depth...it must have gone directly into the stomach... "
The other end of the thin tube is connected to a strange machine. At the entrance of the machine, a giant cow is pouring porridge-like food into it.
"This is..." Ke Xun frowned tightly, "cramming to fatten up."
Weidong was frightened.
Bi Jing is too thin. If used for breeding, his quality is obviously very unqualified. So he needs to be fattened up, quickly and effectively.
Wei Dong couldn't bear to watch Bi Jing struggling in pain between the giant bull's hooves, so he turned his face away, squatted aside and retched.
Fortunately, the cramming process did not last long. After Bi Jing's stomach swelled up, he was released. Ju Niu picked up the next thin man and inserted the thin tube into his stomach.
Ke Xun didn't look any further and turned to look at Mu Yiran in the distance.
Seeing that he seemed to be saying something to the people in the painting around him, those people obviously had a high degree of obedience to their leader. They were afraid and respectful and divided into two groups. Suddenly, one group began to run towards the distance, and the other group chased them. After catching up, there was a melee. The whole lawn suddenly became a mess, and Mu Yiran took advantage of the chaos to run to the door of the food processing room where Zhu Haowen was.
The chaos on the lawn attracted the attention of several giant bulls. They temporarily let go of the few thin people who were still being fattened by cramming, and got up to chase the humans who were running around and fighting. The people off-screen took the opportunity to immediately enter the houses they were going to, leaving one person standing at the door to keep watch.
Ke Xun was glad that Weidong didn't follow in.
He would never forget the scene before his eyes—no, perhaps even in his next life or the next life.
The slaughterhouse made him realize what hell on earth is.
The walls, the floor, the huge long table, and the gaps between various machines were covered with bloodstains of varying depths, both new and old.
If you look closely, you can find that some places are entangled with meat threads, some places are embedded with bone fragments, and some places have lost nails.
But these were far less than the internal organs and intestines soaked in blood in the big barrel in the corner, far less than the human bones with fresh blood on the huge chopping board, and even more far less than the human bodies strung on the rows of iron hooks on the wall, some of which had been skinned, some had their limbs chopped off, some had their abdomens hollowed out, some had their heads chopped off, and some had been dismembered into pieces.
Below that, there were huge food bowls, filled with human hearts, livers, and intestines, or bowls full of limbs, or mountains of human heads. Their hair had been shaved off, and they had their eyes closed or open, their lips and tongues open or bitten. Some looked as if they were sleeping, while others looked painful and hideous.
His compatriots were displayed here so neatly, coldly, and without dignity, like raw meat waiting to be processed.
certainly.
How can species at the bottom of the food chain have dignity?
In the basin of human heads, Ke Xun saw Yuan Yuan. Above him was a fresher head of a forty-year-old woman.
It took a long time for the commotion outside to die down and for all the humans to be herded back into the cubicles of the farmhouse.
"Nothing was found in the administrator's office." Qin Ci shook his head.
"There's none in the food processing room either." Mu Yiran didn't look disappointed.
Everyone looked at Ke Xun.
"No." Ke Xun said.
Mu Yiran looked at his face for a while.
"This is probably the most confusing painting I've ever been in." Qin Ci's eyes were calm. "Did the artist of this painting just want people to understand the natural law of the survival of the fittest more intuitively and deeply?"
"Maybe he's an extreme vegetarian." Zhu Haowen said, "When I traveled abroad, I encountered vegetarian parades. Many people held signs saying animals eat people to protest."
“So the signature might be on vegetables?” Wei Dong said.
"It might even be ironic that it will be signed on a knife or an axe," Qin Ci said.
"Or sign it on the horns of a cow?" said Dong Dong.
"Ke Xun," Mu Yiran did not join in the discussion. He just walked in front of Ke Xun and stared at him with deep eyes, "What's wrong with you?"
"It's okay." Ke Xun said.
Mu Yiran looked at him for a long time. Seeing that he was silent with his eyelids drooping, he stopped asking questions and turned to look at everyone. He lowered his voice and said, "Let's go to the fence in the afternoon. Ke Xun and I speculate that here, even at night, we can leave the room and go outside, so we can't just sit there and wait to die. We should at least try to escape."
"How to escape?" Dong Dong and Wei Dong asked in a low voice in unison.
