Processing Plant 7

Suman had no idea how much time had passed when she regained consciousness.

Her respawn point was not far from the dormitory. She ran back swiftly and found the place utterly wrecked. The items inside were reduced to fragments, and there was an overwhelming amount of blood—whose it was, she couldn't tell. Huang Xin, Tingting, and Brother Zhu were all missing.

This development boded ill.

Yet, Suman did not rashly set off to search for them.

First, she followed the glowing points around the room to pick up two resurrection cards. Securing her own safety took precedence.

Then, she tracked the trail of blood on the ground, gripping her dagger tightly. The weapon had materialized back on her person the moment she respawned.

She followed the trail all the way to the breeding farm.

Perhaps the scent of blood had agitated the swine; they were now ramming violently against the invisible barriers, and Suman could even see blood smeared across several of the enclosures.

However, this was not the time to dwell on that. She pursued the bloodline on the ground straight to a pigpen, where the trail abruptly ended.

"Oink—oink—" A low, warning grunt came from within the pen.

Was he inside? Suman could not be certain, nor was she eager to enter the pen. She knew very well that the last time she was trapped inside that barrier—not even as a player—she had been unable to break free. If she got trapped in there now as a player, escape would be utterly impossible.

As she pondered how to verify if anyone was inside, she heard a faint, trembling voice call out to her, "Su... Suman? Is that you?"

Frowning, she deftly skirted around the pigpen and discovered Tingting and Huang Xin squeezed into the narrow gap between two enclosures.

Both of their faces were stained with blood, shivering and looking utterly traumatized. It was Huang Xin who had called out to her.

"Injured?" Suman pulled the two out and asked Huang Xin, whose mental state seemed slightly more coherent.

Huang Xin shook her head, still emotionally agitated, her words tumbling out in a rush, "We aren't hurt. All of this is Brother Zhu's blood."

She gestured wildly. "It was your dagger... your dagger saved us. I stabbed Brother Zhu with your dagger, and he bled so much..."

At that, Huang Xin was on the verge of tears. "Suman, do you think I've killed someone? Suman, what should I do? I've killed someone, Suman, I've never killed anyone before..."

Suman offered a casual word of comfort, "I've never killed anyone either, so asking me is pointless. Now isn't the time for this. Think carefully—is Brother Zhu really dead? Where did you stab him? Did the dagger actually wound him?"

Her words managed to calm Huang Xin down slightly, though the other woman latched only onto the first half of the sentence. "Right, you haven't killed anyone. You were killed. You were killed..."

She muttered on, her eyes suddenly widening. She stared at Suman for two seconds before rolling her eyes, on the verge of fainting. Suman caught her in her arms and delivered two sharp slaps to her face. "This is no time to faint! Is Brother Zhu dead? Where did he go?"

Yet Huang Xin looked mentally shattered, her gaze unfocused as she kept babbling, "You died, right, you died... I... I've changed too. I shouldn't be afraid of you. I've become very strange myself..."

Her hysterical murmuring made communication impossible. Fortunately, Tingting summoned the courage to step forward at that moment. "Brother Zhu didn't believe Huang Xin could hurt him. When he tried to test her, Huang Xin stabbed him in the stomach with the dagger. He went berserk at the sight of the blood, smashed up the dorm, and tried to kill Huang Xin. We were terrified and ran out. As for where Brother Zhu went, we have no idea."

Tingting paused, a look of terror in her eyes. "I suspect he's here too, because shortly after we came in, the pigs suddenly went wild."

"The pigs going wild proves Brother Zhu is here?" Suman looked at her.

Tingting fell silent again, only saying, "Trust me."

Suman said no more. She told Tingting to support Huang Xin and took the lead to search for Brother Zhu herself.

Things had already escalated to this point with him; there was no way she could let him leave alive to expose the situation.

Moreover, she was now urgently driven to find him to verify a hunch.

Perhaps, by sheer coincidence, she had stumbled upon Boss Zhu's weakness.

After walking for a distance, she suddenly heard a faint crunching sound emanating from one of the pigpens ahead.

She stopped, turned her ear to listen closely, and prepared to ask Tingting—who seemed to know more—what was going on. Instead, she found Tingting's face completely drained of color, her eyes filled with a turbulent mix of anger, unease, and panic.

Displaying an unprecedented surge of initiative, Tingting shoved Huang Xin into Suman's arms and sprinted toward the pigpen.

Suman looked at the still-dazed Huang Xin and cast aside any notions of gentle coddling. She raised her hand and delivered a couple of sharp slaps. Huang Xin instantly stopped muttering, her eyes clearing up considerably. Grabbing her by the collar, Suman hurried after Tingting.

As she reached the spot, she saw Tingting sitting on the ground with her hands over her mouth, tears streaming down her face.

By then, Suman had also taken in the sight inside the pigpen.

The barrier of the pen was gone, and even the area beneath the wooden cover was no longer pitch-black. Right there beneath the cover, a jet-black boar was chewing on the carcass of a piglet, blood dripping from its jaws.

Calling it a piglet was relative to the massive boar; to Suman's eyes, the young pig looked to be about two months old and weighed some forty or fifty pounds.

The ground was littered with its remains.

"The big pig ate the little pig," Suman stated matter-of-factly. Seeing Tingting crying so miserably, she sensed something amiss and pressed further, "Were you particularly attached to this piglet?"

Whether or not her words triggered Tingting, the latter let out a breakdown shriek, snatched the dagger from Suman's grasp, and threw herself directly into the pigpen, stabbing frantically at the black boar with the weapon.

The agonizing squeals of the slaughtered pig rang out, startling the animals in the surrounding pens.

The black boar writhed in pain, struggling continuously, but Tingting clung to it as though fused to its body, refusing to be shaken off. Hatred burned in her eyes as she stabbed and slashed relentlessly, as if she wanted to devour its flesh and blood raw.

A sudden thought flashed through Suman's mind, though she dared not confirm it.

Until Huang Xin suddenly pointed blankly at the piglet's remains and uttered, "That's Sister Ting's child."

Suman looked back at the piglet. Was that truly the case?

Tingting's abnormal behavior had led her to suspect the piglet possessed a special identity.

Yet that wasn't even the most shocking revelation. More absurdly, the next second, Huang Xin pointed at the squealing black boar—now clinging to its last breath under Tingting's onslaught—and declared, "Brother Zhu."

Suman considered herself quite resilient when it came to processing information, but upon hearing this, she needed a moment to digest it. The black boar was actually Brother Zhu?

Above all, why did it feel like anyone aside from herself could beat Brother Zhu until he squealed?

Could her previous hypothesis have been wrong?

Her gaze drifted back to Huang Xin. Earlier, she had foolishly assumed Huang Xin was Boss Zhu's weakness.