Chapter 510: Thief

Meng Chao knew that the building would collapse completely in three minutes.

But he had not gathered even a single bit of energy to escape just yet.

Bloody Slaughter Gao Yang’s fatal attack was worse than he had expected. The Wilful Blade had been made from some sort of unique biochemical material, had been poisoned with something made by the Vortex, or Bloody Slaughter Gao Yang had activated his spirit energy magnetic field when he stabbed Meng Chao’s chest, thus destroying the tissue around the blade. Or he might have done all three of these things.

In any case, no matter how Meng Chao used his spirit energy to stimulate the tissue around his heart, the speed of recovery for his wounds was really slow.

The newly made cells instantly withered and decayed. They turned into poison that slowly invaded the important organs in his body, including his heart and lungs.

With great difficulty, Meng Chao looked down.

He saw a circle of black fog around the wound on his chest. It looked like a plague that was about to explode.

Whenever he was finally able to gather some strength, all of it would flow out through the fog-shrouded hole on his chest.

If he did not use spirit energy to suppress the area, the poison would have spread out long ago. His heart would have been corroded so badly that it would have ended up as pus.

‘Looks like I’ll need to use around twenty Healing Skills to solve this problem.’

Right then, he did not have the time and the resources to completely treat his wound and get rid of the poison.

Meng Chao injected a gene medicine and high-calorie nutritional fluid into his chest and thigh.

Then, he got the ice spray he obtained from Bloody Slaughter Gao Yang’s corpse and sprayed the area around his wound.

Once he finished using the ice spray, a thin layer of ice formed on his wound.

Even the black fog was frozen.

He had some difficulty breathing and his heart was a little affected by it, but at the very least, he was able to block the hole in his chest with the ice for the time being and could gather enough strength to escape at the last second.

For the moment, though, Meng Chao could do nothing.

He could only lie on the ground with his limbs splayed while he watched the dozens of floors above his head burn, explode, and collapse.

Reinforced concrete weighing tons poured down. It was as if thousands of Tyrant Mammoths were using War Trample at the same time.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

When the floor above him fell apart, the space around him distorted due to the pressure, and everything was about to be reduced to ruins. By then, he had recovered one-tenth of his mobility.

“Now!”

Meng Chao sucked in a deep breath and used his hands and knees to flee to the escape tunnel in the corner. The moment he entered it, he heard a loud bang, and the building behind him collapsed completely, swallowing up Bloody Slaughter Gao Yang’s body whole.

The dust and air gathered together into a fierce wave that chased after Meng Chao relentlessly and kicked his butt several times.

Even the escape tunnel was collapsing bit by bit.

The ruins weighed thousands of tons and were burning fiercely, which turned it into a matchless monster that had been lurking underground. It opened its mouth wide, revealing fangs that went after Meng Chao.

If he was the slightest bit slower, he would have been completely swallowed up by the falling debris and dropped to the deepest parts of hell together with Bloody Slaughter Gao Yang.

But even if he did not care about the pain in his body and just kept speeding up, he did not seem to be able to outrun the destructive wave behind him.

The escape tunnel in front of him kept letting out creaking sounds. It was the sound of metal fatigue that made his skin crawl.

The metal started distorting really badly at a rapid pace.

It was as if an invisible hand was squashing and kneading it from outside to turn the escape tunnel and him into a crystal the size of a can.

Meng Chao could only dislocate his joints and shrink his muscles again to contort himself into all sorts of weird shapes and force his body through the cracks.

Even so, the poisonous smoke, heatwaves, and explosion caught up to him.

Meng Chao’s mind was a little blurry, and he could not quite understand what happened next.

In a daze, he continued climbing through the poisonous fog that was hundreds of degrees Celsius hot and contained a lot of impurities from low-grade crystals.

It was as if he was struggling in a dark oceanic trench that was twenty thousand meters deep in the sea.

With every breath of poisonous smoke he inhaled, he felt like a main battle tank’s cannon had fired a shot at his heart and lungs.

His organs seemed to have been burnt to a crisp, and only an empty shell was left struggling uselessly against the push of the shockwaves.

Suddenly, he remembered that everything around him had collapsed, and he was sealed under tons of reinforced concrete. It made him feel as if he had sunk into the deepest parts of an oceanic trench.

Against his expectations, the feeling was not too bad. It felt a little warm.

It was as if there was a soft voice mumbling in his ears. “Sleep. You’re too tired. Why don’t you take a rest?”

However, when he really thought about lying down in the depths of the oceanic trench, he always saw ten thousand suns descending from above and exploding like supernovas. They released the most violent and brilliant rays.

Those rays destroyed everything and burned his soul.

It made him summon 120% of his courage and strength to struggle with everything he had through the darkness, all so that he could find a bit of light that might not even exist.

He had no idea how much time had passed, but in the end, he finally emerged from the darkness.

It appeared that he was flowing along a really stinky sewer.

It was a sewage system shared by several underground shelters in the area.

The liquid waste was really murky. After the explosion, it was filled with blood and suspicious-looking substances, which made it as thick as a swamp and hot as magma. Meng Chao felt as if he had acid invading his body all over again.

There were also all sorts of deformed pests around him.

The hideous creatures were shining as they climbed eagerly onto him.

He held his breath as he waited for the pests to fall into his trap. His plan was to open his mouth and stuff them all inside to serve as precious protein and energy.

Unfortunately, the pests living under Leprosy Village were really alert.

They sensed his uncontrollable killing intent at the final moment and fled with a screech.

Meng Chao clicked his tongue in slight disappointment and dropped to a dead faint again.

He seemed to have flowed along the underground sewer for a long period of time and was brought far away from the collapsed building by the sticky, polluted water.

When he opened his eyes again, the area had already stabilized. He could no longer feel vicious tremors that shook the world nor hot poisonous smoke.

Aside from the stab wound that still had black fog around it, the wounds on his body had already started healing and had thin scabs. It gave him some of his strength back.

He was now at a corner of an underground sewer.

Ahead of him was an incomplete metal fence. It blocked quite a lot of trash that flowed down the sewer, which created a mount that slowly circled around itself.

Meng Chao was slumped on top of the mountain of trash.

There were rustling sounds next to him. It seemed like an audacious rat was searching through his body.

… No, not a rat. A human.

Meng Chao reacted instinctively. His killing intent gathered into a sharp blade that seemed to have physical form and stabbed right into the enemy’s eyes.

The boy shuddered and stopped searching. He looked around for a while before he stared at Meng Chao in slight puzzlement.

It was a boy. He was around seven or eight years old, at most twelve. But since he was so thin that he was emaciated, Meng Chao could not tell.

His hair was as messy as a bird’s nest, and there were scabies all over his scalp. He was also ugly, so he looked more pathetic than a rat.

His right eye was a normal shade of black, but his left eye reminded of gold. It even had a crystalline quality to it. The light shining from it was so brilliant that it seemed like it was not a real eye.

If this eyeball was embedded into a handsome face, perhaps it would make the man look even more powerful and mighty.

But when it was on an ugly face, it created a stark contrast to the rest of his body, and it made people pay more attention to how ugly the boy was. It would even give them a ridiculous thought that he stole someone else’s eyeball.

Of course, that was not true.

The boy was most likely the descendent of a Leprosy Village infectee. The crystalline, light gold eye was the result of his deformity, the same as the fangs that stuck out of the left side of his mouth.

He probably knew that his left eye and the fangs on the left side of his mouth were really eye-catching, which was why he had a black pair of goggles, a black bandana with the picture of a skull as a mask, and a wide cloak to cover his face.

However, he was the only one working on the mountain of trash in the sewer deep underground. So, to make it easier for himself, he had shoved his goggles up and pulled down his mask.

Yes, he was “working”.

Meng Chao secretly activated Walking Corpse and made sure that his body remained cold and made sure that his breathing and heartbeat were practically non-existent. He also narrowed his eyes to slits and watched just what exactly the boy was doing.

There were bulges on his waist, pushing his cloak out to the point that a slit was created.

Meng Chao saw three wide monster pelts on his waist. They had his “loot”, which was making a lot of noise. Some of the items were synthetic food cans wrapped in a net. Some were daggers with no sheaths. There were two bloody pistols as well, along with a crossbow, and a pair of motorized boxing gloves with crystals embedded in them.

The motorized boxing gloves were too huge. Clearly, they did not belong to the child.

After looking around, the boy did not find the source of the killing intent, so he thought that his mind was playing tricks on him. He mumbled under his breath and continued using all his strength to cut the tactical bag tied to Meng Chao’s body with all his strength.

‘Got it. He’s a thief, robbing others while they’re suffering a misfortune. He’s here to steal from the dead.’

A huge building had collapsed, and countless Leprosy Village villagers were buried underneath. Even though they lived at the bottommost part of society and were really poor, they still had some nutritional fluids, food cans, and weapons.

The boy had to have been targeting such people.

After figuring out the boy’s identity, Meng Chao wanted to subjugate him, but a thought rose in his mind.

‘I paid a huge price to kill Bloody Slaughter Gao Yang. Right now, I’m heavily injured, and my fighting strength has plummeted. I can’t even activate maglev. It’ll be hard for me to leave the lair straightaway.

‘Besides, I wouldn’t leave even if I could. I have to stay here and fight the Vortex.

‘That means I need resources and support.

‘I’ve just woken up, so I don’t know what’s going on nor anything about the outside world. I don’t even know how much time has passed since the explosion. I have to get a spy to help me understand the situation.

‘And if I want to maintain the order in Leprosy Village and the lair, I will need to look for a leader who can manage things. The lair is easy, I can just look for Golden Tooth. But I don’t know who the leader of Leprosy Village is, and I don’t know where to find them. I don’t even know whether they were lured over to the Vortex’s side. The situation is really complicated!

‘This thief is a local. He’ll be of some use.’

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