Chapter 572: Fire in the Lair
“Did you hear? Even Meng Chao, who has grown really famous, was corrupted by the abnormal beast!”At that moment, Meng Chao heard a homeless person speaking while winking at his companion. “The abnormal beast turned Meng Chao into a monster with three heads, six arms, and loads of fangs. He’s no longer a human, and he even killed a few of his comrades!”
Meng Chao gulped.
Even if he thought with his toes, it was obvious that if it weren’t for Red Brows Su Lun fanning the flames in the dark and spreading false rumors about him, this sort of rumor would not exist.
“I heard it too. He was not corrupted by the abnormal beast, but—”
A number of homeless people were huddled up in a corner and listened as well as spread all sorts of rumors excitedly.
Every time a story passed to another mouth, the rumor got upgraded. In the end, it became something unrecognizable and terrifying, which made everyone feel like a disaster was imminent and they had nowhere to run.
Meng Chao also noticed something else.
More and more people were starting to cough.
Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough!
Practically all the homeless people were coughing, and no one remained quiet for more than half a minute.
Even the armed gang members nearby were coughing and grumbling softly.
But they were not to be blamed.
The explosion and fire in Leprosy Village was just too great. All sorts of poisonous and chemical impurities had gone up in flames, and they turned into thick, dark smoke that spread all over the lair.
Aside from blocking sight and interfering with the wireless network, it also left countless heavily polluted particles in the air.
Most of the buildings in the lair were located underground, and poisonous particles were heavier than gas particles. Once the poisonous particles descended, they seeped underground through every hole they could find.
After decades of development, the population in Dragon City had grown abnormally, and it was the same in the lair.
Narrow spaces were overcrowded and were usually stuffed from three to five times or even more people than there should be in a room. So, the air was really polluted.
The underground space had always stank, and now, a large amount of highly polluted smoke had crept in from burning substances and entered people’s bodies through their noses and throats. They invaded tracheas, lungs, and esophaguses. This, naturally, affected people’s immune systems, and they coughed so much that their eyes became bloodshot. They could not stop for even a moment.
This was not a good sign.
For a long time, the lair had been the place with the densest population and worst pollution in Dragon City.
But what was amazing was that even though quite a number of residential areas in the outside world were affected by the zombie virus and Blood Flower spores, the lair seldom experienced any large scale cluster infections.
The gangs acted swiftly in such cases. They used methods that disregarded casualties and feelings of the lair citizens. The moment they found someone who seemed to be infected, they used the most brutal methods to “treat” and even “purify” them. This was one of the reasons why cluster infections were seldom seen in the lair.
The other important reason was that the law of survival in the lair was far more brutal than the outside world. During the decades of filtration when only the strong survived, the people whose immune systems were not strong and easily affected by the zombie virus just died.
Those who survived might have appeared dirty, deformed, and ugly, but their immune systems were much stronger than those of the citizens who lived in classy residential areas in the outside world.
It was as if they were born vaccinated and were immune to dozens of zombie viruses.
The people who could not stand the invasion of viruses and bacteria died in their cradles or even in their mothers’ wombs.
This was one of the reasons why the Survival Committee allowed the lair to manage itself.
If the lair was a ticking time bomb that might release more than ten thousand zombies at any moment, then no matter how great a price the Survival Committee had to pay, it would have cleared the lair.
Yet no matter how strong the immune systems of the lair citizens were, there was a limit to them.
When humans suffered major external injuries or were invaded by viruses, their immune systems would naturally plummet to the ground.
A lot of viruses and bacteria were already lurking in the lair citizens and waiting for the impenetrable immune systems to crack. Then, these viruses and bacteria would charge out like a flood through a cracked dam and show an absolutely horrifying outbreak.
Meng Chao’s former neighbor, Granny Wang, had not been in contact with zombies. She was only struck by a Demonic Halberd Pig in her stomach, which destroyed her immune system. Then, the zombie virus lurking in her body rose to the surface, and Granny Wang turned into a zombie.
Now, Leprosy Village was burning, and the heatwaves and smoke tormented the immune systems of the lair citizens.
Meng Chao noticed that as the coughs grew worse, many people’s eyes grew bloodshot, and snot started flowing down their faces.
Some people were already showing signs of a fever. They suffered from chills or were spasming a little.
Some people scratched the pus and rotting wounds on their bodies nonstop, as if they were suffering an itchiness they could not tolerate.
‘As the fire in Leprosy Village grows stronger, the smoke containing unknown impurities will continue spreading and sinking, and the immune systems of the lair citizens will also become weaker.
‘Before long, their immune systems will crumble, and they will be like the citizens outside. No, they will be even more susceptible to the virus and spore infections compared to the citizens outside.
‘The living environment in the lair is horrible. The underground layer is like a hornet’s nest. Humans stay together with pests. If they lose their powerful immune system that serves as their “firewall” and the abnormal beast releases a large amount of new zombie viruses and Blood Flower spores, and if the Deification Capsules start wreaking havoc…’
Meng Chao did not dare to imagine just how terrifying the situation would become.
The Noble Descent Hotel ambush he experienced half a year ago might have seemed to be filled with zombies and the undead, but compared to the future the lair might face, it was nothing.
The fundamental solution to this was the lair working together with Leprosy Village. They had to trust each other, gather all their manpower and resources, and get rid of the fire in the village.
But after listening for a long time, Meng Chao noticed that there was a major misunderstanding and bias between the lair citizens and the villagers.
On one hand, the lair was the largest slum in Dragon City. Aside from a small number of gangs that belonged to the middle or upper class, the lair citizens belonged to the bottommost level in Dragon City.
They looked down on the villagers to maintain psychological balance and ascertain their status of being human.
Otherwise, when the dirty, ugly, poor, and even homeless lair citizens looked at the brilliant superhumans, who were superior to them in every way, they would have a hard time finding their own place in the civilization.
On the other hand, the businesses in the lair and in the village overlapped in many areas.
There were only a few lucky people who could be attendants in monster coliseums, bate-fichas in gambling sites, or who were pretty enough to take part in the oldest profession.
Most of the lair citizens had to take up the hard, dirty, and tiring work that no one in the outside world wanted to do in order to survive, such as refuse classification, monster harvesting, special weapons creation, recycling trash and excretion, and opening up underground spaces. Such work paid very little, but was toxic and dangerous.
More than ten years ago, the lair citizens could still somewhat maintain their livelihood by relying on tse hard, dirty, and tiring jobs, but as tie passed, Dragon City’s population increased, and competition grew fierce. The citizens living outside were getting better at enduring hardships and there were less and less requests for work.
The lair citizens started to no longer care about not getting insurance, overtime pay, and holidays. They stopped caring about how dirty and dangerous their work was too. As long as they had food to eat, everyone was willing to work like cattle.
And the speed at which the strong took over the weak became much faster in the village and the lair compared to the outside world.
The younger generation of Leprosy Village was able to work more efficiently and withstand greater radiation and pollution.
The result of both the outside world and the village oppressing them was that the lair citizens lost most of their jobs. Aside from the lucky ones who joined the gangs and could rely on the tertiary sector of economy to put food on the table, the number of homeless people who had no job and no home kept on going higher.
Many lair citizens were naturally full of resentment in the face of such a situation.
They did not understand why things ended up this way.
Didn’t they say that Dragon City was currently in a rare golden age of development after more than half a century of struggle?
The nine great mega corporations, cultivation families, and superhumans were enjoying their lives.
But why was it that their lives seemed to be no different from ten to twenty years ago, aside from the fact that they did not need to face zombies and monsters every day? If being honest, it even seemed like things were becoming worse than back then?
Millions of citizens outside had been working arduously for Dragon City, and it was the same in the lair. Yet where did all their hard work go?
The lair citizens could not find an answer to this question.
So, they could only point their aggression to the villagers who seemed to be even more inferior and lowly compared to them.
They believed that the villagers had snatched the jobs that should have belonged to them.
Even when the gangs introduced jobs that the mega corporations subcontracted to them, they usually offered them at an even lower price than before with the excuse that Leprosy Village could work harder, and their wages were even lower.
Some of the lair citizens were even transferred to Leprosy Village because of their jobs. They did not have anyone to rely on and became squirming piles of flesh that rotted away in the dark corners of the lair.
Many of the unemployed died soon after losing their jobs.
Before their death, however, they cursed Leprosy Village, and their curses lingered like ghosts in the ventilation pipes of the lair. They never faded away.
The misunderstanding between the lair citizens and the villagers was really deep.
It would not be easy to make them work together.
When Meng Chao realized this, he could only sigh in his heart. He originally thought that fire in the lair that cost a few hundred thousand lives in his previous life was just an accident, but it was no accident.
It was a scheme by the abnormal beast. He had to get to the root of the problem and kill the abnormal beast to solve this problem in its entirety.
But it was only at this moment that he obtained an in-depth understanding of the situation in the lair and Leprosy Village. Only right then did he finally learn that Golden Tooth Lair was a place with the worst and deepest resentment after half a century’s worth of the city’s development.
The lair was like a volcano stuffed full with crystal bombs.
It was easy to get rid of a visible fire, and it was not impossible to kill the Vortex.
But the task of getting rid of the anger that had been accumulating for years in the villagers and lair citizens as well as resolving the conflict in the lair so that the future of Dragon City could be changed was harder than trying to make pigs fly!
Amid the rising and falling coughs, Meng Chao sank into deep thought.
In the meantime, A’Ji crawled over from among a few homeless people on his arms and legs. He looked like an oil-drenched rat.