Chapter 455: Blood in Darkness

Meng Chao thought of something.

These men came to the temporary settlement to force Ning Lang to pay off his debt.

Since they did not find him at his apartment, they naturally had to go and look for news about him from the other pathfinders.

Meng Chao did not stay for long at Ning Xing’s apartment.

If they had not found Ning Lang’s whereabouts, they should continue to ask his friends one by one. They would not leave that easily.

Judging by how hastily they were moving and how goal-oriented they appeared to be, they had to have obtained information.

Meng Chao thought about this for a while.

He connected the clues of the lair, Blood Flower, and the Deification Capsule together. They were enough for him to spend some time following the group and see what was going on.

Meng Chao calmly trailed behind the men.

After they left the temporary settlement, they quickly brought out folding 3D mobile gears from their backpacks, opened them, and put them on.

In an instant, their speed increased ten times, and they charged through the path specifically built for 3D mobile gears on the walls of the buildings.

Meng Chao might not have had any 3D mobile gear on him, but with the great mobility of Heaven Realm superhumans, he could still casually keep up with them without losing sight of them.

However, it was long since past the rush hour at night. There were not many people on the road, and the men were heading to the outskirts.

Meng Chao had to suck in a deep breath and use spirit energy to stimulate his mitral cells to locate their scent. Then, he widened the distance so that it would be difficult for them to discover him.

Half an hour later, he smelled a foul stench from somewhere ahead of him.

It was a waste management plant in the outskirts.

The men disappeared behind a rising and falling mountain of trash.

Meng Chao frowned a little. He endured the feeling of his nasal mucosa being assaulted by the stench released by trash after it went through the fermentation process.

Even so, he felt like tears and snot were about to escape from his eyes and nose in waves.

But he could do nothing about it. Ever since he entered Heaven Realm, his senses had become much more sensitive, and it was not necessarily a good thing in all situations.

Now, he could somewhat understand what Lu Siya, who was a Spirit Sensor, had felt.

“Gosh I hate trash sites...” Meng Chao mumbled and went into the depths of the trash site with his back bent.

He carefully avoided the eyes of the waste collectors while he sniffed the stench that came charging at him to identify the scent of the men from the thousands of different smells.

Even after he circled the entire trash site once, he could not find the men.

“That’s strange. Where did they go?” Meng Chao stood at the tallest spot on the mountain of trash and narrowed his eyes. His gaze scanned the entire area like lightning.

Suddenly, he narrowed his eyes more. He sensed a faint fluctuation of spirit energy.

Meng Chao moved like a black panther. With the night providing him cover, he jumped down the mountain of trash and arrived at a row of abandoned buildings at the edge of the trash site. They were almost drowned out by trash.

Soon, he discovered a maintenance shaft.

The trash site originally managed the trash by burning it, which was how it created electricity and thermal energy.

Later, it had brought in sandworms, microorganism fermentation, and other advanced technology and other, more effective ways to turn trash into energy, and the incineration plants and generators affiliated to the trash site were gradually abandoned.

This maintenance shaft led to the underground incineration plants. The cover was rusty, and it looked like it had been corroding for decades.

However, a lot of the rust at the edges was removed. It looked like someone had opened it recently.

Meng Chao knelt down on one knee and sniffed.

He smelled a faint hint of blood in the depths of the maintenance shaft.

“No!”

Meng Chao’s pupils shrank swiftly. Without hesitation, he opened the lid and jumped down.

He fell more than ten meters down and landed at the bottom of the shaft as lightly as a feather.

While there was still a signal, he called Ye Xiaoxing and Lu Siya, but their phones were off.

If he were to guess, they were carrying out an emergency task or were in an area where signal interference was really bad.

The bloody scent ahead of him was getting stronger.

Meng Chao could only turn off his phone, tense up his muscles, and move forward carefully.

The maintenance shaft was as complicated as a maze. It led to several dark garbage furnaces.

Each furnace was as quiet as the dead. It was as if they were crematoriums ten times larger than the regular-sized ones.

Meng Chao blinked. Faint gold rings soon appeared around his pupils.

The gold rings continued magnifying and shrinking. He used spirit energy to scan through the darkness and see everything around him clearly.

For the time being, he did not see the men, but he did smell them, especially the sweat that no matter what, he could not avoid smelling.

They seemed to have sweated a lot.

People would only sweat this much under two conditions.

First, vigorous exercise.

Second, extreme fear.

Suddenly, Meng Chao stopped moving. He knelt down on one knee and brought out a forceps from the inside pocket of his shirt. With it, he picked what he found carefully from the ground.

It was a finger.

It was soft, warm, and still bleeding.

It was thick and short, and the fingerprints were almost worn out. The skin was rather coarse. It should be the finger of a man who had received professional grappling or shooting training.

The severed part of the finger was a mess. It did not look like it was cut off by a cold weapon. It did not seem like it was bitten off either. Instead, it seemed to have been yanked off with brute force.

Meng Chao searched along the spot where he found the severed finger and discovered specks of blood.

The blood splatter was in radial form, and it spilled all over the underground incineration plant.

Even though he was in the dark and had practically fused into one with the cold metal around him, Meng Chao’s eyes were like fireflies that were dancing about madly.

In his mind’s eye, he saw an incredibly brutal scene.

‘These men... should have found Ning Lang’s hiding place. They came fiercely and went straight to their target. They ran into Ning Lang here and immediately fought against him.

‘Logically, they were only here to force him to pay off his debt. There was no need for them to kill him, so it’s impossible for them to attempt to take his life immediately.

‘So, the one who attacked first was Ning Lang.

‘Based on the distribution of the blood, the first two men’s neck arteries were instantly ripped off by Ning Lang or someone else hiding here. The blood from that action sprayed on the walls and the ground.

‘The remaining people were caught off guard. There should be someone here whose chest was punctured, which is why this blood splatter was formed.

‘When the other men saw how fierce Ning Lang was, they were terrified. They wanted to turn tail and run, but Ning Lang caught up to them and killed them with heavy blows. He might have hit them at the back of their heads with a heavy hammer and crushed their brains. That’s why drops of blood came out of their orifices. Not a lot of blood flowed out because of it.

‘I came after these men, but I’m around half an hour late. Ning Lang probably took only one minute to kill these men and another three to take care of the corpses before he left quietly.

‘Since these men were sent to force him to pay his debts, they must have been brave, ruthless, and fearless. I ran into one of them earlier, and he managed to make me feel like I was stung by an insect. Their physical constitutions had already reached the peak of normal people. Even normal one-star superhumans wouldn’t be able to kill them so quietly in just a short one minute.

‘Is it... because of the Deification Capsule?’

Meng Chao remembered the superhuman who had mutated into an ape that he saw in the wild during the day.

He also remembered the superhuman who was surrounded by flames and was reduced to ashes in the end.

The image of the five dried up corpses who burnt to death and whose blood evaporated also popped up in his head.

He stood in the darkness and carefully surmised Ning Lang’s objectives.

Logically, even if he owed someone a major debt, there was no need for him to kill his debt collectors the moment he saw them.

Owing someone money was an economic conflict, while killing someone was a malicious crime.

Since there was a need for severe punishments during times of chaos, there was a death penalty in Dragon City.

The fierce men might not necessarily have been good people. They had probably committed several crimes, so killing them would not mean the death penalty straight away.

Even so, there was still a high chance for the killer to be sent to the most dangerous mining fields in the wild for hard labor. Or he could be sent to a suicide squad that searched for satellite cities and Apocalypse Beasts’ nests that were hundreds of kilometers away from Dragon City and deep in Monster Mountain Range. It was about the same as being sentenced to death and having it carried out immediately.

Scums were also a form of resource.

Dragon City was a place that lacked resources, so they had to squeeze out the most value out of criminals on death row too.

Ning Lang had been a hooligan for years.

Hooligans were people who performed multiple petty crimes, but never major crimes. They sometimes understood the laws for malicious crimes even better than the lawyers and judges.

Then why did he kill these debt collectors the moment he saw them?

Hate?

It did not seem like it. Even though these people came to cause trouble to his family, he had hidden himself away and had no contact with anyone. He should not know about what happened at home.

This meant that... Ning Lang hid here to do something that could not be seen by others, but the debt collectors had accidentally saw it?

This explanation made much more sense.

While Meng Chao thought about this, he searched everywhere. Soon, he found empty cans and packages of high-calorie nutritional fluid. He also found a few sleeping bags that were partially new.

By the looks of it, Ning Lang had been lurking here with a few unidentified people over the past few days.

Meng Chao also found some steel pipes that were twisted into the shape of Chinese donuts and steel plates that were ripped in half.

The steel plates were more than 5 cm thick.

Meng Chao was certain that they were ripped apart because he discovered deep fingerprints on the steel plates.

It seemed that the steel pipes that had a diameter of from three to five cm were twisted into donuts by human hands.

It was impossible for normal people to have such great strength.

‘Did Ning Lang and his companions take the Deification Capsule and were cultivating or testing their own strength?’

The bad feeling in Meng Chao’s heart grew stronger.

In the end, he found some ashes left by something that was burnt at the ventilation pipe in the furnace.

He used his finger to test it, and he found some faint traces of heat in the ashes.

By the looks of it, after Ning Lang murdered the group, he left urgently, but before he escaped, he burnt a large pile of paper documents.

Since he left in a hurry, he did not have the time to wait for all the documents to be burnt.

It was stuffy underground, and since the ventilation pipes in the furnace were not good when it was shut, while the documents at the top were burnt, Meng Chao could still discover some yellowing and blackening pieces of paper under the ashes of the first layer of documents.

‘This is...’

Meng Chao carefully picked up the scraps of paper that had not finished burning and pieced them together.

At first glance, it was a map.