Meng Chao's Skills

"Uncle Zhang, Uncle Luo, Brother Zhou."

Meng Chao recalled one familiar face after another.

In his previous life, these simple, kind elders had taught him many things alongside his father.

"A Chao came too?" No one was surprised. They all nodded. "Learn well from your dad. Being a harvester has a future."

"Where's Brother Shen?" Meng Yishan asked.

He turned back to explain to his son, "Brother Shen is one of the company leaders. Whether you can become a harvester is up to him. Be sharp later—no, be honest."

"Brother Shen is over there enjoying the cold air. Tiger Lord killed a Level Three monster today, so he's in a good mood. Take A Chao over to see him, say a few nice words, and it'll definitely work out." Several harvesters laughed.

The general manager of Nine Xin Resource Recycling Company, Shen Rongfa, had tiny eyes, large nostrils, and a face shaped like the Chinese character for "you."

He clearly did not need to do any work himself, yet he wore a medical mask with the highest filtration rating and three layers of protective clothing inside and out.

He was short and fat besides. No wonder he was sweating all over, constantly enjoying the cold air beside the refrigerated truck carrying monster materials.

"Old Meng, last time you said that if your son couldn't get into university, he wanted to join our company. But why did I hear that he'd been injured before?" he asked in a pompous drawl.

"He suffered some minor injuries last year, but they've long since stopped being a problem. This kid has had quick hands since he was little. If I teach him myself, he'll definitely become a skilled hand within two years." Meng Yishan bent at the waist, smiling humbly. "Brother Shen, please help us out."

"Mm, I'll certainly help if I can."

Shen Rongfa neither agreed nor disagreed. "But then again, this company isn't mine. With your son's condition, it'll be hard for me to explain things to my brother-in-law..."

"I understand. That's why I can only ask Brother Shen for help."

Meng Yishan nearly lowered his head to the ground. He grasped Shen Rongfa's hand and gave it a gentle push.

Meng Chao had sharp eyes. He glimpsed his father slipping a shopping card into Shen Rongfa's hand.

The card bore gaudy monster patterns. It seemed to be a spending card from Golden Dragon Mall.

That was a high-end shopping center in Dragon City, selling rare monster raw materials. Membership spending cards required a minimum top-up of ten thousand yuan.

In his previous life, Meng Chao truly had not known that this was how he had gotten the job.

His father, who normally could not bear to smoke even half a good cigarette and patched up torn underwear to make it last three to five years, actually had ten thousand yuan in secret savings?

Meng Chao narrowed his eyes.

He thought very seriously.

Later, under the cover of a dark and windy night, should he put a sack over Shen Rongfa's head and snatch the card back?

As soon as the shopping card entered his hand, Shen Rongfa smiled until the fat on his face quivered. With his damp, hot palm, he patted Meng Yishan's shoulder. "Fine. Anyway, your harvesting team is only affiliated with the company. Whoever you want to take as an apprentice has nothing to do with the company. Just one thing: don't cause trouble—causing trouble for me is no big deal, but upsetting my brother-in-law would be bad, right?"

"Understood. We definitely won't cause trouble for Brother Shen or Tiger Lord." Meng Yishan nodded repeatedly, then turned and tugged at his son. "A Chao, hurry up and thank Uncle Shen!"

Meng Chao took a deep breath and stepped forward. "Thank you, Manager Shen."

"Mm." Shen Rongfa waved impatiently. "Enough talking. Hurry up and get to work!"

He patted his backside and went back to squat atop the refrigerated truck to rest.

"Time to start work!"

The harvesters gave their masks and protective clothing one final inspection.

They readied iron tongs, dissection knives, washing devices, adzes, chisels, axes, saws, and all sorts of tools capable of cutting monsters into eight pieces.

"A Chao, you can't offend Manager Shen." Meng Yishan heard the displeasure in his son's voice. As he helped him put on his equipment, he spoke in a low voice.

Meng Chao remained silent. He did not know why, but the moment he saw the man named Shen, he had been filled with indignation and even hatred. The negative emotions rising in his heart were far stronger than when he faced Zuo Haoran.

It seemed... this guy had harmed Dad terribly in my previous life? The sudden thought made him pause in slight surprise.

After pondering for a moment, he decided to cut straight to the point. "Dad, you've been a harvester for more than ten years, and everyone respects you. Why do you have to work at Nine Xin? Can't you set up on your own?"

Whether Shen Rongfa was good or bad, since Meng Chao had returned from a nightmare, there was no reason for him to live under another's roof.

Only by building his own power and growing stronger step by step could he hold his fate in his own hands.

"That's really the way a child talks. Starting a company isn't that simple." Meng Yishan sighed.

After so many years in the trade, he had considered working for himself too.

But starting a company required capital. The Meng Family carried heavy burdens and was stretched thin at the end of every month. Where could they find such a large sum of spare money?

Besides, the most important thing for a harvester was not craftsmanship, but connections.

Only connections with powerful people could provide a source of monster corpses.

Meng Yishan did not like Shen Rongfa either. That fellow could make even an ordinary Sword Halberd Demon Pig into a complete mess.

But his brother-in-law, Qin Hu, was a Transcendent, and the Mad Blade Squad he belonged to had some reputation. Whenever the mist descended, they could kill great numbers of monsters and let Shen handle them.

Many harvesting teams could not find corpse sources, so they could only affiliate themselves with Nine Xin and endure Shen's exploitation.

Meng Yishan's harvesting team did not know any powerful people. If they truly struck out on their own, they could only take military contracts.

The monsters the military blasted apart with heavy firepower were all scorched and battered. Not only were they filthy and stinking, there were barely any useful resources left to harvest.

Besides, even military contracts had become fewer and fewer lately. The monsters had all been killed off!

Meng Yishan did not know how to explain this to his sheltered son. He could only say, "Endure it for two years. Once you've mastered the craft and your sister has entered university, we'll talk again. I definitely won't let you suffer grievances forever."

But Meng Chao's eyes shone brightly. "Dad, have you ever considered that the monsters might increase again?"

Meng Yishan froze. "What do you mean?"

"One of the biology teachers at our school said so." Meng Chao spoke without missing a beat. "The fact that monsters have been decreasing over the past decade or so doesn't necessarily mean they're truly afraid of us. It could also mean they've entered some kind of... dormant, evolving state. Very soon, the monsters will complete their evolution and appear before us in greater numbers and with even more violent forms."

"Is that possible?"

Meng Yishan was astonished. He was not well educated, and he instinctively trusted teachers from key high schools. "Which teacher was it? Have I seen him at a parent-teacher meeting?"

"He was a famous teacher from another school who came for short-term training. I only heard him casually mention it during an extracurricular class," Meng Chao said. "If monsters really increase, then there'll be no need to worry about corpse sources, right?"

"This—" Meng Yishan hesitated.

"Didn't an Ultra Beast spawn in our residential complex today?" Meng Chao said urgently. "Dad, this is a threat, but it's also an opportunity. If we want to get rich, or even soar into the heavens in a single leap, we have to seize this chance!"

His son had always been Meng Yishan's greatest pride.

He had entered a key high school, and his theories came one after another. The two elders had long since been unable to out-argue him.

Meng Yishan knew Shen Rongfa's character well. If he had not been left without a road to take, he would not have wanted his son to work for that bird-brained bastard either.

But when he thought of the funding, connections, and technical support needed to start a company, the middle-aged man with graying temples developed another headache.

"Let's start work first. We'll talk later. Come, we'll teach you how to harvest monsters together."

The main force of this wave of invasion consisted of crustaceans.

Aside from the Black Beetles they had seen at Tianfu Garden, there were also many arachnid monsters, chiefly Yellow Striped Giant Tail Scorpions.

These monsters were about 1.2 meters long.

The two pairs of enormous forelimbs shaped like crab claws contained rich, tender meat.

Their hard chitin shells could serve directly as armor or be ground into powder to refine Special Alloy.

The mucus inside their bodies could fertilize fields and raise giant earthworms, providing Dragon City's people with ample protein.

Their enormous pale-golden scorpion tails contained precious venom. It could be refined into cell activity medicine and Gene Serum, using mild toxins to stimulate the evolution of the human immune system and awaken the Superhuman Power hidden deep within human genes.

They also had an extremely hard venomous stinger. After being finely ground and inscribed with runes, it could be paired with a heavy Anti-Material Sniper rifle to make the finest sniper Bullet. Beyond armor-piercing, he naturally carried the effects of "corrosion" and "deadly poison."

"Little Chao, you've never seen so many monsters before. Pretty exciting, huh?"

"This is called a Yellow Striped Giant Tail Scorpion. It looks frightening, but it's completely dead. It's fine, come touch it. With so many uncles here, how could we let you get hurt?"

"Look, this claw is still moving. Hahahaha, did that scare you? It's just a stimulation response from the nerve cords, perfectly normal."

The harvesters were a rough bunch, and nothing was off limits in their crude banter, but they were all kindhearted. They truly cared for Meng Chao as if he were one of their own juniors.

"Thank you, uncles." Meng Chao forced down the twitch at the corner of his mouth and kept a low profile.

In his mind, the structures of hundreds of monsters ten times more complex than Yellow Striped Giant Tail Scorpions gradually emerged.

His fingertips trembled lightly, eager to try.

"A Chao, watch carefully."

Meng Yishan and the other harvesters worked together with seamless coordination. In a few quick moves, they finished processing a Yellow Striped Giant Tail Scorpion.

To accommodate Meng Chao, they had even slowed down a little. Every time they harvested a part, they explained it to him in detail.

"Come, your turn."

For the second Yellow Striped Giant Tail Scorpion, Meng Yishan planned to see what talent Meng Chao had. "Your school has extracurricular classes for dissecting monsters too. You should have used these tools before, right? Don't be afraid. They aren't especially valuable. Go ahead and do it. If you damage anything, we can fix it."

"Mm." Meng Chao added a Calm Mind Detoxification Pill to his mask's filter.

He picked up a dissection knife and carapace tongs, then walked to the operating position on the Yellow Striped Giant Tail Scorpion's right side.

The experience of harvesting this type of monster countless times in his previous life naturally surfaced in his mind.

For the first cut, he entered at a twenty-five-degree angle through the gap in the carapace between the head and thorax.

His fingertips trembled slightly as he changed the blade's direction, stripping out the main nerve cord intact and immersing it in a thirty-seven-percent neural cell activator to keep it fresh.

For the second cut, he used a Number One Armor-Breaking Knife to sever the two pairs of forelimbs, then switched to an eighteen-centimeter downward-curved handle with a Number Thirty-Four butterfly blade.

Using the blade's curve, he directly separated the meat inside the claws from the carapace. Then, with a gentle pull from the negative-pressure suction device, the quivering scorpion meat, soft as tofu, fell into a vacuum container.

For the third cut, he switched to a Number Eleven blade and used a reverse-picking technique. First, he picked open the narrow shell tendons, then drove straight in, treating the hard chitin carapace as though it were nothing. He directly stripped out the contents of the thoracic cavity, then used a vacuum liquid extractor to suck up every last drop of the precious mucus.

Rustle, rustle, rustle, rustle.

Meng Chao's blade fell like a light spring rain, moistening all things without a sound.

Thanks to Alliance Leader Mu Yuan for the reward, and thanks as well to the other readers for their rewards and strong support. The new book has set out on its journey, and this is exactly when it most needs data to nurture it. Brothers and sisters, please bookmark and recommend it. Let's take Dragon City and charge from the Otherworld toward the stars together!