At this moment, inside an abandoned factory that looked utterly unremarkable from the outside, several elders of the Pickpocket Sect sat drinking tea. Their gazes kept darting outside, tense yet expectant.
"Who would have thought that in our lifetimes, we would have the chance to be received by two Western magnates on par with Supreme Experts—and even serve under them..."
"They pay a thousand in gold for the bones of a horse. As the first to abandon the dark and turn to the Western Lands, we will surely be heavily valued. Another sixty years of life, glory for generations—it is all right before our eyes. From now on, everyone else can only be reduced to laborers, trampled beneath our feet for the rest of their lives, while only a select few of us remain high above..."
The elders conversed with smiles.
To them, so long as they had no shame, the arrival of the Foreigners was not all that bad. After all, as the earliest to defect, they would still be the masters. It would merely mean making those beneath them suffer a little more.
They needed resources, and the Foreigners needed resources too. Neither could go without them. The people below had originally worked for them to earn resources; now they also had to earn resources for the Foreigners. Naturally, their lives would become even harder.
"Wait! Listen!"
As they chatted idly, one elder's ear suddenly twitched. He raised a hand, stopping the other two mid-conversation.
The three listened closely. In the once-silent factory, three sets of footsteps suddenly appeared, their rhythm nearly identical—the sound of leather shoes striking the ground.
"Tap... tap... tap... tap... tap..."
The unhurried footsteps approached the second floor, echoing through the empty, silent factory building and bringing with them an inexplicable sense of oppression.