Peeling Skin

Chapter 43: Skin Stripping

The three people, including General Manager Zhu, were dragged into a room on the side. In the few seconds the door was open, a thick smell of blood wafted out.

"Thump!"

"Thump!"

"Thump!"

The sound of knives chopping rang out in succession, and the voices of those three disappeared.

The red-nosed man opened the door again and walked out. Looking at the fat pigs huddled together trembling, he smiled with satisfaction and continued driving them outward.

A few minutes later, everyone was locked inside the pigsty, coming face to face with the people in the neighboring pen who were also in pig form.

Red Nose poured a bucket of pig feed, chattering happily to himself: "Eat well, eat your fill, grow more meat. If you grow well, the meat will taste good."

"Too bad there are no piglets. The old pigs will have to be picked out too. If the meat is tough, we'll chop it up and make dumplings."

The pigs squeezed and trembled together, the smell of urine spreading through the air.

Red Nose sniffed and laughed heartily. Suddenly, as if hearing something, he tilted his head to look to the left, slammed the gate shut, and walked away cursing.

Xu Huo heard him say, "Here they come again," and "Don't these people ever get tired of it?" Between words, he smashed an empty pigsty to pieces, his violence and mania on full display.

Once the sound of his footsteps faded, Xu Huo turned back to assess his surroundings.

The neighboring pen held the people who had been taken away earlier. The numbers matched—forty-one total, including his side.

Apart from them, a few piglets lay in the farrowing pen at the far end, and the sow pen wasn't empty either. Three large sows had bellies bulging high.

But unlike the panic here, the piglets and sows looked as if they were dead, indifferent to the newcomers.

Without a doubt, they were also human.

Xu Huo's eyes darkened. He stepped back and squeezed into the middle of the pig herd.

Every pig-human had a stitched line on their belly. For those near him, the stitching was crude—just a few random pins holding the skin together. But the piglets were different; their stitches had fully fused with the pigskin, as if they had grown into the flesh.

Since the slit over his eye had been cut, the pigskin on his body had been tightening, seeming to merge with his skin. If too much time passed, the pigskin might become impossible to remove.

Flexing his fingers, Xu Huo manipulated the "Omnipresent Strings" to fish the fragment of the Head Chopper Demon's Axe from his pants pocket.

After successfully retrieving the fragment, he cut the pigskin on his wrist, reached his hand out, severed the stitches on his belly, and with both hands, tore the pigskin off.

The moment the pigskin came off, a game notification lit up:

[Player Passerby A has entered "Good Taste Fresh Meat Supply Factory," defaulting to participation in this D-class random instance.]

[Background: No trade, no harm. With increasing customer demand, more and more underground meat supply factories have emerged. To ensure a steady supply of goods, these factories often appear randomly across various worlds.]

[Good Taste Fresh Meat Supply Factory is one of them.]

[As a popular supply factory favored by underground restaurants, the factory boss, Red Nose Karl, not only provides customers with delicious red meat at the first opportunity but also allows diners to openly serve it at the table. In underground restaurants, the name Red Nose is somewhat famous.]

[It is said he was once a top-notch skin stripper. In his career, he has skinned no less than ninety-nine thousand out of a hundred thousand, possessing a delicate heart that belies his rough appearance. He can tell from an animal's fur whether it is pregnant or sick—a master of his craft.]

[But business at Good Taste Fresh Meat Supply Factory has been getting better and better, and Karl is too busy to keep up. Forced to, he posted a recruitment ad, hoping to hire a few nimble-handed workers.]

[A few young people have already come to apply.]

[Instance Tasks:
① The more precious something is, the easier it is to lose—Steal a treasure from the skin stripper Karl;
② Piglets flying to freedom—Rescue three or more children;
③ Diligent and hardworking worker—Complete the tasks assigned by factory boss Karl.]

[Instance Time: Unlimited]

[Players can exit the instance upon completing any one task.]

The instance location was the factory itself. The applicants were either players or had players mixed in. Although time was unlimited, none of these three tasks were easy...

"Oink! Oink!" The large pig beside him frantically nudged him. The pigs in the neighboring pen also tried to jump over, their eyes full of hope and pleading.

Xu Huo noticed one pig jumping particularly vigorously, but he only glanced at it before looking away. He tossed the peeled pigskin into a corner and said in a low voice, "I'm going to find a way out. As long as you don't let that man find out I've slipped away, I'll find a way to come back and save you."

The large pigs nodded hurriedly. Two of them ran to the corner and lay directly on the pigskin, covering it with their bodies. The others crowded over, jostling and piling up into a small hill.

The people in the neighboring pen followed suit, squeezing into a pile. Only one pig kept howling angrily and persistently.

Xu Huo pushed it back down, then crouched low and climbed out of the pigsty.

He came to the pen with the piglets not far away. Six little piglets lay quietly inside. When they saw him, their eyes only brightened a little. They didn't approach or cry out.

He waved at the piglets, but they backed away in fear. A large sow from the neighboring pen waddled over and awkwardly tapped her own belly with her front hoof. The stitches on it had fully fused into the skin.

"Can't you just cut it open with a knife?"

"You've grown together with the pigskin?"

"Would forcibly peeling the skin kill you?"

With each question he asked, the sow nodded once.

"How long does it take for the skin to fuse with the flesh?"

"Three hours? Five hours?"

Big Pig chose for five hours.

"Do you know any way to get you all out?" he asked again.

This time, Big Pig shook his head.

With no leads on the second task for now, Xu Huo could only try the other two. Skin Stripper Karl should be interviewing applicants right now and wouldn't be back so soon.

He crossed the pigpen and headed in the direction the skin stripper had gone.

The pigpen seemed to be at the very back of the factory. The light was still fairly bright, and through the windows he could see large stretches of forest outside. Past the pigpen was the main part of the factory—a slaughtering, dehairing, and cleaning assembly line.

But this place was the complete opposite of the clean pigpen behind him. Not only was the floor covered in black mud and water, but even the machinery was caked with bloodstains. Flies, cockroaches, and rats were everywhere. The mop in the corner had dried into a flat cake—this wasn't a matter of being too busy to clean; it had never been cleaned at all.

Xu Huo tried to walk only on dry ground.

There were two rooms nearby. One was where he and the others had fallen in, with a conspicuous pipe outlet welded into the center of the wall. The pitch-black pipe led to who knew where.

He paused for a few seconds before backing out, glanced at the two rotten pig heads hanging upside down from iron hooks nearby, then opened the other room, which reeked of blood.