Mine Foreman's Office

When Zhang Ling's corpse crashed heavily to the ground, Yan Li stood frozen in place, holding his hoe high overhead with wide, vacant eyes!

Only when Li Wei drew his knife and turned around did he finally snap out of it!

His bloodshot eyes seemed ready to burst from their sockets as an enraged, trembling curse echoed through the entire mine shaft!

"You little bastard! I'll fuck your grandmother!"

But before he could bring the heavy hoe down from above his head, an arm that was not particularly muscular yet looked exceptionally balanced and powerful reached out and firmly caught the wooden handle near the hoe's head.

Li Wei moved with incredible speed—so fast that no one could see how he had reached out. The bloodstained dinner knife had already plunged into Yan Li's neck again!

His carotid artery was severed, and blood gushed out in torrents, filling the narrow mine shaft with a thick, choking stench of blood.

The dinner knife had not damaged Yan Li's windpipe. He desperately clutched his spurting neck with both hands, his eyes on the verge of losing focus fixed stubbornly on Li Wei's face beneath the headlamp's light.

"How... how did you find out?"

Covered in blood, Li Wei felt none of the discomfort of killing someone. No matter how realistic the scene was, his subconscious kept telling him that this was only a game.

The people dying before him were not people at all, just code bought with some programmer's sleepless nights and hair loss.

"Guessed," he said casually.

"You killed people based on a guess?"

"Can't I?"

Yan Li had nothing to say.

He could no longer hold on. The severe blood loss dragged his consciousness completely into a void of darkness.

In the pitch-black mine shaft, Li Wei was now the only person still alive.

He glanced at the two notifications that had appeared in his mind.

[Kill: illegally obtained assets 10,000, experience 0.1]

[Kill: illegally obtained assets 570,000, experience 5.7]

[Experience: 22.2/1000]

That Zhang Ling who had died first had actually been poor even among the poor. In contrast, Yan Li, who looked so ordinary and quiet, had contributed quite a bit to Li Wei.

But it was still only a single-digit amount—better than nothing.

Li Wei had figured it out. If he really wanted to level up through killing in this game, he could not keep picking off poor people.

The poor had already been squeezed dry. With such an absurd ratio of 100,000 to 1, getting substantial experience in a place like the laborers' district was clearly nothing but a fantasy.

Besides, those two impoverished scumbags were obviously not his ultimate target tonight.

As the ventilation fan continuously sucked air out of the mine shaft, the nauseatingly thick smell of blood gradually became less unbearable.

Li Wei found a spot beside the two corpses, sat down, and waited quietly.

About three or four hours later, after the bodies on the ground had gone completely cold, he casually tossed the bloodstained dinner knife in his hand and hummed a cheerful tune as he headed out of the mine shaft.

It was nearly midnight. The Coal Mine Field, bustling during the day, was now empty. Apart from two or three guards slacking off, no one else was moving around.

Covered in blood, Li Wei was like a silent ghost. After crawling out of the deep mine shaft, which resembled hell itself, he made directly for the two-story house at the center of the field.

During his spare time that day, he had already learned nearly all the important information about the Coal Mine Field.

As the foreman of this mine, that distinguished man who held a middle-management position in Tian'en Company naturally did not live with the filthy laborers in Afterglow District.

He had his own mansion in Radiance District, closer to the Sun Tower and fully bathed in sunlight. But handling all the large and small affairs of the mine every day made traveling back and forth troublesome, so he had simply built his office into a two-story house within the mine field.

The house was beautifully maintained and spotlessly clean, utterly out of place amid the coal slag and dust scattered throughout the mine field.

Ordinary laborers were not even qualified to come near. Even foremen had to bathe and change into special clothes before entering, lest the filth on them stain those immaculate floors.

Yet at this moment, the guard posted at the gate to the house's courtyard was not faithfully performing his duties. He lay in a reclining chair, snoring away.

To be precise, guarding this place was indeed an extremely easy job. No laborer dared come within a single step of it. Even the laborers' families who had come seeking compensation earlier that day had only dared to cry and shout outside the gate.

That made it extremely easy for Li Wei to sneak inside.

He used his dinner knife to pry open a first-floor window, then effortlessly vaulted through it.

The place really was excessively clean. Dedicated maids came to clean it every day.

Li Wei's shoe soles, coated in coal dust, left brazen footprints across the expensive teak flooring and cashmere carpets.

But he did not care. After looking around the living room, which was barely any different from modern decor, he moved about as familiarly as if he had returned to his own home. Humming softly, he opened the refrigerator, found milk, toast, sausage, and ham, and happily filled his stomach.

Only ten minutes later did he let out a satisfied burp. After hesitating for two seconds, he decided out of kindness to make the leftover bread and ham into two simple sandwiches for Cripple to try.

Next, he found a more suitable and satisfying boning knife in the kitchen to replace the dinner knife.

Only then did he begin slowly climbing the wooden stairs to the second floor.

The old wooden staircase gave off faint creaks beneath his feet, but the moment those insignificant sounds arose, they were drowned out by the obvious snoring.

After reaching the second floor, Li Wei used the snoring to locate a room.

He gently pressed down the handle. The owner of the house apparently had no habit of locking his door while sleeping, and Li Wei entered the luxurious bedroom without encountering the slightest obstacle.

Under the gentle glow of a night-light, a magnificent brass-and-crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. The enormous four-poster bed seemed large enough to dance ballet upon, delicate cashmere carpet covered the entire floor, and there was an exquisite full-length mirror, an expensive desk lamp, an antique mantel clock...

No one would have imagined that this was a room located in a coal mine field without seeing it for themselves.

Sleeping soundly on that four-poster bed was an enormously fat man.

He looked round as a ball, with thinning hair and a neck so buried that it was impossible to find.

Li Wei held his knife against the spot where the man's head should have connected to his body for a long while, but eventually gave up on that region, which he simply could not locate.

Instead, he fixed his eyes on the mine foreman's thick leg, exposed halfway from beneath the flannel blanket and covered in black hair like a radish.

His left hand grabbed the blanket, his right hand gripped the knife. The instant the boning knife sank into the foreman's thigh fat, Li Wei also covered the man's head with the blanket!

"Pfft!"

The sound of the blade piercing flesh was crystal clear in the deep night. The agonizing pain that instantly swept through every nerve also jolted the sleeping foreman fully awake in the next second!

He let out a terrified howl, but it was completely smothered beneath the bedding.

Under the gentle night-light, only Li Wei, covered in blood, smiled at those tiny eyes filled with utter terror.