Taken to a Heartless Factory

After waking up the next day, Zhuang Xiaolin asked the local villagers where he could trade labor for food. Of course, he still had to use gestures. Though both sides roughly got their meaning across, the details remained unclear.

One villager stepped forward and gestured that he knew of such a place. Zhuang Xiaolin decided to go take a look, and that was how he ended up here.

A supervisor dressed in a black jacket and black jeans, looking like a thug, swung a long whip that cracked sharply against the ground.

The supervisor shouted, his face full of rage. Anyone could tell at a glance that the workers under his watch had clearly failed to meet his productivity targets.

Zhuang Xiaolin was now one of the workers under that supervisor's control. With the villagers' help, he could originally have gone to another factory they had mentioned.

But unexpectedly, he was stopped halfway there. The man was huge, with a pair of bear ears, wearing a green military coat and a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

The moment he saw those bear ears, Zhuang Xiaolin felt utterly miserable. He had once thought his plane had crashed in some savage wilderness.

After all, he had been flying home from San Francisco, and an accident had happened just hours after takeoff. Anyone would assume they had miraculously survived and ended up somewhere wild or uninhabited.

At first, when he heard the villagers speaking something similar to Russian, Zhuang Xiaolin thought he had arrived in Europe or Siberia. At the time, Europe was in winter, so the cold seemed normal.

Dressed for summer as he was, Zhuang Xiaolin would certainly have suffered there. That was what he initially thought, until he saw something far beyond the ordinary.

That man with bear ears possessed inhuman strength. At first, Zhuang Xiaolin tried to resist and struggle, but it was useless. The man slung him over his shoulder in one motion and threw him into this factory.

After entering the factory, Zhuang Xiaolin was assigned a job. He collected his work uniform and began working inside.

Zhuang Xiaolin's job was simple: hauling cargo. By modern standards, it was almost absurdly simple. With forklifts and other machinery, moving cargo had become much easier.

However, that was not how things worked in the factory where Zhuang Xiaolin now found himself.

With great difficulty, Zhuang Xiaolin carried a crate five or six heads taller than himself forward.

The supervisor watched the scrawny fellow haul such a massive load. Though he continued swearing, the whip he swung was not aimed at him.

Zhuang Xiaolin struggled to carry the cargo to its designated spot. He sat on the ground, gasping for breath. Hauling so much stuff was undoubtedly extremely difficult for a mere office worker like him. Coupled with his small frame and the fact that he had not eaten for days, if this continued, he would sooner or later die here.

And so, after laboring through the day, Zhuang Xiaolin finally got a chance to rest. The moment he sat down, a piece of black bread was thrown to him.

Zhuang Xiaolin looked toward the direction it had come from and saw a manager distributing bread. He said nothing, lowered his head, and began gnawing on it.

A few days passed like this. Zhuang Xiaolin had worked in this factory of flesh and blood for some time. Though his body was growing weaker by the day, it was at least much warmer here than outside, and there were some shabby places to sleep.

But things soon changed. A few days later, the factory's food supply suddenly stopped. The workers, who had already been full of resentment, finally erupted in rebellion. Their end was miserable, however. Several guarding soldiers rushed in and knocked down a large group in no time.

The supervisor began cracking his whip again. The starving workers were forced to endure the growling in their bellies and the churning in their stomachs as they continued working, but soon, things changed once more.

The supervisor disappeared, and the soldiers guarding the gate withdrew as well.

Thinking they were free, the workers rushed out of the factory, only to find a vast expanse of snow outside. Other than abandoned residential stations, there was not a scrap of food to fill their stomachs.

Under the pressure of the extreme environment, they were forced back into the factory. Their stomachs rumbled, their eyes were bloodshot, and their hands were covered in calluses. The atmosphere was deathly quiet and heavy. Then, a bolt suddenly fell from the factory and struck the ground with a tremendous clang.

The crowd, driven half-mad by hunger, came to their senses for a moment and looked up. It was a scrawny young man lying on the ground, gasping for breath.

The crowd, briefly awakened, instantly became frenzied again under the pressure of hunger. The bolt had shattered the fragile balance, and they even lost their reason, pouncing on one another and biting whoever they caught.

Frightened, Zhuang Xiaolin tried to back away, only to find a burly man sneering at him.

Before Zhuang Xiaolin could react, the man charged over and punched him in the face.

The punch was powerful. Zhuang Xiaolin was sent flying into an iron railing, blood flowing from the corner of his mouth.

The man muttered something Zhuang Xiaolin could not understand. Then a large hand reached inside Zhuang Xiaolin's clothes, pulled out the black bread he had hidden there, stuffed it into his mouth, and began chewing.

Zhuang Xiaolin's eyes turned red as he watched. He reached out to stop the man, but the man only sneered, grabbed Zhuang Xiaolin by the collar, and lifted him up. After looking around, he finally threw Zhuang Xiaolin out of the factory and shut the only door through which anyone could enter.

Even if this place might become a living hell, its warmth was still far better than the cold outside.

Zhuang Xiaolin was thrown into the snow outside, feeling as weak as if he had been battered by a gale. The icy wind howled toward him, while cold and hunger pressed against his nerves.

Zhuang Xiaolin forced himself to stay alert. With his gloved left hand, he wiped the blood from his mouth and began walking away from the factory step by step.

He did not understand where this place was. Was it some dark corner of Southeast Asia or North America? The people here all looked so strange, bearing animal-like features and possessing terrifying strength.

Zhuang Xiaolin walked step by step. He did not know how long he had walked, but the chill in his body gradually faded, replaced by an unprecedented warmth.

Looking at the world before him, with heavy snow swirling through the air, Zhuang Xiaolin seemed to understand something. Even his lips, trembling from the cold, curled into a smile. He reached out and undid the coat draped around him, revealing the suit he still wore beneath it.

He was about to die, about to freeze to death. Before freezing to death, people would feel an unprecedented warmth. It was not an illusion, but the result of blood concentrating in one part of the body. The other parts became numb, leaving one able to feel only that concentrated warmth.

Before dying, Zhuang Xiaolin wanted to die with dignity. The world before him grew increasingly blurred. He slowly knelt in the snow, and just as his consciousness was about to fade, a voice faintly came from the depths of his mind. He did not know what it said.

Zhuang Xiaolin passed out in the snowy field.