Bai Zhu took the lead in leaving the Fourth Dimensional Apartment.
After traveling through the woods for a day, the next village was finally not far from them.
Half a wooden sign stood at the village entrance. Most of the writing had been washed away by rain, making it impossible to tell what it had originally said. Bai Zhu and the others did not rush in, instead letting the Mechanical Dragonfly circle overhead.
The villagers were turning over the soil.
Several dozen men stood in two rows, repeatedly digging at the same patch of ground with wooden hoes. There were no crops in the field, but many bone fragments lay buried beneath the soil. Whenever someone dug up a bone, they casually stuffed it into their mouth, chewed it twice, then spat it back into the pit.
One villager raised his arm. An extra curved bone protruded from the outside of his elbow joint. Whenever he swung his hoe, that piece of bone opened along with the motion and caught against the handle.
Milluki stared at the screen.
"What is this, the scene of a failed human modification experiment?"
Piyu recorded the village number.
"The transport records label this place as one where the drugs have only begun altering the body. The people who survive have unstable changes, while the dead are disposed of on the spot."
After merely observing from afar, Bai Zhu lost interest in the place.
"Next one."
The forest outside the second village had been stripped bare by locusts, and the ground was piled with gnawed wood chips. Several villagers carried cloth sacks on their backs and crouched in cracks between rocks, catching locusts. The insects were nearly palm-sized, their abdomens swollen.
One villager caught a locust and stuffed it straight into his mouth.
The insect