Black Rat

Biodata

Appearance

• Black Rats vary considerably in size; senior members are repeatedly described as enormous, while smaller members live and move around the clan grounds 936.
• The chieftain is visibly aged, with gray and white mixed heavily into his fur 937.
• Black Spine has black hair and brownish-yellow pupils. During pursuit, its hair bristles backward before it accelerates 1030 1031.
• Black Rats can stand on their hind legs and use their foreclaws to carry captives, wield whips, and gesture 934 970 975.

Clan and Territory

Leadership and Settlements

• Chieftain: Leads capture expeditions, directs responses to rebellions, and issues orders to senior members 936 957 965.
• Councils: Senior Black Rats debate punishments, mining policy, security, and the use of temple prayers 938 1049.
• Clan grounds: Contain crude buildings, bonfires, and a spacious meeting hall 1020.
• Fenced settlement: One settlement occupies a clearing nearly two hundred meters across and houses more than a hundred Black Rats 958.
• Temple: Located in an enormous cavern beneath a mountain and protected by guards, including Fourth Tier members 982 1013 1017.

Mining and Slavery

The clan captures other Calamity Beasts and forces them to mine dull star stone. Feixu explicitly identifies the captives as slaves and threatens death or being eaten for failing their assignments or resisting orders 910 915.

• Tunnel expansion: Newly assigned beasts are divided among tunnels and ordered to dig downward along existing ore deposits 907 910.
• Quotas: Overseers inspect the ore brought back by individual miners. Extra production can earn temporary leniency 910.
• Punishment: Whippings, executions, and public threats enforce obedience 910 931 934.
• Informants: Reports of escape-related conversations can lead to lethal punishment, even when the accused deny planning an escape 975 1048.
• Replacement overseers: Feixu appoints enslaved Calamity Beasts to replace Black Rat mine overseers, issuing blood whips and using their presence at attacks to help identify rebels 1010.

The clan depends heavily on captive labor. One-Eye rejects killing all the miners because nobody would remain to extract ore; Feixu opposes replacing them with Black Rats because mining would reduce their cultivation time and damage the clan’s future 1049.

Treatment of Other Beasts

Black Rats commonly describe enslaved beasts as livestock and regard their deaths as expendable. During one council, a member dismisses the execution of uninvolved captives as unimportant; the leadership’s concern is that the actual escape planners remain unidentified 938.

Their conduct is not uniformly strategic. The unnamed overseer supervising Shen Heng mistakes his performance of respect for genuine admiration, then decides to invent an excuse to whip Shadow Wolf for being insufficiently respectful 910. Temple guards likewise pursue provocateurs despite recognizing that they may be drawing them away 1019.

Abilities & Skills

Origin Power and Physical Combat

Black Rats fight using Origin Power, claws, and direct physical force 954 956.

• Fourth Tier Lame Claw tears a captive apart and sends attacking beasts flying with claw strikes 956.
• A badly wounded Black Rat tears through five successive vine nets before being overwhelmed and killed 954.
• Fifth Tier Black Spine can withstand Second and Third Tier attacks without actively defending itself or suffering meaningful injury 1029.

Flight and Speed

Higher-tier Black Rats use flight for pursuit, patrols, and battlefield control 934 956 957.

• Black Spine overtakes and captures the fleeing Second Tier Spiny-Back Lizard with a single blow 934.
• Fourth Tier patrols search the surrounding mountain walls and intercept beasts attempting to climb out 957 965.
• Black Spine continues gaining on Shen Heng’s fleeing group despite awakened trees obstructing its path 1029 1030.

Resistance and Limits

• Mental attacks: Black Spine initially freezes for less than roughly two seconds under Two-Horned Lizard’s mental attack. Repeated attacks become progressively less effective 1031.
• Shen Heng’s attacks: His visible, distorted-air attack also loses effectiveness with repetition, although switching attacks creates another opening 1031.
• Mass attacks: Isolated Black Rats can be trapped and killed by coordinated groups of weaker Calamity Beasts 953 954 957.
• Environmental threats: Awakened branches eventually halt Black Spine’s pursuit. The Underground Demon also impairs Black Rats’ movements, though Broken Tooth retains its physical durability 1031 1032 1054.

Equipment and Religious Items

• Blood whips — Used to torture captives during interrogations; Feixu also distributes them to appointed Calamity Beast overseers 934 1010.
• Black Rat God statue — A hundred-meter-tall statue carved from unknown dark-green ore, depicting an enormous, slightly aged Black Rat. Qin Yu notices its resemblance to the clan patriarch 982 1019.

Prayer and Sacrifice

The clan petitions the Black Rat God for help locating hidden rebels, offering members of its own species as payment 982 983.

• One offering consists of one Third Tier and five Second Tier Black Rats. They vanish, but the petition produces no result; Black Spine understands this to mean that the payment is insufficient 983.
• Black Spine then orders Lame Claw to bring three additional Third Tier members 983.
• Black Spine later rejects the assumption that only Black Rats can pray to their god 1020.
• Two-Horned Lizard concludes that the clan probably used prayer to fix the escape portal in one location and guard it 1034.
• Further sacrifice becomes contentious after heavy losses. Feixu protests the cost of another prayer, while Broken Tooth proposes using another group of clansmen 1049.

Notable Members

History

Failed Screening and Mass Punishment

After discovering an escape attempt, the Black Rats demand that the culprits identify themselves. Their interrogation offers captives a choice between naming accomplices and dying quickly, or being whipped to death. This produces chains of false accusations and the deaths of uninvolved beasts 931 937 938.

The chieftain recognizes that the real planners remain hidden. He orders twenty percent of the mining beasts killed; Feixu subsequently separates a little over two hundred captives from the herd and increases the remaining miners’ quotas by twenty percent 938 940.

First Major Uprising

Rebellious Calamity Beasts trap and kill Black Rats in the woods, while further violence spreads through the resting grounds. Broken Tooth reports the uprising, and the chieftain deploys search teams along the valley’s mountain walls 953 954 956 957.

An origin-ore explosion kills Gray Whiskers and Curly Fur. The chieftain recognizes the organizer’s planning ability and orders that the Second Tier Rock-Backed Beast responsible be captured alive. Despite the searches, beasts continue escaping over the mountains 963 965 966 968.

Questions About the World

While questioning Steel-Mane Bear, the chieftain struggles to explain where the clan previously traveled to capture beasts. His memories supply landscapes but no coherent directions, prompting him to ask whether the bear comes from another world 970.

Later, Black Spine receives a carved slab mentioning the outside world and something false. It then questions who really directed the earlier suppression, noticing contradictions in the role it remembers playing 1033 1034.

Temple Raid and Renewed Revolt

Shen Heng’s allies lure guards away from the temple. Black Whiskers sends multiple messengers by different routes, but Shen Heng, Qin Yu, and Stone kill the remaining Fourth Tier defender and enter with its corpse 1018 1019 1020.

Black Spine subsequently pursues the escapees through awakened trees, but repeated disruptive attacks and increasingly dangerous branches force it to stop 1029 1030 1031 1032.

Another mass revolt brings over a thousand Black Rats into battle near the valley entrance. Feixu’s side offers to release half the beasts, then exploits their rush for the opening to trap and kill those left behind. Continued killings and unrest lead the clan council back to the question of temple sacrifices 1040 1046 1049.

Relationships

• Shen Heng — An infiltrator posing as a Coiling Mountain Beast; deceives an overseer with apparent deference, advises Feixu, and later raids the temple 910 980 1019.
• Two-Horned Lizard / Rock-Backed Beast — Organizes the major uprising and escape preparations; the chieftain orders its capture alive 946 966.
• Enslaved Calamity Beasts — The clan’s mining workforce and the source of repeated rebellions against its rule 915 954 1040.
• Underground Demon — A recurring mining threat. Broken Tooth orders work suspended once its emergence is certain, but later attacks a fleeing Coiling Mountain Beast while affected by it 1052 1054.