Noah rose from his seat and left the red-haired monster's villa, casually closing the door behind him, transforming into a shadow that disappeared into the night. As for the woman, he had knocked her unconscious, and she wouldn't wake up for several hours.
The night was dark and windy, and the others were still unaware that their third-in-command had already rushed to reincarnate. Noah's next targets were the remaining two chiefs. He had an intuition that both the chief and the second-in-command might possess S-class abilities, and if not S-class, they were at the pinnacle of A-class.
They would be the strongest opponents he had encountered so far. The best strategy was to defeat them one by one, facing two S-class awakened beings at the same time would be too much even for him.
A guard, yawning while on patrol, was suddenly attacked by several wires that dragged him into the shadows. He was met with a pair of cold eyes.
"Tell me where your chief and second-in-command are. If you're not afraid of death, you can try screaming for help, or choose not to speak." The guard nodded desperately. The wires around his mouth slowly loosened.
"Spare my life, I'll talk, I'll tell you everything," he pleaded.
"The chief is always in the basement, and the second-in-command is in the highest villa."
"Where is the basement?"
"On the back hill, you can see the door to the basement just by going there. Only the chief is there, usually, no one dares to go there, not even our own people. When the chief gets angry, he even eats his own people."
"Do your chiefs like to eat humans?" The guard's face paled a bit as he spoke of the chief.
"It's not that the chief likes to eat humans, it's... it's that he only eats humans, especially fond of human hearts and livers. Several of our brothers on the island have disappeared like this, so we lure outsiders to come here. Those meat pigs are raised for the chief."
Hearing the guard's response, Noah couldn't help but frown. Cannibalism was not uncommon in the apocalypse, mostly for survival. Because human flesh was not tasty, and cannibalism had a certain chance of contracting the prion virus, which was almost a death sentence. The risk was too great.
So, those who have a choice generally won't resort to cannibalism, it's only those struggling on the brink of life and death who would eat whatever they come across. Noah had never encountered anyone who ate human flesh for the sake of eating it. Such a person must either be a pervert or a monster.
But whether a pervert or a monster, Noah wanted to meet them, to broaden his horizons. Then, with a single swing of a wire, he strangled a guard to death, and following the guard's directions, he quietly made his way towards the back mountain.
Just as the guard had said, the entire back mountain was eerily silent, without a soul in sight, which showed just how much people feared the head of the household. Bypassing a large rock on the back mountain, a half-open iron gate came into view, with dim incandescent light spilling out from the crack of the door. The night was dark and the light flickered, the mountain wind howled, making the iron gate squeak, creating a somewhat terrifying atmosphere.
Noah approached the gate, looking sideways into it. This was a huge underground tunnel carved out by hand, more than five meters wide and tall, with fresh chisel marks visible on it, indicating that the tunnel was newly made. Several electric wires ran along the tunnel walls, with incandescent bulbs providing light at intervals.
At this moment, the narrow tunnel was devoid of people, and the end was not visible. Noah didn't think much and gently pulled open the iron gate to enter. As soon as he entered the tunnel, a foul stench hit him, making him want to vomit, a smell Noah was all too familiar with. It was the smell of rotting corpses. Since humans are omnivores with a long lifespan, their decomposed smell is much more foul than that of herbivores like dead cows and horses, a stench that is overwhelmingly nauseating.
Walking about a hundred meters into the tunnel, the surrounding space gradually became wider but also more eerie. Human skeletons hung upside down on the walls and ceiling, reminiscent of the White Bone Cave from the Journey to the West.
However, since these human bones had just been stripped off not long ago, with bits of flesh and rotten skin still clinging to them, under the high temperatures of summer, the bits of flesh had already begun to rot and stink. A large number of flies circled above the skeletons, breeding, and occasionally, maggots would wriggle their bodies and fall to the ground, with a small layer of desperately wriggling maggots piling up in the corners.
The pungent smell of decay in the tunnel came from this. Going deeper by several tens of meters, the tunnel branched off. Noah randomly chose an entrance to proceed. This passage was not long, less than twenty meters, and turned a corner to reach the end. The end was blocked by a thick, heavy iron door, with the temperature around it noticeably several degrees higher, stuffy and hot.
This heavy iron door was similar to the kind used for cold storage rooms and could be opened from the outside. Driven by curiosity, Noah approached the door, twisted the handle, and slowly opened the iron door. A blast of cold air hit him in the face instantly. As he had expected, there indeed was a large cold storage room behind the door. Because the cooling system's heat dissipation was connected to the tunnel, the temperature inside the tunnel was slightly higher.
This cold storage room covered an area of about two to three hundred square meters. At that moment, the ceiling of the cold room was filled with densely packed hooks, from which hung bodies wrapped in frost, roughly looking to be about forty to fifty in number. This must be the head of the household's 'refrigerator'. Noah couldn't help but wonder, could he possibly eat all this meat? But then, the psyche of a pervert is naturally incomprehensible to a normal person.
Leaving the cold room, Noah made his way back along the tunnel towards the other end, quickly reaching it, only to find another large iron door blocking the way. The door was not completely closed, and faint sounds of joyful humming could be heard from behind it
Noah peered through the crack of the door to look inside. It was a room with quite an odd design. The kitchen and bedroom were in the same room, to be precise, the kitchen was the bedroom. In a corner of the room, there was a large bed stained with black grease. The bedding and mattress had turned black and shiny from the grease stains. Next to the bed stood a large iron table, on which lay uneaten meat that was not fully cooked and still had streaks of blood, with a swarm of flies buzzing around the tabletop.
The walls of the room were adorned with corpses that were either dried in the air or dehydrated with salt. At the center of the room was a large stove, which was still lit, bubbling with something being cooked. Next to the stove, a large meatball of a figure stood at the chopping board, wielding a kitchen knife, chopping ingredients, and humming a cheerful tune.
Noah was taken aback at the sight of the meatball figure. Over two meters tall and just as wide, with upper body fat nearly drooping to the ground. Was this even human? Compared to it, a fat, bursting zombie could be described