Chapter 530: Chapter 529: How Could They Possibly Sleep?

Xue Zhu possessed the Beast Taming Ability. After getting permission from her Father and Mother, she looked toward her two older brothers.

Xueqiu and Xue Bao slapped their foreheads. ’Fine. They were Snow Leopard cubs—felines. And with a Cat Beastman for a mother, of course they could help catch mice!’

The two cubs shifted into their Beast Forms and darted into the bamboo forest. Before long, they each returned with several squeaking, struggling field mice in their mouths.

Xue Zhu took out a handful of grain and offered it to them. The field mice smelled it and turned their heads. When their eyes met hers, their tense nerves slowly calmed, and they became docile and still.

Xueqiu and Xue Bao dropped the field mice on the ground. The seven or eight mice then scurried over to Xue Zhu, sat back on their haunches with their heads tilted up, and waited for her command just like people!

Xue Zhu smiled and gently tapped each of their heads with her finger. "Hello, I’m Xue Zhu, your temporary master. I need you to be my little scouts and burrow underground to take a look for me..." 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

She even pulled out a palm-sized Beast Skin Bag. "There’s a reward for completing the mission!"

Inside were various types of grain. She possessed the Beast Taming Ability, and because of it, both Beastmen and Wild Beasts couldn’t help but feel an affinity for her. She always remembered her Mother’s words: the universe requires balance and fair exchange.

That was why she always paid the small animals a reward whenever she asked them for help.

The field mice smelled the fresh grain, their whiskers twitching with excitement as they nodded repeatedly.

In truth, as subjects of Xue Zhu’s Beast Taming, they were also cleansed by a faint amount of Spiritual Power, which brought a bit of clarity to their minds.

Xue Zhu tilted her head and looked at her Father and Mother. ’What exactly should they check for?’ "Is there..."

"See if there are any excavated tunnels around the bamboo rhizomes!" Wei Ce said, taking a deep breath.

Si Shuo also remembered that Wei Ce’s mother, Yichu, was a Black-striped Field Mouse. She pressed her lips together and couldn’t help but ask, "Brother Ce, what was the Yichu Saintess’s superpower?"

Wei Ce sneered. "I don’t know."

’He doesn’t know?’ Everyone was inwardly surprised.

"She kept her superpower a complete secret. I wonder if that Wolf King, who’s now just a pile of white bones, had the honor of knowing what it was."

They weren’t sure if they were just being paranoid, but they couldn’t shake the feeling that this incident was somehow related to Yichu.

At Xue Zhu’s command, the field mice squeaked and scurried into the pits left by the uprooted bamboo, burrowing into the earth.

Xue Zhu closed her eyes, attaching a few wisps of her Divine Sense to each of the field mice to perceive the situation underground.

The soil’s moisture was just right. But the deeper they went, the denser the Wood Spirit Energy became. Before they had even reached the bottom, the mice were startled by a dense swarm of mole crickets. Delighted, they grabbed one and started munching away, completely ignoring Xue Zhu’s commands.

She opened her eyes helplessly. "Father, Mother, the field mice are eating mole crickets. We’ll have to wait for them to finish before they can investigate further."

Fortunately, the field mice were fast eaters. After devouring two or three of the high-protein snacks, they licked their paws, cleaned their faces, and continued to dig deeper.

In the first few years of a bamboo’s life, all its energy goes into growing roots. Afterward, as the bamboo grows taller, the roots spread out extensively, and buds on the horizontally growing rhizomes sprout from the ground to form new stalks.

This is why bamboo grows in groves. The Iron-eating Beast Clan’s usual practice was to grind Crystal Stones into gravel in water. The water would then be used for irrigation, and the gravel buried in the topsoil. Even if insects were affected by the Spiritual Energy, they would be active in the shallow layers of the soil and easily discovered. Moreover, Bamboo Forest Mountain was home to many chickens and ducks that would peck up all sorts of pests.

But now, these horizontally growing rhizomes were crawling with insects attracted by the dense Wood Spirit Energy!

The Iron-eating Beasts looked after the bamboo forest more meticulously than their own cubs, and there were always patrols at night. Therefore, the culprit could only have done their dirty work from underground.

Sure enough, as the field mice tunneled left and right, they discovered many stones underground. These stones were newly formed and still carried a faint trace of Earth Element Spiritual Energy!

Xue Zhu tilted her head and had the field mice dig along the stones. Unexpectedly, the stones under each clump of bamboo were all connected. Or rather than connected, it seemed someone had used the stones to fill in an excavated tunnel.

Even worse... some stones directly encased the bamboo’s rhizomes. This, more than any pest infestation, was the true reason the bamboo was losing its vitality.

When Xue Zhu relayed what the field mice had found to Wei Ce, several Iron-eating Beastmen immediately used their Earth Element Ability to start digging deep along the rhizomes of different bamboo stalks.

"Brother Ce, the bamboo roots are completely encased in stone! They can’t absorb any water from the soil!"

"These stones are all connected. They must have been used to fill in the tunnels they dug while simultaneously cutting off the bamboo’s water source..."

"There are signs of damage to the bamboo roots here!"

The Iron-eating Beastmen all made discoveries. Their faces turned ashen. They had originally thought this was an unavoidable natural disaster, but it turned out to be man-made sabotage.

Just how much must the culprit hate the Iron-eating Beast Clan to cut off fifty percent of their entire food supply?

Xue Zhu continued to use the field mice to trace the path of the stones, while she walked above ground, following her connection to them. The perpetrator had gone through the entire Bamboo Forest Mountain; the roots of every single clump of bamboo were either damaged or encased in rock.

By now, many Beastmen from the city had been drawn over by the commotion, shaking their heads and clucking their tongues.

"The rainy season and the coldest season are coming. The Iron-eating Beast Clan usually relies on Bamboo Forest Mountain to supplement thirty percent of their food stores. This year, who knows how many of their clan members won’t make it through..."

"The bamboo has flowered and died. It’ll take who knows how many years for it to recover and grow into a forest again. But before that, I’m afraid this whole mountain will be carved up by everyone else, right?"

"You bet. There’s so much land here. Forget anything else, you could just raise chickens, ducks, and geese. You’d have meat and eggs to eat every day, with plenty left over to sell for Crystal Stones... No matter how powerful the Iron-eating Beast Clan is, can they really fight all of Guangshou City?"

Shi Si sniffed lightly. Every Beastman’s Spiritual Power was generated from within their body and carried its owner’s scent. Moreover, since the stones were encased in soil, the scent dissipated even more slowly.

He took advantage of his small size and the chaos of his large family, using his Invisibility and transforming into a five-tailed Black Fox. He then darted into a hole to sniff the scent on the stones.

Sure enough, after sniffing the Spiritual-Power-condensed stones in several different holes, he discovered that the scents did not come from a single Beastman!

He scurried onto his Father’s shoulder and whispered what he had found.

A slight smile touched Xiao Cheng’s lips. He also used the cover of the dense bamboo forest, turning Invisible to follow Shi Si and catch the Earth Element Ability Users involved in making the bamboo flower.

In just half an afternoon, the sky had already grown dim under the heavy cloud cover. The crowd of onlookers began to thin out, especially the Bird Beastmen, whose vision was poor at night.

The members of the Iron-eating Beast Clan were furious. How could they possibly sleep until they had traced the channels filled with stone and caught the vicious culprit?