The woman froze for a moment, white powder falling from her scalp.

"Clown City won't accept you, that should be obvious, otherwise you wouldn't have fled here to live underground," Xu Huo said coolly, as if he felt no sympathy for their suffering or situation.

"If you were only being hunted by those warriors on the surface, you wouldn't prefer to be treated like livestock and hide down here. There must be another reason, right?"

"The water and food in the cleanup area can make people mute and get infected. There may also be special elements in the air that gradually rob infected people of their sanity."

"You've been able to hide underground for more than a decade and raise children safely, so it looks like you discovered a pattern. What's wrong on the surface? Is it the soil, or extreme heat?"

Jin Dong's case was very strange. Of course the oddness wasn't just that he suddenly lost his mind without being injured, but this particular climate deserved suspicion.

There were countless things that could cause such an effect, and Xu Huo was not an expert in this field, nor did he really want to chase down an answer. Still, if the key to the cleanup area's deformed ecology lay in the warriors who were supposed to clear that area, then his hypothesis about clearing the dungeon would be incorrect. Whether Mutants or warriors, they could basically be put in the same category.

If he couldn't find clues in people for now, other places might offer a breakthrough.

The woman kneeling on the ground did not react. Xu Huo turned and left without a word. Only then did she hurry forward to stop him, frantically pulling a pen from the hole in the wall and scribbling on paper.

Xu Huo glanced at what she had hastily written. His expression darkened. "No need to make excuses."

The woman babbled in protest, then wrote even faster, but this time Xu Huo didn't even bother to look. He grabbed the piano wire and rose into the air.

Only then did the woman reluctantly tell the truth, "High temperatures accelerate mutation!"

Xu Huo stopped. "You lose your mind when you go to the surface? How long does it take?"

"A few hours. If your constitution is weak, maybe one or two hours."

Xu Huo looked at the children standing in the cave entrance. After a moment he decided, "I'll take two people. Whether they mutate when we go out depends on their luck. If they can survive the high heat, I'll take them away from the cleanup area."

The woman nodded eagerly and hurriedly called the children over for him to choose.

Xu Huo ultimately picked Fish Ball, who had been throwing stones, and the frail child called Ice Cream.

The woman had already made it clear that frail kids wouldn't last long outside, yet Xu Huo still chose Ice Cream. The adults—unable to speak but thinking clearly—began to suspect his motives, and Ice Cream's parents were even reluctant to let him go with Xu Huo.

"I'm not a Player-Eater," Xu Huo said. "He looks sickly. Even if he stays, he won't last two years. Let me try taking him out."

The white-haired people clustered around refused to disperse. Xu Huo turned the question on them. "What happened to the kids who were taken out before?"

The agitated group gradually calmed. Although they lived underground, they knew exactly what happened to children taken out of the place, because usually on the second or third day after someone managed to get one or two normal people to take the kids, corpses or skeletal remains would be tossed down—sometimes children, sometimes adults.

In other words, neither children nor adults had escaped. That was a small bargaining chip used earlier to persuade Xu Huo.

"Either take two, or take none," Xu Huo put the decision back on them.

Now it was Ice Cream's parents who were being begged. No parent would trade their child's life for another's, of course, but the frail child gripped his mother's finger and pointed upward, showing his desire to go out.

In the end Xu Huo still took the two children. They didn't use the underground tunnel to leave; he lifted them by the piano wire and flew up through the crack.

As expected, Gao Peng was waiting outside.

Sitting on his motorcycle, Gao Peng grinned at him. "Lightning Strikes said you came out. Didn't expect you'd be here too."

Xu Huo set the two kids down, pulled out a lighter and lit a cigarette, and glanced at the black bag behind their bike. "I heard you eat people."

The faces of Gao Peng's group changed slightly. They straightened immediately.

"Not planning to be reasonable?" Xu Huo flicked the lighter, and the bag at the back of the bike burst into flames.

Gao Peng's men quickly stepped aside and widened the distance. Taking advantage of Xu Huo's attention being drawn to the corpses in the bag, one of them suddenly charged in from the side with a swinging punch.

Xu Huo didn't even turn his head. He lifted his hand and swept through the air, then cut toward the ground. The man's body abruptly split misaligned into two halves. Because he was lunging forward, his stiff body couldn't keep his balance and fell forward, and the ground-level beam sliced him clean in two!

The corpse collapsed, blood pooling at Xu Huo's feet. He took a drag of his cigarette, narrowed his eyes, and stared at Gao Peng's group. "Killing children too? That's inhuman."

High heat seemed to make bodies burn more easily. A stench soon spread, but Gao Peng's men had no time to worry about their recently hunted "provisions." They were highly nervous and on guard against the man not far ahead.

"I advise you don't move," Xu Huo nodded at Cen Lu. "Hot weather puts everyone on edge. If one more person makes a move, you'll all die here."

Cen Lu already had a prop in her hand, hidden behind her back. She glanced at Gao Peng after hearing him speak.

Gao Peng tilted his head to signal her to put it away, then relaxed his stance and smiled at Xu Huo. "Just different philosophies. No need to make it kill or be killed. Calm down, brother. He just wants to take two kids out, whatever—"

Before he finished, Xu Huo suddenly drew his sword. The sword-energy swept through the air, cutting a plane that split an invisible obstruction. The rupture rolled open and sent a few people who had appeared to still be standing in place tumbling to the ground—this was only a visual trick prop. In reality, from the moment Gao Peng began speaking, the people in Xu Huo's sight had not been standing still; it only looked that way under the prop's effect.

With their trick exposed, Cen Lu and the others quickly struck as they closed in. Cen Lu threw a live wire first. "I'll control his hands! You shoot!"

The prop rope did bind Xu Huo as intended, but the next second it was removed by the Universal Lubricant. He planted the Severing Ties Door in front of them to block the incoming spray of bullets, pressed the two children against the door, then flicked the lighter and burned the protective suit of the person lunging at him from the side.

Screams erupted. Xu Huo kicked aside the writhing person on the ground and burst out from behind the door. After several rapid moves he used the water jet gun to kill two nearby men, then cut down another with his sword. When dodging bullets from Gao Peng and Cen Lu, he threw out the Lament of Plants. In the momentary paralysis of the two, he cleanly and efficiently sliced off both their heads!