Chapter 43: Skinning

Including Mr. Zhu, three people were dragged into a side room. In the few seconds the door was left ajar, a heavy stench of blood wafted out.

“Bang!”

“Bang!”

“Bang!”

The sound of chopping and hacking knives rang out repeatedly, and the voices of the three disappeared.

The red-nosed man reopened the door and stepped out, looking at the pigs huddled together, trembling with fear. A satisfied smile spread across his face as he continued to herd them outside.

A few minutes later, everyone was locked inside a pigsty, coming face to face with others who had also been transformed into pigs in the adjacent pen.

The red-nosed man poured a bucket of pig feed, happily muttering to himself, “Eat well, eat your fill, grow fat. The better you grow, the better the meat will taste.”

“Too bad there are no piglets. Even the old pigs must be picked out. Tough meat will be chopped up for dumplings.”

The pigs pressed and shivered together, the smell of incontinence filling the air.

The red-nosed man flared his nostrils and laughed heartily. Suddenly, as if hearing something, he glanced sharply to the left, slammed the gate shut, cursed under his breath, and walked away.

Xu Huo caught phrases like “Here they come again” and “These people are so annoying,” while hearing the sound of him smashing an empty pigsty in rage and frenzy.

Once the footsteps faded, Xu Huo turned back to assess his surroundings.

The adjacent pen must have held those who were taken away earlier—the numbers matched, plus exactly forty-one here by his count.

Besides them, a few piglets lay quietly in a distant nursery pen, and the sow pen was also occupied; inside were three large sows with swollen bellies.

Unlike the panic-stricken pigs here, the piglets and sows seemed lifeless, utterly indifferent to the newcomers.

There was no doubt—they were human, too.

Xu Huo’s gaze darkened as he withdrew, squeezing into the middle of the pig cluster.

Every person transformed into a pig had a seam running down their abdomen. The stitching on those near him was crude, as if the skin had been roughly nailed together. But on the piglets across the way, the seam had fully fused with the pigskin, as if grown into the flesh itself.

After he cut open the eye slit earlier, the pigskin on his body had felt increasingly tight, as if merging with his skin. He feared that, given time, the pigskin would become inseparable.

Flexing his fingers, Xu Huo summoned the “Omnipresent Strings” to fish out the fragments of the beheading demon axe from his pocket.

---

After successfully retrieving the fragments, he sliced open the pigskin on his wrist, extended his hand, then cut the abdominal seam. With a sharp pull of both hands, he peeled off the pigskin.

The moment he removed the pigskin, a game prompt appeared:

[Player Extra has entered the "Delicious Fresh Meat Supply Factory," automatically participating in this D-rank random dungeon.]

[Background: No trade means no harm. As customer demand increases, underground meat supply factories have sprung up. To ensure sufficient stock, these factories randomly appear across various worlds.]

[The Delicious Fresh Meat Supply Factory is one such place.]

[As a supplier popular with underground restaurants, the factory’s owner, Red-Nose Karl, not only provides customers with delicious fresh red meat promptly but also allows diners to openly serve it at their tables. In the underground dining scene, the nickname Red-Nose is quite well known.]

[It is said Karl was once a top-tier skinner, having skinned nearly a hundred thousand animals in his career. Despite his coarse exterior, he possesses a delicate heart, able to smell from the fur whether an animal is pregnant or sick. His skill is impeccable.]

[But business at the Delicious Fresh Meat Supply Factory has boomed, and Karl is overwhelmed. He has posted job ads hoping to hire a few agile workers.]

[Several young people have already come to apply.]

[Dungeon tasks: ① The more precious the item, the easier it is to lose—steal a treasure from Skinner Karl; ② Piglets flying to freedom—rescue more than three children; ③ Diligent worker—complete tasks assigned by factory owner Karl.]

[Dungeon time: Unlimited]

[Completing any one task allows the player to exit the dungeon.]

The dungeon is located inside the factory. Those applying are either players or have players among them. Although unlimited in time, none of the three tasks are easy...

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“Snort! Snort!” The large pigs beside him desperately nudged him, while those in the adjacent pen tried to leap over, eyes full of longing and pleading.

Xu Huo noticed one pig in particular was especially eager to jump, but he only glanced briefly before looking away. He tossed the peeled pigskin into a corner and lowered his voice.

“I’ll find a way out. Just don’t let the person from before catch me sneaking away. I’ll figure out how to come back and save you.”

The large pigs nodded eagerly. Two of them ran to the corner and lay down directly on the pigskin, covering it with their bodies. The others pressed in, limbs entangled, piling themselves into a small mound.

The pigs next door did the same, clustering tightly, with only one stubbornly howling in anger.

Xu Huo pressed it back down, crouched low, and slipped out of the pigsty.

He approached the nursery pen not far off. Inside, six piglets lay quietly. When they saw him, their eyes brightened slightly, but they neither approached nor called out.

---

He waved at the piglets, but they shrank back in fear. A large pregnant sow from the adjacent pen waddled over, struggling to tap her swollen belly with her front hoof. The seam there was fully fused into the skin.

“Can’t you just cut it open with a knife?”

“Have you grown together with the pigskin?”

“Will forcibly peeling the skin kill you?”

He asked, and the sow nodded once each time.

“How long until the skin grows into the flesh?”

“Three hours? Five hours?”

The sow indicated five hours.

“Do you know any way to save yourselves?”

This time, the sow shook her head.

With no leads on the second task, Xu Huo resolved to try the other two. The skinner Karl was probably still interviewing applicants and wouldn’t return so soon.

He passed through the pigsty and headed toward the direction Karl had left.

The pigsty was likely at the back of the factory, with decent light filtering in. Through the windows, vast woods surrounded the area. Beyond the pigsty lay the main factory—the slaughter, hair removal, and cleaning assembly lines.

But here and in the clean pigsty behind were two extremes. The ground was slick with black muddy water, and the machines were stained with blood. Flies, cockroaches, and rats were everywhere, and the mop in the corner had dried into a crust. This wasn’t just overwhelmed—it looked as if it had never been cleaned.

Xu Huo tried to walk only on dry patches.

Two rooms were nearby. One was where he and the others had fallen in, marked by a conspicuous pipe outlet welded to the center of the wall. The dark pipe led to some unknown place.

He lingered a few seconds before stepping back, glancing at two rotten-headed pigs hanging upside down from iron hooks nearby, then opened the other room, which reeked of blood and filth.