Riding the Tricycle Li Ban had rented entirely on credit, they went back, picked up Ed, and resumed their usual work.
Taking out the trash.
Ed wanted to pedal, but Zhu Yao made him rest in the cart.
"Don't put too much strain on your leg for the next couple of days. Be careful not to tear your stitches."
She used the same excuse to turn down Li Ban, earnestly taking on the manual labor herself.
Thanks to the rented Tricycle, they managed to haul four bags of waste this time.
The camp sat a long way from the mud pit where they dumped their waste. Even riding the Tricycle, the trip took nearly an hour.
"Why dump the pieces so far away?" Li Ban asked. Last time, he hadn't spared any attention for the waste disposal.
The entire Recycling Station had been incredibly novel to him.
It wasn't that he was idle; he just wanted to understand everything about the Recycling Station as quickly as possible.
Any single detail could become his ticket out of this place.
"This is actually considered close," Zhu Yao said, keeping her head down as she pedaled, careful not to waste any extra energy. "There are two other camps near this great mud pit. They're even farther away—one of them is a seven- or eight-hour walk. But they still throw all their body parts into this pit."
"The pieces attract monsters!"
Ed suddenly threw his hands up, a flicker of genuine fear crossing his face.
"They attract bugs, too! I don't like bugs."
"Nobody likes bugs," Zhu Yao agreed, unbothered by Ed's interruption. "If a camp lets too many severed pieces pile up, the bugs will come. A few scattered bugs are just annoying, but a swarm of them is serious trouble."
Sitting on the side of the Tricycle, Li Ban turned his head to catch a partial profile of Zhu Yao's face.
She was frowning too.
"One camp failed to clear out their remains in time and drew a swarm. They were forced to relocate."
Li Ban glanced back at the burlap sacks on the cart.
Judging by their bulk, they could hold two adult men.
"Are all these pieces from the people in our camp?"
"Some of it is from camp members who suffered fatal head trauma," she said. "The rest is from dismembered monsters. These should be from the creatures that attacked the camp yesterday."
Just like the humans in the Recycling Station, the monsters here only lost their mobility if their heads were completely pulverized. To keep the corpses from becoming rations for the Fallen Ones and other beasts, the camp had to chop up the captured monsters' remains and dump them into the mud pit.
The thick sludge was enough to conceal the pieces and stop monsters from tracking down a meal.
"People have been dumping pieces into this mud for years. Aren't you worried the pit will fill up?" Li Ban asked casually.
Zhu Yao paused, then shook her head. "It won't fill up. People have tied ropes around themselves and gone down into the sludge to check. Some made it back up in time. Others vanished completely, along with the end of the rope."
Ed threw his hands up again. "The great mud pit—it is a monster too."
Looking at Li Ban, he formed a small circle with his hands, then slowly widened it.
"A little mud pit—will turn into a big mud pit."
Li Ban stroked his chin. "Things vanish when they sink deep enough, and the pit expands on its own. Calling the mud pit a monster actually makes a lot of sense."
"If all the monsters were as docile as the mud pit, we wouldn't call them monsters," Zhu Yao pointed out.
Li Ban smiled. "Some things look docile on the surface, but that might not actually be the case."
As they spoke, they arrived at the great mud pit Li Ban had originally fallen into.
The white stones still stood in their original spots along the edge, telling people where the pit's boundary lay.
Zhu Yao and Ed lifted one of the burlap sacks together.
Li Ban, meanwhile, hoisted two sacks onto his shoulders by himself.
Zhu Yao glanced back. "You're carrying a heavy load, so be careful near the edge. There have been times when someone moved the stones. People thought they were just approaching the marker, only to find themselves already in the rapid-sinking zone."
Li Ban nodded, completely unbothered. "I'll walk behind you two."
They untied the hemp ropes sealing the sacks and carefully dumped the pieces inside into the pit.
Once the first two bags were emptied, a small hill of pieces piled up along the edge of the mud.
Li Ban could see several eyeballs in the heap, along with strange, rabbit-ear-like organs that were still moving.
A few limb extremities were still spasming as well.
However, the vast majority of the pieces had already quieted down, completely still.
"Do you think they still have consciousness?" Li Ban asked Zhu Yao.
"No," Zhu Yao replied, her voice icy. "Don't overthink it."
If you thought about it too much, you would become so terrified you'd lose even the courage to walk.
The sludge was sinking. Even the pieces dumped near the pit's edge quickly sank down.
It sank faster the closer it got to the center, forming a small slope along the edges. The pieces that landed on the periphery rapidly slid down that incline and vanished into the sludge.
Seeing that barely a few pieces remained on the surface, Li Ban turned back to grab the final sack.
Watching Li Ban reach the Tricycle over ten meters away, Ed suddenly looked up—even with his new leg, he still wasn't as tall as Zhu Yao—and whispered to her, "This man is pretty good. He's got strength!"
Zhu Yao gave a barely perceptible shake of her head. "I don't think about things like that."
"Why not?" Ed muttered. "The women and the men all think about it."
Zhu Yao said nothing.
Ed wanted to say more, but he quickly slapped a hand over his mouth when he saw Li Ban walking back with the final sack.
He looked as if he was afraid people wouldn't know they had been whispering.
"Talking bad about me?" Li Ban asked with a smile. He casually opened the sack in his hand and dumped the brimful load of pieces into the pit.
At the same time, he shot Zhu Yao a glance.
Zhu Yao stiffened for a second, then said softly, "Hurry up. We still need to do our gathering task."
Once the last bag was empty, they visually confirmed that the vast majority of the pieces had sunk completely into the sludge, as required. Only then did the three of them turn back.
Zhu Yao took the pedals again for the return trip, steering onto a different narrow path carved out by cart wheels and feet.
The path was barely two meters wide, bordered by small, bluish-black grass.
The edges of the grass were serrated, and those jagged parts were a shade darker.
They looked like bloodstains left behind after cutting up prey.
As she pedaled, Zhu Yao was extremely careful to keep the Tricycle driving down the middle of the path, not crushing the small grass on either side.
The Tricycle's tires were also made of rubber, scarred with many visible patches.
Just when everything seemed perfectly calm, a row of spikes suddenly shot up from the ground less than a meter ahead of them.
Zhu Yao instantly grabbed the brakes.
At this distance, without any preparation, it was very difficult to brake in time.
Yet, at the exact same moment she engaged the handbrake, Zhu Yao slammed both feet heavily into the ground.
She pressed down so hard that the tips of her shoes gouged right into the soil.
Simultaneously, Li Ban—who had remained fully on guard—vaulted off the Tricycle, seizing the cart's tailgate from behind with a single hand.
"Thwip!"
"Thwip!"
Two sharp arrows tore through the air, aimed squarely at Zhu Yao and Li Ban's heads.
Even though Zhu Yao had no spiritual rhinoceros left to draw upon, her reflexes were extremely agile. In a split second, she shifted her entire body to the opposite side of the Tricycle, then let go and rolled onto the ground.
Li Ban, on the other hand, stepped directly into the arrow's path. He reached up, snatched the short arrow, and hurled it right back the way it had come.
Back when he was still a 3rd Tier Spirit Cultivator, he could catch arrows single-handedly.
Now, it was hardly worth mentioning!