Chapter 100 - 97: Ke Taichiro

Chapter 100: Chapter 97: Ke Taichiro

Boss Tang looked slightly green around the gills. He explained weakly, "This is Ke Taichiro. It belongs to Gao Ming, the guy you saw at the auction last time. It’s his precious baby, and he entrusted it to me."

Huai Yu was speechless.

She didn’t quite understand the current trends of city folks. Were creatures like Ke Taichiro actually popular in the Imperial Capital?

How was it introduced last time?

Other dung beetles used their hind legs to roll dung balls and walked backward. This Ke Taichiro, however, used its front claws—its mutation seemed focused on its forelimbs.

Huai Yu sucked in a sharp breath.

She instinctively took two steps back. Remembering the round ball Boss Tang had just picked up with his tongs, she shuffled another two paces away to give the spot a wide berth.

Outside the door, the roughly forty-centimeter-tall Ke Taichiro was covered in a fluorescent blowfly green. Truth be told, Huai Yu didn’t know what color a normal dung beetle was supposed to be. After all, nobody went out of their way to observe such things.

But regardless, Ke Taichiro’s blowfly-green exterior made anyone extremely reluctant to go anywhere near it.

Looking at Boss Tang, fully decked out in a raincoat and rubber gloves, she suddenly understood.

It was just that...

"Shouldn’t you hide Ke Taichiro a bit better? You sell food here. If the customers find out..."

Huai Yu believed Boss Tang would keep things impeccably clean, but some things...

Boss Tang’s expression grew resentful. "It’s fine... he’s not rolling dung balls. You don’t have to worry. I slipped some good stuff to the people managing the public restrooms around here. They’ll keep a close watch and won’t let Ke Taichiro inside."

"Then what about this..." Huai Yu looked at Ke Taichiro, specifically at the black, round ball it was hugging.

Boss Tang said speechlessly, "I don’t even know what exactly it is. It’s just rotten vegetable leaves, cabbage stalks, tree leaves, and whatever else it gathers from the streets itself.

"Gao Ming told me that creatures like dung beetles love rolling their dung balls back into their burrows to hide them and eat them slowly."

By this point, he genuinely looked like he was on the verge of a breakdown.

Every day, between trying to hide Ke Taichiro and doing his best to keep it clean, he had truly aged several years. He had even lost several pounds of the precious fat he had painstakingly accumulated during the post-apocalyptic era!

When Gao Ming finally returned, if he didn’t present Boss Tang with a silk banner praising his "towering righteousness," there was no way he was giving Ke Taichiro back—actually, never mind. Forget the banner, he just wanted the bug taken away as soon as possible!

That said, Ke Taichiro seemed to have developed some intelligence after its mutation.

Seeing Huai Yu standing at the door, it actually stood upright while clutching its ping-pong-ball-sized black sphere. From behind its blowfly-green and ink-blue-tinted carapace, its yellow membranous wings fluttered open a couple of times, as if welcoming her.

It was actually quite gentlemanly.

Huai Yu instinctively smiled and nodded back. A moment later, when she realized what she had just done, she went completely numb.

In any case, after Ke Taichiro gave its polite and gentlemanly greeting, Boss Tang shoved and hustled it into a small side room to hide it away.

Once everything was properly settled, he finally let out a long sigh of relief. He stripped off his raincoat, gloves, and boots, scrubbed his hands meticulously, and sat back down on his stool.

Huai Yu couldn’t bear to see him like this. "If it’s not rolling dung balls, it actually shouldn’t be that dirty, right?"

"Right," Boss Tang said, sitting there. His voice sounded like a weak, emotionless machine as he countered sharply, "Eating shit can also fill your stomach, but would a person actually eat it?"

That was exactly the logic!

Huai Yu tried and tried to hold it in, but eventually, she couldn’t help bursting into laughter.

Only then did Boss Tang regain his senses. He hurriedly weighed the entire woven basket of bean sprouts and calculated, "It looks like a lot of bean sprouts, but after deducting the water weight, I’ll count it as twenty-eight catties."

A Mutant Value of 9 could still fetch a good price these days, though it wasn’t quite as exaggerated as it had been right after the rain.

Looking at the 800-plus points she had earned, Huai Yu finally felt her savings grow a little richer.

After a moment of thought, she inquired, "If the Defense Army goes on a mission to the Wilderness, how long does it usually take for them to return?"

Boss Tang considered this. "It’s hard to say. It mostly depends on how smoothly the journey goes. If it’s fast, they might be back in just over a week. If it’s slow, it could take up to three months."

He remembered Huai Yu mentioning that her two older brothers were in the Wilderness. Though he wasn’t sure if they were in the Guard Army, the Defense Army, or were Explorers, he could only sigh and comfort her, "Don’t overthink it. There’s a complete set of standard procedures for going to the Wilderness now. It’s not easy for things to go wrong."

Huai Yu nodded, not saying anything more.

At this moment, Boss Tang suddenly remembered something else. He smiled at Huai Yu, looking a hundred times more amiable than usual. "Say... I recall you’ve been farming lately, right? Do you find it interesting?"

Remembering the persona she had established for herself, Huai Yu nodded. "It’s pretty interesting. Why do you ask?"