Beauty and the Beasts

Chapter 867: Underground Palace in the Quicksand

After saying that, the lion beastman paused for a while before making his tone heavier. “Even if you’re beastmen from the higher levels, I don’t care either! It’s worth it if I can have a taste of a female before I die!”

Bai Qingqing bit her index finger and guessed that they must have come across fugitives.

Parker immediately understood that these must be the rootless beasts that Winston often mentioned.

Rootless beasts no longer had the awareness of being loyal to their mates, and they held great hatred for females. They treated females as playthings out of revenge.

He looked around at the beastmen around them. All of them had a strong feeling of viciousness and seemed deadly. They had no desire to live and looked like a group of walking corpses.

Beastmen like these were the most terrifying. They weren’t afraid of death and thus had nothing to fear. No one knew what they’d do.

However, this lion beastman seemed wary of those who came from higher levels. This was great.

Parker gulped, then immediately changed his expression, laughing as he said, “How is that possible... Females... Females are so fragile. They’d have created a big fuss if we were to bring them with us. How could it be so quiet?”

The lion beastman felt that it made sense. The beastmen here were all rootless beasts who had been abandoned by their females. The females they brought with them were naturally those they had captured, and they couldn’t stay still. He might have heard wrongly.

He wore a look of pity, his beard-covered face filled with fatigue and looking weatherworn.

“I have long been sick of living. I’ve only been mining day and night and unknowingly became a four-striped beastman.” He smiled in self-mockery, “The ores that I’ve saved up will let me go out very soon, but what meaning is there to go out? I only want to catch an extremely beautiful female and have her die alongside me!”

Parker hadn’t experienced what rootless beasts felt before and wasn’t able to continue with the conversation. Because the lion beastman’s last line made him raise his guard against him.

Qingqing mustn’t be discovered by him!

Looking at how the surrounding beastmen were all carrying rocks, Parker thought, Could it be that everyone here was locked up to mine? What ores were they mining? Did the Flame City know about iron-smelting too?

The lion beastman was still assessing Parker. He kept having the feeling that this guy was a little strange.

“I really admire you. It’s as if nothing has happened for you.”

The lion beastman’s words had a hint of probing in them, and Parker’s heart tightened. He pretended to act irritated.

He removed the rope around his waist, grabbed Curtis, who was carrying the luggage (including Bai Qingqing), then said impatiently, “This is a rootless beast I met on my way here. He wants to get into Flame City, so I brought him here to take a shortcut. Make way! Don’t stand in our way!”

Curtis’s brows raised and threw a sideward glance at his hand grabbing onto his arm.

Parker’s arm turned numb. He felt really gross but didn’t let go. He pulled Curtis and headed outside like a boss leading his subordinate.

“When did snake beastmen come to Flame City too?”

The lion beastman didn’t have any doubt about Curtis’s identity. His disposition was too cold, and he looked even more like a rootless beast than they were.

“Shouldn’t snake beastmen be used to not having mates? Hahaha...”

As he said this, he broke out laughing loudly. The surrounding beastmen also laughed.

Curtis threw a cold gaze toward the lion beastman. For some reason, the laughing lion beastman suddenly felt that the hair on his back was standing up. His laughter disappeared as if the mute button had been pressed.

As they spoke, the quicksand waterfall had come to a stop, and the ground returned to its peace. There was only a dune where the waterfall’s position.

The atmosphere was dead silent, and only the sound of Parker’s and Curtis’s footsteps could be heard.

At the instant Parker and Curtis passed by the lion beastman, the latter seemed to smell something and quickly whiffed with his nose.