Plumped Meat Scandal
You should read this chapter over at Travis Translations – It’s free and the ad revenue is much better for me!
In any case, Du Yixin can only imagine that the supervisor is referring to Ying Sheng by ‘unprocessed food.’ Through the narrow slits in his mascot costume Du Yixin can already see veins popping on Ying Sheng’s forehead and his hand reaching towards his backpack. Trying to prevent the supervisor from being turned into minced pork, he stops him discreetly, not exactly difficult with the large unwieldy suit, and whispers, “wait, not now. After we have found the way to pass.”
Ying Sheng gives him a glance and slowly puts his hand back down.
The supervisor is still blabbering, completely ignorant of his potential impending death, “hurry it up! And the female piggy there, follow me!”
“Eh?” Li Qiqi seems to have been blanking out.
“How many times do I have to say it?!” The supervisor seems to have lost his patience entirely. Seeing her standing still, he just moves to grab instead, “you young’uns nowadays won’t even budge an inch when told to. The boss sure is too kind to even offer internship to you bunch,” he continues like this as he forcibly takes the girl through the corridor at the back. He also throws some words at Du Yixin, “I’ll be back soon enough. Get ready.”
Du Yixin picks up the rope, as Ying Sheng looks at him with eyes narrowed, neither cooperating nor refusing.
Du Yixin, though, walks behind and approaches the door to the changing room. It wouldn’t open.
It looks like it’s a single choice. It’s too late to get changed now.
“Make an appearance?”
“Tch,” he says, but obediently putting his hands to his back and standing up. Du Yixin wraps the rope around him a few times and make a loose knot. Unfortunately, it really is hard doing such precise work with oversized fingers on the mascot costume. Soon enough, Piggy the Supervisor is back, and sees how he’s still messing with the rope.
He then goes forth and pushes Du Yixin aside to do it himself – and Ying Sheng is now a very qualified zongzi.
“That’s how you tie him tight! What were you even doing, trying to let the food run away?”
Feeling the killing intent oozing from inside the zongzi, Du Yixin quickly says, “understood!”
“Now come!”
Although Ying Sheng is zongzified, at least he can still walk with his two feet; Du Yixin thinks he definitely doesn’t have the strength to carry concentrated masses of muscle.
After entering the door at the back, they pass by a corridor two metres by two in cross-sectional area. Du Yixin doesn’t see the girl and asks, “has the intern from before gone ahead?”
“Some new ingredient arrived just now so I told her to go get it.”
Meanwhile, Li Qiqi is following behind another staff leading her on, nervous. It seems all staff here are pigs and, for them, humans are the food instead. New ingredient? She shudders to think what it might be.
The temperature is dropping around her as well, as she passes by the walk-in refrigeration room, where other staff happen to be moving ‘cargo’ around. She notices a familiar figure when peeking around, and the temperature complete drains from her limbs.
Several bulky staff are inside the Arrivals area inside the refrigerator. They turn around at the noise behind them to see another staff leading Li Qiqi their way. Li Qiqi can only feel terror at so many anthropomorphised pigs staring at her.
“I’ve brought the intern. Is the cargo ready?”
They nod and make way for them, showing the ‘cargo,’ and Li Qiqi swallows once, but doesn’t dare say ‘mom.’
Once into an attraction, no leaving until passing or failing; her mother, escaping halfway through, has been caught and sent back here as food.
It seems she has struggled hard, as her well-maintained hair is now scattered all over, and her clothes are all messed up. Besides the ropes, she also has a towel stuffed into her mouth. She’s whimpering, but unable to speak.
“Intern, this is yours for the day.”
Li Qiqi snaps back to reality hearing that.
“Use it to produce a tasty meal for our boss. If he’s happy about it, he’ll let you go.”
Hearing that, her mother struggles even more.
On the other side, Du Yixin, with Ying Sheng led by a rope, has reached the slaughter grounds in the factory.
The walls and doors are certainly well-insulated like the cruise ship before. In the corridor, they could at most hear the humming from the machinery and other staff walking around. Through the door, and it’s full of screams and gore and blood. It’s like descending from human realm to hell.
Even through the costume he still feels choked by the smell of faeces, blood and urine. Even if Du Yixin has already went through the equally bloody teacher’s room in the last game, he still can’t help but feel his stomach churn.
And that is all in spite of the slaughter ground being open-air, and segregated into blocks with wide avenues between them, and with only a percentage of these blocks actually processing ‘meat,’ indicated by an orange light turning on at the corners of the block.
Many ‘people’ —— faceless NPCs are hanging off the support cranes, all naked, tied by their hands and feet with their stomach facing down. There is a hose stuffed straight into their mouths which is pumping water continuously inside. This does explain why the NPC they saw when they were coming in had such a malformed stomach.
The supervisor tells him what’s happening, “the recent batch of cargo have been appalling, thin and barely worth any meat. The customers have all been lodging complaints. So our boss had this genius idea he called ‘plumping’! It would make each and every one of them look juicy and fat.
It seems the grounds is separated into different sections as well for different stages of the process. As they head deeper inside, pass the first step of filling their stomachs, the ‘people’ become more and more deformed. First, their limbs and face swell, and their hair starts falling away. It is barely human anymore. Water is still being pumped at this stage, flowing out those humanoid forms’ mouths, nostrils, ears and eye sockets.
The screams area already rather far behind them at this point; they could only scream before the hose is inserted into their mouths, which is then sealed up.
Even if he knows these people are NPC, Du Yixin can’t bring himself to look anymore. But the supervisor seemed really proud of the process, as he is introducing these areas with way too much detail as they pass by. This product certainly looks… That one has been plumped for… Women generally have smoother skin and are thus more welcomed by customers… etc.
Du Yixin could only try to blank out as much as he could, until they’ve finally reached the end of the road and turned back. It is oddly… refreshing (?) to hear the screams up close again, kind of like snapping back to reality.
The supervisor asks, “have you understood the entire process now?”
“Yes, sir,” sorry, he didn’t listen to a damned thing.
“Good. Make sure you follow this procedure well and produce a good product. It will be sampled by our boss, and if he’s satisfied as well, then your internship will be over successfully.”
It seems the condition for passing is as instructed——Make a product. But, how does he have to make it to make the ‘boss’ satisfied?
Meanwhile, the supervisor has waved a worker over, saying to help the intern and also to watch over him, then leaves. Compared to the supervisor with the fiery temper, this worker is just cold as he takes Du Yixin to an empty block and tells him to set up the crane to hang the food up there.
Du Yixin does not move.
“I’m busy, so please be quick.”
While the worker is urging Du Yixin on, Li Qiqi has also been brought to the slaughter grounds, and had to ‘admire’ the entire production flow like Du Yixin did. She barely held herself back from puking right right. In the end, the staff that brought her told her to start doing it herself.
Li Qiqi couldn’t move.
“I’m busy, so please be quick.”
One would wonder if perhaps these staff are mass-produced by the instance, as they hurry people along with seemingly the exact same words.
The girl hesitantly crouches down and takes the towel from the woman’s mouth, and whispers, “mom…”
The desperate woman widens her eyes in glee hearing the familiar voice, “save me! Quickly!”
“I, I don’t know how…”
“Don’t know how?! You dumb girl,” she seems to be on the verge of breaking down, “quickly think of something! Or I might die!”
The girl glances over at the worker, who is still looking this way coldly, seemingly ignorant of the ‘secret talk’ that has been going on between the two. She tries to calm down as she puts her hand on the ropes, trying to untie it; but, through the thick, clumsy mascot hands, she can’t get it open.
“Agh, you clumsy git, damn you,” frustrated, her mother continues to scold her, “if it were your younger brother, he’d have untied it soon enough!”
Li Qiqi stops “…”
“What’s wrong? Quickly!” She doesn’t seem to notice her daughter’s state of mind, as she continues hurrying her.
“Even if I untied you, you still couldn’t get out, and I’d be busted too. What should we do?”
“You…” She pauses, as she has clearly not thought that far ahead of her desperately seeked freedom. She just says, “untie me first.”
“… But, if I’m busted too, I’d also die.”
She fall silent. Suddenly, the weak-minded, always obedient daughter seems to have changed, somehow. But she just says after a little bit, “think about your younger brother. He’s still just a boy. If mom can’t get out, he’d be all alone. That’d be tragic.”
“Then what about me?”
“What?”
“What if I died?”
“Uh…” She says, finally a little bit hesitant, “you’re his older sister, so you should help him some more. Even if you got out, you can’t bring him up by yourself, can you?”
“…”
“Qiqi?”
The girl stands up and asks the worker, “I can’t lift it up alone. Can you help me?”
The woman seems to blank out for a whole second before blowing up, “you damned girl! What the hell are you saying?!”
The worker then walks over, lifting her up on the other side as Li Qiqi takes one side.
“Let me go!” The woman squirms and tries to resist, “she’s also human! She’s human too!” She glares daggers at her daughter, but she cannot see how her daughter is looking through the smiling piggy mascot head.
Du Yixin doesn’t have the mind to care about another scream coming from another side of the grounds. To make time for Ying Sheng to get his rope undone, he’s been doing his best to keep up a chatter with the worker, but he’s at his limits.
“Just move!” The worker is about to come and do it himself, extending his chubby hands towards Ying Sheng. Du Yixin quickly moves in to intercept, almost forgetting he had a mascot costume on himself. And, he does prevent the worker from getting his hands on Ying Sheng, but the worker’s hand has also dislodged his mascot head halfway.
“You——!”
Shit. He quickly grabs his head and tries to move it back down, but the worker is trying to lift it up with all his strength instead. While they’re at a standoff right now, but Du Yixin only has the burst and not the stamina. The head is gradually coming loose.
Suddenly, the worker seems to go limp and falls down.
Ying Sheng is standing behind the worker, as he pulls his butchering knife back out.
How many weapons does the guy even carry in his backpack?!
“That damned fat pig sure knew how to tie people up,” Ying Sheng is moving his body about. There’s clear bruise marks on his well-defined arm muscles.
Du Yixin quickly looks around the adjacent blocks, and sees that the other workers are all so absorbed in their work somehow that they have completely failed to notice what is going on here. Then, he says, “the condition for passing is making a product. What do we do now?”
“The ingredients are everywhere, isn’t it?”
“Ah?”
“Pork,” Ying Sheng says, his lips perking up.
TL’s notes: Eugh. But I guess it does make sense what an imaginary ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ might look like here when it’s perhaps equally horrifying what real ‘Pig Slaughterhouses’ look like in real life.
Oriental Rabbit 