Chapter 20 Sample Collection
"Can you show me the meat ingredients you have here?" Zhou Ming asked.
"Meat ingredients? Why do you want to see those?" The fat boss frowned, puzzled.
In Senma Town, there were no departments regulating food safety. The wilderness was an lawless zone, and the people wandering there only had two demands for food.
First, it shouldn't make them sick!
Second, it should fill their stomachs!
As long as these two points were met, no one had the right to question what they used to cook, so the fat man couldn't understand why this Hidden Ones was so particularly concerned about ingredients.
After a few seconds, the fat boss suddenly remembered the Hidden Ones' purpose for coming to Senma Town, and immediately guessed Zhou Ming's objective. He shook his head and sneered several times.
"Hmph! You think I sold all those missing people as meat? You're giving me too much credit. Come on, come on!"
The fat boss turned with difficulty in the narrow kitchen aisle, walked out the back door, and turned into a dark room. Zhou Ming followed closely behind him.
The moment he entered, the already extremely hot temperature rose for the second time, and he also heard the hum of electrical appliances working.
The other party lit a candle, and the dim light illuminated the surroundings. Many large freezers were placed here; the soft humming sound just now came from these. Frankly, Zhou Ming was quite surprised to see such large electrical appliances here.
"There are even freezers."
Zhou Ming took out a flashlight from his pocket and walked around a freezer, discovering that it was powered by a device similar to a large power source.
"Summer is coming, and meat spoils quickly, so it must be kept in freezers. Everything you want to see is inside," the fat boss said.
Zhou Ming glanced at him and asked indifferently, "These devices must be expensive, right?"
"Ha! Of course they are! You don't know how many of these batteries are used up in a day, but the cost isn't my problem. The more I spend, the more I sell for. No one from outside is unwilling to pay, after all, Senma Town is the only rest stop around here."
"Also, chilled beer has been selling like hotcakes recently. Just chilling the beer a bit can double its price. Making money couldn't be easier! Damn it, if the transport truck could come twice a day, that would be great. If it came twice a day, I could even get rid of several freezers and save a lot of money," the fat boss grumbled.
Zhou Ming opened the nearest freezer and looked inside. Dark ribs and large pork legs covered in white frost lay quietly within. The color didn't look very fresh.
However, Zhou Ming wasn't a food inspector; that wasn't his concern.
He walked to the other freezers and inspected them one by one. The other freezers contained lamb and other meats, but these meats, apart from their poor color, looked normal. None of them bore any resemblance to human body parts.
While Zhou Ming was inspecting, the fat boss leaned closely beside him. Every time he opened a freezer, the other party would lean in to enjoy the escaping cold air, as if wanting it to make its final contribution.
He watched Zhou Ming slowly inspect freezer after freezer and couldn't help but say, "Brother, we are professionals, after all. If it really were human meat, how could we not tell!"
"Is there no minced meat?" Zhou Ming suddenly asked.
The fat boss paused, then quickly walked to a freezer and tapped it: "Used for making buns for breakfast, it's minced pork neck meat."
Zhou Ming walked closer, opened the lid, and saw barrels of processed meat paste. At this point, it was truly impossible to tell what was what. Even if there were fragments of cockroach corpses inside, he wouldn't be able to tell.
If there were indeed some organs of missing persons inside, he also wouldn't be able to tell.
The fat boss watched Zhou Ming staring blankly at the meat paste barrels, feeling a bit pained by the constantly escaping cold air. He stammered an explanation beside him:
"We don't have such processing tools here. All these meat pastes are processed in the city and then sent over by transport truck. If there's truly a person or half a person inside, it's from the city, absolutely not from the town!"
Zhou Ming was stunned, a look of surprise on his face.
"You mean you can't make this kind of meat paste?"
"We can make it, but hand processing can't compare to machines. Chopping by hand would be very tiring, and this stuff is very cheap, so buying it directly is more cost-effective!" the fat boss said.
"Do local people buy this kind of meat paste?"
"No, they don't! The one sold to locals is a different barrel. Everyone here is a neighbor, and they know what I do. It's not worth getting into a gunfight over such a trivial matter! After all, neighborly business is long-term business; how can it be compared to fleecing outsiders!" The fat boss waved his chubby hands, a hint of pride in his expression.
Zhou Ming lowered his head, the investigation once again reaching a dead end.
If all the restaurants here were as this fat man said, buying meat paste rather than making it, then the possibility of the missing people becoming food was greatly reduced. After all, if it wasn't machine-processed, bones would be very difficult to deal with and hard to hide.
"I say, brother, are you done yet?"
The fat man was sweating profusely, growing impatient from the high temperature.
"Give me a spoon. I need to collect some samples," Zhou Ming said.
"Oh."
The boss brought a spoon and handed it to Zhou Ming, then stood nervously beside him, several times wanting to speak but hesitating.
Finally, he mustered his courage and asked, "You say, will people like me, who can see those people, eventually go crazy?"
His voice was very soft. Zhou Ming turned to look at him, seeing a look of unease on the fat boss's sweat-drenched face in the dim candlelight. His previous composure had suddenly vanished.
He stared at Zhou Ming with an anxious expression, hoping to get the answer he wanted from the other party.
Fear and unease spread like an infectious disease, and the passage of time would multiply the risk of this disease spreading. This was the terrifying aspect of the oddity, and also the inherent weakness of the human heart that was destined to be unavoidable.
Zhou Ming suddenly had a more realistic understanding of the danger of the oddity. The other person's expression and that of the woman he had seen in the air-raid shelter had subtle similarities.
"Don't worry, at your level, you're only being affected by the oddity. Nothing will happen. As long as the oddity is resolved, you'll return to normal," Zhou Ming comforted him, though in truth, this was not entirely accurate. He had simply chosen the most optimistic of all possible outcomes.
Zhou Ming collected some meat paste from various depths in the meat barrels, classifying them into clear plastic bags.
The fat man beside him was still uneasy. He leaned close to Zhou Ming's ear and whispered, "How many cooks did you see outside just now?"
Zhou Ming instantly recalled the flustered cook he had seen in the back kitchen earlier, and immediately understood everything.
"You hired a missing person?"
"No... no! I didn't know he was missing at the time! He skipped a few days of work and then came back, and I thought there was nothing wrong. But that very day, I found that only some people in the shop could see him." The fat man wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and said, "Now everyone in the back kitchen is panicking... Do you think if I fire him, I'll be haunted?"
Zhou Ming glanced at him and truthfully said, "I don't know either. You can only decide for yourself."