Wei Dong, his eyes red and swollen, rushed over in overjoyed excitement and scratched Ke Xun's head: "You're okay?! Holy crap, you're okay?! That's great! That's great! That's great! You're okay, hahaha, you're okay!"
"Calm down, stay calm, easy." Ke Xun broke free from his grip and patted him on the shoulder. "I'm fine, take your heart back inside, look at you crying like that."
"Holy crap, who am I doing this for!" Wei Dong wiped away the tears that were welling up again and walked to the side, afraid that Ke Xun would make fun of him again.
Ke Xun looked at Mu Yiran, who had been watching him, and smiled.
Mu Yiran looked away, paused, and then looked back: "Where did they take you?"
Ke Xun's smile disappeared, and he hesitated before saying, "Maybe... the gay hell?"
Perhaps because the day's experiences were too turbulent and exciting, and he hadn't slept well last night, Ke Xun sat down and applied a cold compress to the wounds he had sustained in the fight with Mo Mou, and unknowingly fell asleep.
He was woken up by a bottle of cola being smashed against his head. When he opened his eyes, the giant bulls were distributing dinner from room to room.
Given that Yuan Yuan had been chosen yesterday, none of the others felt like eating, afraid of accidentally gaining weight and becoming a plate of chubby human flesh next to the giant bulls' hotpot.
Ke Xun rubbed his still-aching nose, sat up, and leaned against the wall. He saw Wei Dong looking at him with a complicated expression.
"I heard you were taken to be bred?" Wei Dong asked in a strange tone.
Ke Xun guessed that Dong Dong had already been questioned by everyone, and couldn't help but look over at him. He saw him sitting there looking tired, carefully putting chocolate into his mouth.
Wei Dong leaned closer and whispered, "I saw his legs were weak when he walked, he's probably been drained dry."
Ke Xun chuckled, "Heh, men are all big pigs who can't control their lower bodies."
Wei Dong asked him, "What about you? You haven't lost your composure, have you?"
Ke Xun kicked him, "You know you're insulting an upright comrade."
Wei Dong retorted, "You don't have 'upright' in your dictionary, remember?"
Ke Xun looked around, sensing something was off, and asked Wei Dong, "Why does it seem like some of the people in this cubicle have changed?"
"You bet," Wei Dong said, "Didn't you notice there's a familiar face?"
Ke Xun's gaze fell on the people in the painting who were scrambling for food, and he was surprised to see Mo Mou's face.
"What's going on?"
"They changed the guys," Wei Dong said. "Giant Bull moved the previous ones to another room, and these new ones were brought in. They all look even stronger than the previous ones, but what's amazing is that they all behave themselves like monsters when they see Boss Mu here. They didn't dare to rush up and grab the food when it was being distributed. They were so obsequious that Boss Mu picked first before they dared to come up and eat. Even Mo Mou was like that. Isn't this what they call the intimidation of a leader?"
Ke Xun nodded: "Yeah, the alpha chicken in a flock has the right to choose food and mate first."
"..." Wei Dong looked at Mu Yiran sitting opposite him with a complicated expression. "If I were a chicken, I would be so envious of him. By the way, there's something else... Giant Bull moved Bi Jing to another room. I don't know why."
"Maybe it's because he's too thin." It was Zhu Haowen, who had been sitting to the side, who spoke, fiddling with a few macadamia nuts in his hand.
"How so?" Wei Dong asked hurriedly.
"Birds of a feather flock together," Zhu Haowen pointed to the people in the room. "We are all young and strong. If you look closely, these people are all in good shape and have good physiques, which fits the 'good breed' that middle-aged man was talking about."
"So this is divided into excellent, good, average, inferior, and poor grades?" Wei Dong realized, then exclaimed in surprise, "Holy crap, does that mean we're going to start by cutting things up in this room?"
Ke Xun looked at him with the look of someone looking at an idiot: "If you raise chickens and cattle, do you eat the strong and young chickens and cattle first, or do you eat the old and infertile chickens and cattle first?"
Wei Dong scratched his head: "But what did Yuan Yuan say yesterday?"
Ke Xun continued to look at him with the look of someone looking at an idiot: "When you have hot pot, do you eat old beef or young fat beef?" Although it was a bit disrespectful to Yuan Yuan to say it like that, it was obviously the truth.
Wei Dong's eyes lit up: "So, it seems we won't be chosen again?"
Ke Xun shook his head: "The rule in the painting is that someone will die almost every day. And judging from the nature of this painting, there probably won't be a chance for us to gather and vote for someone to die. So, regardless of whether we're fat oxen or not, we'll definitely be controlled to the point where at least one person dies every night. You know, there are plenty of strong men on this farm, more or less of us won't make a difference. Someone will definitely die tonight."
Wei Dong slumped down and sighed: "We look relaxed during the day in this painting, but it's probably the most powerless one we've ever experienced. Faced with the absolute difference in size and strength of the giant oxen, we have absolutely no ability to resist, not even the possibility of escaping. It's purely... just waiting to die, completely powerless."
"We need to find the signature as soon as possible," Ke Xun said.
"How can we look for it here? We've already searched the lawn outside. Where else can we go besides these two places?" Wei Dong said dejectedly.
Ke Xun stood up, walked to Mu Yiran sitting opposite him, squatted down, and tilted his head to look at him: "My god, do you have any clues about the signature? The big shots are probably coming to pick people again tonight."
Mu Yiran's gaze fell on the ground in front of him: "To find the signature, we first need to decipher the artist's intention, and then analyze the content and structure of the painting."
"I usually consider these surrealist painters to be half mad and half genius," Ke Xun said. "First of all, I'm not mad, and secondly, I'm certainly not a genius, so I think the psychology and intentions of these kinds of people are the hardest to understand."
"Actually, this one is relatively easy to understand," Qin Ci joined in from the side. "Since the painting is titled 'Animal World,' then it's clear that in the worldview designed by the artist, animals are the masters of this planet, and humans have replaced the roles and ranks of animals in reality, resulting in a complete reversal of status here."
"What I'm curious about is, since humans are depicted as lowly animals in this painting, what is the artist himself?" Ke Xun said. "Does he see himself as a lowly human, or as a superior animal? If the former, then humans in the painting have no dignity, not even worthy of having names. What right does he have to leave his signature in the painting? If the latter, then this person is a bit despicable. Are all other humans lowly, and only he is superior? Okay, he's the artist, so let's not argue with him about that. Then what kind of animal is he? A panda, the aristocrat among animals? Or the Lion King?" Wei Dong nodded
: "That's a question." "For some animal rights activists or enthusiasts," Mu Yiran said, "in their minds, humans are not even as good as animals." "Humans are selfish, dark, cruel, and have countless flaws. They are indeed inferior to animals," Zhu Haowen, who had joined the conversation at some point,
chimed in . "Comrade Xiao Zhu, Haowen," Ke Xun made a gesture of putting his hands together, "the topic of human nature is too vast. If we continue to discuss it here, seven days will pass and we may not even finish the first chapter. The priority now is to get signatures. Let's brainstorm and Yi Ran speak first."
Mu Yiran seemed too lazy to correct Ke Xun's form of address anymore, still ignoring him, and said while pondering, "Based on past experience, signatures won't appear in places we can't reach. Wherever our abilities allow, that's where signatures might appear. So, conversely, if there's no possibility of signatures appearing in places we can currently reach, does that mean…?"
"Some places that seem inaccessible to us are actually reachable!" Ke Xun interjected. "That makes sense! Why didn't we think of that? Thinking about things from the opposite perspective often yields unexpected answers. No wonder you're a big shot; your thinking is much more agile than ours."
Everyone: "…"
Qin Ci said, "What Xiao Mu said is indeed reasonable. The places we can currently reach are this cubicle and the lawn outside.
"The lawn offers a clear view, and Xiao Mu and I observed it from a high vantage point during the day. Neither the terrain nor the texture of the grass forms a pattern for a seal or a signature, so the lawn can be ruled out."
"As for a separate room, ours is definitely out of the question, and the other rooms are also unlikely, because it's pointless. The corridor outside the separate room, and the entire interior of the farmhouse, are also unlikely, since we can see
everything just by looking up or going in and out when we're out for exercise. If the signature is here, it would be easily spotted. "We only have these two places to go normally. If there's no signature in these two places, it can only be somewhere else. It seems like we can't go to those places, but according to Komaki, it might be possible. We just think it's impossible because we haven't tried."
"What we need to find now is a place like this, a place where signatures are likely to appear, and where we have the ability to get there. Let's all think together, what kind of place would have these attributes?"
Ke Xun: "The administrator's office? We can go to that place, but the premise is… cough, you know. It's just that when I went there, I was dragged along and couldn't move freely. If we want to go and test it out, we can only try to sneak in, and it's probably quite dangerous, after all, it's full of cows."
Dong Dong also coughed: "And… the women's farm, we can go there too…"
"No," Mu Yiran glanced at him, "Going there is useless. It's the same as the men's farm. If there's no possibility of signatures appearing in the farmhouses and lawns, there won't be any there either. So the administrator's office is one possibility. Besides that, I think there should also be a slaughterhouse and a food processing room nearby."