After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World novel Chapter 503

Somewhere on the outskirts of Fargo

While the smoke of war was slowly rising, most of the citizens—especially Fargo’s—remained completely unaware. The citizens were doing their daily activities. Most were hunting and working hard to survive, some—mostly those who had allied with Fargo—were dilly-dallying, while others were busy bullying their fellowmen.

At this time, a good portion of the activity was fixed in the mines. "Work harder!" A man said, kicking another poor slave to ’wake’. He didn’t move anymore though and someone checked his breathing to be extremely weak.

"Tsk. Another one broken," Peko sneered, spitting out in disgust. He looked at one of the guards and gestured to get rid of the body.

One man carried the near-corpse to the edge of the cave system. It wasn’t exactly a cliff, but the slope wasn’t gentle either. The guard carelessly threw the man there, watching him roll to the bottom, hitting a few trees by the way. He watched until he was satisfied before nodding and turning back to the gossip.

Rolling down and hitting rocks and shrubs, Thomas didn’t care anymore. He didn’t even feel the pain of being thrown down. He doubted he’d feel the pain if a monster decided to bite onto his flesh.

He just wanted his life to end so Vivian didn’t think about him anymore. How sorry she must feel to him, and how guilty she must feel to be touched like that by those men. But he couldn’t even tell her he didn’t blame her at all, and that he would not be disgusted with her.

But it’s alright now. With his death, Vivian would eventually forget about him, moving on with her life.

Eventually, the seemingly-endless rough roll downhill ended, and he heard various rustles of shrubs around him. He closed his eyes, feeling his last breath slowly leave him.

From the back of his consciousness though, he realized he wasn’t hearing the familiar growls of monsters. Instead, it was voices. "Hey, it’s a corpse!"

"No, he’s still alive." Another voice said. "Pull back now. Back to the temporary base!"

"Yes, Boss Gill!"

Thomas didn’t know what happened anymore because he completely lost consciousness.

***

Anyway, back to the mines, the guards were lounging as they watched the hard-working slaves, completely unaffected by the fact that they threw away yet another one to the monsters.

"We found copper, why are we still mining limestone?" One asked, wondering why most of the slave labor still went there.

He was a little annoyed as one of the people who ’found’ the copper, because it made his ’contribution’ less cooler.

"Idiot, sure copper is awesome, what do we do next?"

"Make money?"

"Nah, many people tried to take it in their spaces to see if it could be converted to money, but it didn’t work."

"Damn!"

"At least we have construction experts here, we could at least make concrete!" One said. "That’s a huge thing, okay?"

Most of the gangsters weren’t highly educated, so they didn’t know much about concrete except it was a good place to throw people in. However, from the various conversations and actions in the territory, they could surmise limestone was needed to create it.

"They tried putting it over a section of the wall to make it stronger."

"And?"

"It didn’t stick."

While the men were chatting, Bruce was working hard nearby. They chatted without care around slaves thinking that they couldn’t reveal anything automatically as long as they were enslaved.