The pork butcher is smoother than a pig butcher!

Chapter 178 The Army of Ten Thousand Rats
That's what caused all that commotion.

They are a group of animals that the herders call "big-eyed thieves"—prairie ground squirrels.

They inhabit grasslands and semi-desert environments year-round.

They like to eat the roots, stems, leaves and seeds of pasture grass, as well as insects and small animals.

In short, it's an omnivore and easy to raise!
Mentioning these prairie ground squirrels, which are larger than house mice, makes every herder hate them with a passion.

They not only steal grass from sheep's mouths and damage the roots of pasture grass.

Its front claws are several times sharper than those of a common house mouse.

The middle toe of the front paw is very well-developed, especially good at digging holes.

They are natural-born architects.

The dug rat burrows not only had fixed living and storage areas, but also areas for excretion and escape.

Moreover, there is more than one of these areas, and there are many entrances.

The storage area is so large that it can hold tens or even hundreds of kilograms of grain.

In years when weasels are rampant, the pastures are full of weasel burrows.

Herdsmen hate these rat holes the most, because when herding horses, their hooves can easily get stuck in them.

A broken leg in a horse can trigger a series of diseases, almost tantamount to death.

What is the most valuable possession of a nomadic tribe?
It wasn't a person, nor a sheep or a cow, but a horse!
Therefore, when herders see a ground squirrel, their first reaction is to crush it to death.

However, what came running from the opposite direction was not thirty or fifty, nor three or five hundred, but an uncountable number of yellow rats.

Upon seeing this, the leader of the Ejina Torghut tribe's pupils constricted, and he cowered like a quail.

You want him to warn the enemy inside the tent?

How can it be!

Besides fear, he also had many questions in his mind.

When did so many ground squirrels appear on the grassland?

Is this year going to be another year of rat plague?
Another question is, what are they after?
Next.

Then happened a scene that he would never forget for the rest of his life:
The swarm of weasels, seemingly covering the sky, ran straight towards the dozens of tents with a clear objective.

Before long, a series of ghostly wails and howls echoed from inside the tent.

"Ah! Weasels, so many weasels! Where did this swarm of weasels come from!"

"Gods, they're biting my penis, they're biting my fingers!"

"Help! Help! Someone please help me!"

Quite a few people rolled out of the tents.

They rolled out, barely clothed and completely naked.

Their limbs were covered with weasels, and there were signs of bites on their faces and bodies.

They rolled around on the ground.

Roll horizontally, roll vertically.

He tried to crush the weasel on his body.

But there were just too many weasels coming to scout the camp today.

Lying down makes it even easier for them to climb on it.

In less than the time it takes to drink half a cup of tea, the dozen or so people who had fallen to the ground could no longer roll around.

The leader of the Ejina Torghut tribe just watched helplessly.

The flesh of those people from the northern desert tribes was being gnawed away piece by piece by weasels.

A living corpse was transformed from flesh and blood into bare bones in just 15 minutes.

The crunching sounds of gnawing were accompanied by screams of agony echoing throughout the camp.

The young leader was so frightened he almost choked.

He knew that once he collapsed to the ground, he would soon become food for those prairie ground squirrels.

He used almost all his strength and nearly lost his teeth to bite through the ropes binding his hands.

Then, he staggered onto a horse and fled the scene without looking back.

Luckily, he ran fast.

Soon after, King Atu came to inspect the achievements of the army of ten thousand rats.

If there were even one surviving two-legged creature, it would most likely suffer a brutal beating.

In nature, especially on the grasslands, marmots and ground squirrels are competitors on the food chain.

They all rely on plants as their primary food source.

To reduce competition, marmots, which are several times larger than ground squirrels, often hunt ground squirrels.

Marmots simply can't stand seeing weasels hopping around on the same grassland.

The long-standing predator-prey relationship has made the ground squirrel more afraid of the marmot than of the cat.

They've already been bullied enough by now.

Unexpectedly, not long ago, a formidable foe appeared on the vast grasslands.

The nemesis, King Atu, disliked the lack of rats on Mount Junma, so he followed the scent of rats on the grassland and found the rats' home.

The marmots are large, and the prairie ground squirrels have seen them many times.

But the variety of Atu Dawang.

Just hearing its screech makes the weasels curl up into a ball in fright.

especially.

After many weasels witnessed King Atu kill a prairie wolf larger than itself with a single swipe of his claws.

By tucking its tail between its legs and crawling on the ground, it signifies its submission to King Atu.

How can the king's might and might be demonstrated if hundreds or thousands of weasels submit?

As for younger brothers, the more the better, of course.

King Atu's speed is extraordinary.

Within just a few days, it had pulled all the weasels from their burrows within a radius of hundreds of miles.

After much hard work and diligence, we finally assembled our first army of ten thousand rats.

The king has indeed put in a lot of effort these past few days to make the army of ten thousand rats understand his commands.

If it weren't for the mission of helping his master find the villain, he would have almost forgotten the purpose of his trip to the grassland.

I was just wondering where to find the bad guy.

Then a henchman came to report that a group of two-legged creatures had arrived at a certain location.

These two-legged creatures are all bad guys.

They would kill any weasel they saw, skin it, and eat its flesh.

Weasels are very vengeful animals; they are extremely hostile when they meet four-legged creatures.

They usually act alone, and even if they hate two-legged creatures, they will only stay far away when they see them.

It’s different in the past.

Now they are the king's army of ten thousand rats!

The weasels volunteered to cooperate in killing their enemy.

As it happened, King Atu also wanted to see how powerful his army of tens of thousands that he had tamed in the past two days was.

Unexpectedly, the tens of thousands of soldiers all knew how to exceed their limits.

After they gnawed on the flesh of more than a thousand bipedal creatures, they also dug many large rat burrows.

They buried all those two-legged animal bones in the sand cave.

The grass roots on this grassland are all in sand, so they can't dig very hard.

When the king came to inspect the situation, he saw:
The battlefield was cleaned up completely, with not a trace of blood or corpses left.

All that remained were dozens of felt tents, over a thousand sets of Tatar clothing, and their spoils of war, including gold, silver, jewels, weapons, and food.

What makes it happiest is the nearly one thousand terrified horses trembling on the hitching post.

Back then, it hunted those Ferghana horses from the Western Regions at Jinzhou Pass.

After hearing its report, the owner only scolded it for not knowing the goodness of the Akhal-Teke horse!

Even if only a hundred or eighty horses are left behind, it would be worth more than all the spoils of war.

King Atu was unconvinced at the time, but he remembered it from then on.

Horses, those four-legged creatures, are something their poor owners desperately want.

This time.

It repeatedly warned the army of rats not to harm these four-legged creatures.

Now, isn't it time for it to go back and show off its spoils to its owner?
(End of this chapter)