Chapter 224: King Rat Blade
Wang Le saw Zhang Xiao Qiang’s questioning gaze and felt uncertain. He spoke softly: “I’ve never interacted with such a material before, and I can’t be sure of its capabilities? Do you want me to bring it back to test it out?”
Seeing Wang Le’s uncertain behavior, Fat Chef started to laugh at him. He looked at Wang Le, “Hahaha, don’t worry about it. I have a big pot here. After adding in water, we can stew it slowly, I promise you, the longer it stews, the better the taste.”
Fat Chef’s suggestion was naturally rejected. Zhang Xiao Qiang held onto a bone that was the size of an egg, which looked like a yellow stone and asked, “What’s this? Topaz?”
“I…..I don’t know either while removing its innards, I found it inside its stomach. At that time, it was wrapped by food waste. After cutting the food, this thing rolled out, I thought it was some stone…”
Listening to Fat Chef’s explanation, Zhang Xiao Qiang nodded his head and placed the topaz into his pocket. He had found something similar inside a mutated cat before, but it was greyish white and had a rough texture to it while the stone from the rat king was sparkling. “Could it be that these things have different grades to them?”
Zhang Xiao Qiang used the Jing Wei Blade and carefully scraped the periosteum off the joint, then used the Sword to penetrate the joint and rotated his wrist.
“Creaaakk….” The sound of a steel wire breaking came out. One of the claws connected to the joint broke out from the leg bone and dropped to the ground. Wang Le took the first step and picked the claw that was curved like a blade, and carefully inspected it before reluctantly handing it over to Zhang Xiao Qiang.
The claw in his hand was somewhat heavy, and it was just a single claw of the rat. The shiny claw body was 37-38 cm long with a 7-8cm long black joint, with a total of 44-46cm in length.
The joint-whip that could be wielded as a handle was smooth to the touch as he caressed the smooth edges with his fingertips. Although it had a tactile sensation like graphite, it was not as dark as graphite. It looked pure and reflected light, even more lustrous than the highest grade “ink” water. The deepest part of the joint was the darkest, which slowly spread to the rest of the joint, the glossy epidermis of the joints faintly lit up under the light, which revealed another shade of black. The dual reflectiveness was so attractive that it would make people turn their heads to look at it.
The claws gave Zhang Xiao Qiang the same feeling as the sparkling rock. They were of the same color, texture, and glossiness. The only difference was that the touch of the rock was smooth, while the claws felt rough.
Zhang Xiao Qiang gently caressed the blade and looked at its rough body. Although it felt rough, it did not look coarse, as though the blade was made out of corals from the bottom of the sea. The surface was covered with sharp needles that were minute, if they did not know that the claw came from a rat, they would definitely think that the claw was a piece of art made out of corals.
The entire claw was arched, even the point between the joint and the claw was slightly curved with the largest arc at the 3rd quarter of the claw, making it look like a scythe.
The scythe-blade looked extremely normal and had no scent of danger. With the naked eye, he could see that the edge of the blade was extremely thin, as though it had never been used before, but Zhang Xiao Qiang knew that the seemingly harmless blade edge was the sharpest and could even slice through rebars the size of eggs easily into two.
Zhang Xiao Qiang raised the claw towards the light and took a careful look. He realized that the scythe-shaped claw’s back was complicated, revealing dense lines of fine barbed tips under the light.
On the inch wide back of the blade, the number of barbed tips could not be considered plenty, spreading in three rows in the center all the way from the joint to the tip of the blade. Due to the claw being too fine, a casual look will definitely miss out the fine barbed tips. Upon seeing these tips, Zhang Xiao Qiang borrowed the chipped chopper.
It was a smooth movement, the barbed tips on the back of the claw flowed along the blade, and nothing happened to the chopper or barbed tips. He used the chopper to move along the scythe until the joint-whip, but the chopper did not suffer from any further cracks or chips.
Wang Le and Fat Chef stood by the side and watched as Zhang Xiao Qiang use the chopper and claw on each other. They did not understand his actions, but because of Zhang Xiao Qiang’s prestige, they did not dare to butt in. They simply watched as Zhang Xiao Qiang use the back of the claw to move around the chopper, all the way until Zhang Xiao Qiang dragged the chopper on the back of the claw.
Fat Chef and Wang le watched as the chopper flew in midair with their mouths wide opened as it flipped a few times before dropping onto the thick wooden chopping board. The two of them looked at each other and swore that they did not even hear a thing. They only saw how casually Zhang Xiao Qiang had used the back of the claw while dragging the chopper and the thick chopping board instantly split into two.
(TN: The translation explaining this part was rather messy, what I think was that the barbed tips on the back were pulled back and the force of the tips pushing the chopping was so strong that it flicked the chopper outwards.)
Zhang Xiao Qiang looked at the claw with satisfaction, it was similar to the mystical and magical weapons in wuxia novels, it could cut and could hack, could strike and could saw. Zhang Xiao Qiang efficiently removed the other claws with it and became excited. He was able to use the little saw blades on the claws to easily cut bones off.
Zhang Xiao Qiang used the claw as though he was a small child who had found a new toy. He continued to experiment on the skeleton. Wang Le watched as Zhang Xiao Qiang slowly cut the skeletons that he had great difficulty with ease and felt sadness in his heart, but he could not say anything and only silently pray for Zhang Xiao Qiang to leave some for him.
Fat Chef watched as Zhang Xiao Qiang break the skeleton down while thinking, what seasoning should I add to that leftover meat on the bones to make it taste better?
In the end, Zhang Xiao Qiang’s gaze landed on the large rat head. With the right tool in hand, Zhang Xiao Qiang wanted to unravel the mystery to the death of the king rat. Wang Le had carefully peeled off its leather all the way to its head, revealing the two large eyes on the dark red meat. Zhang Xiao Qiang naturally was unafraid of a naked and bare rat.
The rat’s skull could be considered the toughest bone of the entire skeleton. After Zhang Xiao Qiang allowed Fat Chef to clean the rat head, he used the claw and slowly cut the skeleton apart. It took Zhang Xiao Qiang a couple of minutes to saw off the other bones into two, but Zhang Xiao Qiang could not do anything to the skull. After sawing for a long time, he barely managed to leave a shallow scar, to which he could deal no further damage or penetrate further.
Seeing that the sharp weapon in his hand had met its match, Zhang Xiao Qiang became furious. He turned the skull around and started to work from the bottom up. As expected, the lower mandibles loosened up and Zhang Xiao Qiang slowly broke the skull apart.
Aside from the concentrated number of veins and arteries in the skull, Zhang Xiao Qiang actually did not find the brain but instead found a wart the size of a duck egg. The wart was wrapped with countless of veins and on it was a long and narrow slit. Zhang Xiao Qiang believed that the shrapnel piece was inside the wart, and this was the true cause of death to the large king rat.