The blue-gray rock was half a meter high and looked very realistic. Even [System's Eye] couldn't see any indication that there was something wrong with it.

  However, when System tried to touch it with his tentacles, he could tell that the rock was completely an illusion, and he sensed that some special energy aura was being emitted from somewhere near the illusionary rock.

  System reached his tentacles through the illusion and toward the energy aura. A few seconds ter, he pulled back a ratman skull thirty centimeters long from inside the illusion.

  The moment the skull was taken out, the illusionary rock disappeared, revealing a retively clean entrance to a ratman warren.

  Compared to the other ratman warrens that System had seen, the smell inside this one was much better. Although there was a slight odor, it wasn't too bad.

  After having Meatball stand guard outside to prevent the ratman from escaping through any of the warren's other exits, System and Shava once again descended into a ratman's warren.

  ...

  In the Warren Pins, ratmen were also called pgue ratmen.

  Ratmen were timid and extremely greedy. Usually, when encountering a strong enemy, they would first choose to flee. When encountering a weak enemy, they would bare their fangs and attack mercilessly.

  Generally speaking, they were a race that was weak against the strong and strong against the weak.

  However, if these timid ratmen were forced into a situation where they couldn't retreat, they would never sit still and wait for death. They would definitely fight until the end.

  Of course, no matter how much they resisted, ratmen couldn't challenge the overlords of the grassnd, the gnolls.

  In the Warren Pins ruled by gnolls and pigmen, ratmen could only survive in the cracks. Part of the reason was that they lived underground, which the gnoll warriors were helpless against. The other part was the strange germs that ratmen carried on their bodies.

  Ever since they started worshiping the God of Pgue and Curses, almost every ratman would be infected with some form of pgue. Any gnolls who ate a ratmen's flesh were very likely to die.

  Over time, the gnolls, after suffering many losses, had given up on treating ratmen as food.

  Of course, whenever they saw a lone ratman, if the gnolls were in a very bad mood, or sometimes a very good mood, they would still attack the ratman. Although gnolls couldn't eat ratmen, they still found great pleasure in killing them.

  However, not all gnolls were that bloodthirsty, so the life of the ratmen in the Warren Pins was still acceptable.

  Long ago, the half-snake people, the ratmen's mortal enemies, had been eliminated by the gnolls. After more than a hundred years of recuperation, the ratmen had established hundreds of settlements in areas far away from any gnoll cities. They'd even built a city that accommodated tens of thousands of ratmen.

  The ratmen, who had once been trembling under the rule of the gnolls, had now become restless. They had decided to compete with the gnolls and had begun attacking the gnolls' vassals—the wolf packs that roamed across the grassnds.

  But the ratmen were also a contradictory race. After the ratmen had provoked the gnolls, some brave ratmen had chosen to become merchants. They'd traveled to the gnolls' cities to exchange goods, and some had even tried to join the Warren Federation, which was composed of gnolls and pigmen, seeking to become the third race in the Warren Federation.

  The result was obvious. Several of the ratman merchants who had traveled to gnoll cities would disappear every few days.

  Lance Corisius, a ratman wizard, had once lived in the pgue city of Helencia for a period of time. He had ter moved to the border of the Warren Pins and Lilt Forest to work on his pgue experiments.

  Lance didn't support the ratmen joining the Warren Federation. Instead, he expected the pgue god he believed in to grant the ratmen more power so that a pgue could end the gnolls' rule.

  However, reality did not live up to his dreams. Half a year after he'd moved to the border of Lilt Forest, not only had he failed to make any progress studying the pgue, he'd even encountered evil and bloodthirsty monsters.

  Lance didn't know what these monsters were. Soon after a fellow ratman had given him a report about them, the monsters had killed and eaten that ratman.

  A member of his own race had been eaten, but those monsters hadn't been harmed at all. They seemed to be immune to pgues just like the half-snake people, the ratmen's former mortal enemies.

  After the gnolls had wiped out the half-snake people a hundred years earlier, the ratmen's pgue was no longer ineffective against any of their enemies.

  Only the snakes on the grassnd were still immune to their pgue, but ordinary snakes were no match for ratmen. In recent decades, the grassnd's snakes had basically been wiped out, and only a few of them were still alive.

  Every ratman who worshiped the pgue god would carry a pgue. Even a powerful gnoll warrior would get a fever, fall into a coma, or even die after eating rat meat containing these pgues.

  Were these monsters demons? Undead? Or were they possibly creatures simir to the half-snake people?

  After he investigation the situation further, Lance found out that the other party was neither a demon from the Abyss nor a slow-moving undead creature.

  They were a group of strange monsters with cold bodies, just like snakes. The small ones were somewhat simir to the ants here in the grassnd, only many times rger than ordinary ants.

  Lance knew that both the big monsters and the little monsters were definitely not the same species as the ants.

  These monsters were like the half-snake people, but they were more bizarre and even more terrifying than the half-snakes.

  Lance had learned that these monsters were actually going to build a nest near his cave.

  The fear of the unknown had made him want to escape, but before escaping, he'd decided to investigate the monsters a bit more, while also trying to infect them with a more severe pgue.

  However, even after eating the rats that Lance had sowed with a rge amount of pgue germs, the monsters had remained unaffected. Lance had used the spell [Shared Vision] to observe through the eyes of the rats. He'd watched as one of the monsters had bitten off half of a rat and chewed it up, but there hadn't seemed to be any adverse effect on the monster from the pgue germs.

  Lance had used [Pgue Spell] to sow the rat with a pgue that was more than a thousand times worse than those carried by ordinary ratmen. Even the demons from the Abyss would have had a reaction to it!

  At this moment, Lance realized that these new evil monsters that had appeared on the pins were a threat at least on the same level as the half-snake people for the ratmen and were far more terrifying than the gnolls.

  After all, while gnolls were bloodthirsty, they wouldn't eat ratmen, but these cruel monsters would treat them as food.

  Not only that, these evil monsters even built nests underground just like ratmen. As long as they hid underground, these monsters wouldn't repeat the tragic fate of the half-snake people who had been exterminated by the gnolls.

  It could be said that after a few days of observation, Lance now regarded these evil monsters as the future enemies of all ratmen in the Warren Pins.

  He decided to pass on a message to the underground city of the ratmen while these monsters were still small in number and their strength wasn't particurly great.

  Although his pgue viruses hadn't been effective against the monsters, the sharp arrows of the ratmen's pgue archers and the crazy rat warriors could still destroy them.

  ...

  However, just after Lance had sent out the st batch of rats for reconnaissance and decided to escape, he discovered that these monsters had suddenly shown extraordinary wisdom. They'd actually found his nest by following the trail of his rat spies, and they'd also seen through the illusion he'd created outside of his warren.

  Lance, the ratman wizard, started to tremble slightly in his shabby bck and gray robe. He had to do something...