Ralph looked at the mage suspiciously at the door: "You...do you really have a way to deal with these things? We have lost a lot of people because of these things. The priest will use light magic and guide positive energy in almost every battle.
Number of times, they 'did' it, and they could only rely on bandages and medicine to save people.
"There are not enough medicines these days."
Wang: “It sounds like this thing destroyed your front?”
"No! Cavemen are no threat on the ground. They have good hearing and can identify positions by listening to sounds and launch precise attacks, but we have found a way to restrain them!"
Wang: "How?"
"Just beat the gong! We prepared a big gong, and several strong men knocked it continuously. The loud noise covered all the sounds. The cavemen could only keep charging in the direction of the gong, and then fell into our trap. Finally,
Fill the trap and rush towards our military formation on the corpses."
Elizabeth exclaimed: "Full?"
"Yes." Ralph nodded, "When we first penetrated the caveman lair, my grandfather once tried to organize an army to resist. They even prepared to use alchemical explosives to blow up the caveman lair and bury them all inside.
Records from that era say that most of the caveman armies were small teams of dozens of people, and there were rarely large armies of hundreds of people operating together."
Wang: "The number of cavemen has obviously increased now, right?"
"Yes."
Wang touched his chin and thought for a while, then asked seriously: "So, has the body shape of cavemen changed now compared to your grandfather's time?"
Ralph: "Here... you can check the records. When they first penetrated the caveman lair, this fortress was where my grandfather and others prepared to take back the mine. They did not give up until they ran out of financial resources. At that time, my grandfather hired a clerk to take over the mine.
Everything discovered that helped defeat the cavemen was recorded."
Wang: "Let's go!"
Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief: "Finally I don't have to endure this stench anymore."
Xiaobai: "Gu Gu Da!"
**
The castle's library surprisingly doesn't have the musty smell of damp paper, probably because the castle is really well ventilated.
Ralph took down a book from the bookshelf with ease: "This book records the body structure of halflings in detail. I looked through it to learn how to kill halflings and then taught it to my warriors. I didn't expect halflings.
Take out that monster."
Wang took the book, opened it and read quickly.
Xiaobai stretched his head and looked at it for a few seconds and complained: "You are turning too fast!"
Wang: "Don't worry, I will show you the important part later."
Xiaobai: "How do you know what is important and what is not?"
At this time, Wang stopped flipping through the book, pointed to the size of the cavemen recorded on it, and asked Ralph: "Sir, are the cavemen you are facing now so big?"
Ralph came over to take a look, then turned the page and looked at the sketch of the caveman at the back: "The height is about the same, but the caveman we are facing is not so strong and looks very thin.
"Before, I was focused on physical weaknesses and didn't look at this schematic diagram carefully. I thought cavemen were just that thin, and I felt that all underground creatures were very thin."
Flint blew his beard angrily: "What did you say? Dwarves are not thin! We weigh more than long people who have no body!"
Wang ignored Flint's protest and muttered something thoughtful: "The number of cavemen has increased, but they have become thinner...Sir, are there any cavemen who are closer to the diagram drawn by your ancestors?"
Ralph immediately replied: "Yes. The priests of Lamashtu and a small number of remaining shamans are of this size. Ordinary cavemen are not like this. They are usually commander-level characters."
Wang: "Have ordinary cavemen become pathologically ill? In addition to catching live monsters tonight, we also need to catch live cavemen. It is best to catch some of the thin and not thin ones."
Ralph: "The corpse of the caveman last night hasn't been burned yet. We really don't have anyone left. We just let the priest do the ritual. Do you want to take a look?"
"OK."
**
Unlike the monsters, the corpses of the cavemen were piled directly in the tunnel, seemingly preparing for the next defense.
The king immediately found a thin one and a rounder one, and asked Gotrick to drag them out of the pile of corpses.
After placing the two corpses side by side on the ground, Elizabeth commented: "The difference is indeed obvious. The one here looks like a pillow filled with dried rice bran, while the one next to it is filled with velvet."
Wang said while putting on his gloves: "Thank you for your vivid metaphor."
After saying that, he took out the dagger from his dimensional bag.
Xiaobai: "Don't you use that thin claw knife?"
"No, there is no need to dissect this time. We just need to see what's in the stomach." As he said this, the mage took the dagger and was about to insert it, but was stopped by the drow.
Marika: "Let me do it. I can't do your kind of detailed anatomy, but I am good at disembowelment."
Wang: "Then you should take out the stomach completely and then cut it open. What I want to see is the remaining food in the stomach."
Elizabeth: "Do you suspect this size difference is due to not eating enough?"
Wang: "No, I plan to use the elimination method to eliminate them one by one. The easiest thing to eliminate is the food gap."
Marika: "I'm going to do it!"
"Let's go." Wang made a gesture of invitation.
The drow skillfully disemboweled the corpse, took out the corpse's stomach, and then opened it in front of everyone's attention, taking out the food residue inside.
Wang squatted down and fiddled gently with his gloved hands: "The caveman's staple food should be mushrooms, but this doesn't look like a mushroom. Even if it has been eaten for a long time, the remaining mushrooms in the stomach cannot be powdery.
The peristalsis of the stomach cannot grind it into pieces like this."
Wang picked up a small handful of black powdery substance and looked at it carefully.
Xiaobai: "It's moss."
Wang looked at the werewolf girl: "Are you sure?"
"Sure, this is moss."
Wang: "Okay, moss. What are these granular things?"
Xiaobai: "I don't know. They have no taste."
Wang carefully rubbed the granular items with his fingers: "It still feels hard, and it's not completely powder. There are particles of different sizes."
He took out the water bag, grabbed a handful of food residue, and rinsed it with water, and fine black particles appeared in his palm.
Flint came up to take a closer look and said: "This is sand from the sand layer in the earth's crust. It is said that the besieged city-state of Oriath was so poor that it mixed this into bread."
Wang shook his hand, threw away the sand, and then said to Marika: "Tear down a few more thin ones and see if there is this thing in the stomach."
Marika: "Leave it to me."
After a while, the drow came back and reported: "Not all of them are like this. Some people still have sawdust in their stomachs. I don't know how the cavemen got the sawdust underground."
Wang nodded, pointed to the rounder caveman corpse and said, "Take out this stomach and see what's inside."
Marika immediately obeyed, and after a quick operation, she poured out the contents of the round caveman's stomach and spread it flat on the ground.
Wang picked up a small stick-shaped object: "I always feel that this is the stipe of a fungus."
The druid immediately said: "Ghost mushroom, a very delicious mushroom, also emits a faint light in a dark environment."
Wang threw this away and picked up another piece to show to Xiaobai.
"Midnight morels, this mushroom tastes like fish. I don't like fish, so it doesn't taste good." Xiaobai said firmly.
Wang: “Do both types of mushrooms live underground?”
"Ghost mushrooms are everywhere underground, while morels can only live on the ground."
The dwarf said excitedly: "It seems that the cavemen have entered the feudal society from primitive society. This mushroom-eating caveman might be their baron!"
Wang: "No, I think it's more likely that the underground can no longer supply such a large population of cavemen. The underground supply has always been a problem.
"Dwarves do not live completely underground. They also grow dwarf barley on the terraces of the Mountain Kingdom. Dwarves also hunt on the ground and enrich their tables with the meat of ground beasts.
"They don't just rely on crops in the ground."
Flint: "What you said is not comprehensive. We dwarves can also tame goats. Goats are very suitable for grazing in mountainous areas. They can produce good-tasting meat and goat milk."
Wang: "That's right. Many of the common so-called underground races actually rely on things on the ground to survive. The same goes for drow. They hunt on the ground. But cavemen are different. They almost never appear on the ground, or even appear at all.
On shallow ground.
"They can only rely on various crops grown underground, so their population has never been large and has been maintained in balance with food production.
"In line with this characteristic, their birth rate is not high, and their children are prone to die early. Now there are various signs that cavemen seem to have solved the problem of fertility."
Elizabeth: "Then there was a famine, and they ate up all the mushrooms in the ground. They could only eat moss mixed with sand and gravel to satisfy their hunger. In the end, they had no choice but to launch a war against the surface world to seize the land under the sun."
Wang: "That's a good summary. That's probably it for now."
Marika didn't seem to care about whether she could have food. After Wang finished speaking, she said, "Is this abnormal increase in fertility rate related to the crisis we are about to face?"
"I need to collect further information on this." Wang shrugged, "Of course, it is possible that after blocking the attack tonight, most of our questions will be solved."
Flint: "Have you forgotten one thing? There is an angry pseudo-duke who wants to kill everyone except the princess, waiting for us to overthrow him."
Wang seemed to have just remembered that there was another matter, and nodded repeatedly: "Yes, yes, there is another matter."
It seems that his interest has been completely captured by the amazing facts about what happened to the caveman community.
He was already looking forward to tonight's attack.