Da Niu was a burly fellow who was known for being big but slow in Bei Village, only ever hired for laborious tasks since he was well suited to them. Currently, he had been hired by the wealthy head farmer, Bei Nongmin, to watch over the animal pens during the night watch for the first half of the night.
After that, someone else would come to replace him and he could take his copper coins - paid on the spot for the job - and go home to his wife. Even though she had recently been pushing for him to get night jobs for some reason, and was no longer as intimate, she should be happy to see him bring more income home.
As he thought this, Da Niu smiled in a silly manner, but his nose twitched when he began to smell something strange coming with the breeze. As someone who worked in labor and had done a few watch jobs, he knew the best way to observe the pens was not to have eyes on them, but to smell them.
Even though the smell was bad, do enough work like this and you get used to it. So he was seated near the entrance of the secondary barn for the wheat crops, which happened to be downwind of the animal pens which were to his right.
Immediately, Da Niu stood up and picked a cutlass he used for his security jobs to scare away thieves, robbers and wild animals then slowly moved towards the animal pens. The smell he detected earlier was not wrong, it was definitely the smell of blood and not a small amount of it.
For this smell to be here, it meant that the robber or wild animal had managed to get past the guard dog, which showed that they were cunning. Since there was blood, Da Niu felt it was a wild animal, because a human would logically not slaughter the goods on the spot as it would cause more problems than to steal them alive - but out cold - and haul away.
As such he snuck in, so that while the wild animal was feasting, he would be able to give it a big blow from the back. He had done this many times and even once killed a weak old wolf, precisely what he used to propose to the family of his current wife.
The first thing Da Niu noticed was that the pens were deathly silent, as if the animals were too frightened to even make a sound, which was weird. The presence of a predator would rather have them make a ruckus in trying to escape, rather than be silent as death.
It wasn't until Da Niu gently pushed open the door to the pig pens that his pupils constricted into needle points, seeing that all the usually lively hogs were laying in pools of their own blood, all of them stabbed at the same place… the head.
It was likely an instant kill, not even allowing them to cry out before dying.
Seeing this, Da Niu felt extreme fear as this was beyond his understanding and capability, so he directly retreated and planned to inform the head farmer about this, but he bumped into something on his way back.
"Just as well, it's about time to try it with a mortal."
Those were the last words Da Niu ever heard as his head was pierced through by a blood-covered short spear, his body slumping to the ground weakly in death.
｢System Prompt: You have gained 0.01 Slaughter Points.｣
Li Ling casually flicked the blood and brain matter off the tip of his spear, using the clothes of Da Niu to wipe off the rest as he calculated in his mind.
It seemed that humans were ten times more valuable than livestock, which was interesting. Whereas he would need a thousand livestock to get a single point, he would only need a hundred humans to accomplish the same.
Still, Li Ling would rather kill a thousand livestock than kill a hundred humans. This was not an issue of morality, but an issue of culpability.
If he killed a million animals, many would just think he was weird and bloodthirsty, but if he killed even a hundred humans, mortals or otherwise, it would call down investigators from afar. After all, the Qing Shan sect was nominally a Righteous Path sect, so they were opposed to demonic cultivators.
Li Ling found it ironic.
No, not the hypocrisy of the righteous path, that was something almost everyone knew about, especially he who was from Earth.
Rather, it was his initial naivety in traveling to a righteous sect's domain and settling here, which was now the same shackle preventing him from soaring higher. After all, the Infinite Slaughter System was best suited to areas with frequent killing, as well as lax rules towards its penalization.
Then again, in a Demonic Sect's region, he might not have lived till today, so there were two sides to this.
Regardless, Li Ling had done his test, but he was still curious to see if there were any hard limits. Did all livestock give the same amount and did they give that amount forever, regardless of how many were killed prior? What about if he raised his cultivation level?
By midnight, Li Ling was panting as he sat on a bench, sweating profusely. The netizens of Earth didn't lie, those scenes of one assassin killing an entire encampment of soldiers in one night was unrealistic.
Even if all of them were in a coma, it still took time, effort and stamina to stab all of them to death. Despite the help of his cultivation, or precisely because of it, Li Ling was only able to slaughter a little over three thousand farm animals, not sparing the young or old, and had almost cleaned out the entire large farmstead.
However, it was precisely because of this that he was able to accumulate 3 Slaughter Points in slightly over six hours of non-stop execution, ready to increase his power further!