A small sound was heard, and soon a black mouse crawled out from the corner. The man was extremely happy to see it, so he picked it up, stroked it for a few times, took off the iron chain on its tail, and then put the mouse on the ground. It ran happily and merged into the darkness again.
"We have to hurry, a guest is on the way, he is Shrike's man," he said.
The priest in front of him didn't say anything, he just observed the man's actions.
This was a very sloppy man, a homeless man like the other bad rats, with dirty clothes and cotton wool hanging on his body as hard as stones.
He was an intelligence dealer, and he had the information the priest wanted.
"Can you communicate with mice?"
The priest did not seem to be in a hurry, but asked questions about irrelevant things.
"How is this possible?"
The tipster laughed at the impracticality.
"But you got the news from that rat? The other guest."
"It's just some small accessories."
The intelligence dealer took out the iron chain and said, "The mouse is just a messenger."
The pendant was extremely ordinary, but the priest knew that there must be some pattern on it, and this pattern could be interpreted as a message.
"A rat as a messenger?"
"The underground is very complicated, with intricate pipes, and rats can be great helpers if they are trained."
The intelligence dealer said as he had another rat in his hand. Behind him in the darkness something was moving, and there were a lot of them.
"Let's get to the point! Priest, you came from Florence not just to see someone like me, right?"
The priest tried hard to shift his gaze away from the darkness behind him. There was some disgust in his eyes. He hated this place and these people. If it wasn't for the intelligence, he would never have come here.
"I want to know what's going on in Old Dunling lately."
"Be more precise."
"What happened in the northern part of Old Dunling a few days ago?"
The intelligence dealer suddenly stopped stroking, and there was a subtle light flashing in his eyes, as if he had heard some interesting news.
He slowly leaned back and got into a comfortable position on the worn wooden chair.
“That’s not a good question.”
"But I need it, and we will pay the price," said the priest.
The intelligence dealer was silent. He stared at the priest, and then an ugly smile appeared on his cold face.
"We don't know much. After all, we are just lowly mice who can only hear some of the wind and grass."
The intelligence dealer closed his eyes as he spoke, as if he was thinking about something, with a hint of pain on his calm face.
The illusion and reality in the mind overlap, like a strange hallucination.
In an instant, countless homeless people walked out of the darkness. They whispered in the ears of the intelligence dealer and reported all the interesting or suspicious news to him. Then the intelligence dealer carefully stored the news one by one in his memory.
As they spoke, countless images appeared in the intelligence dealer's mind. The darkness that the intelligence dealer and the priest were in suddenly shattered, like an opened cardboard box, and everything became clear.