The sheer volume of tunnels and the near-endless supply of black iron ore means a large number of miners.

After the field trip, Lu Dong'e found no miners - there were no pits in the black iron pit, only slaves.

Rhodes hadn't walked through all the tunnels—but of the ones he had walked, the longest was more than a hundred miles.

This is a three-dimensional space – imagine a spider web corridor with a radius of 100 miles, what is this concept?

In the huge underground space, even with a special ventilation system, the air is still unbearably turbid, and the garbage and excrement inside are unbearable for normal people.

(There are special minecarts to transport the ore, but they don't handle the garbage properly.) ）

In this environment, will there be normal people who come to work here?

The answer is no.

In fact, in the black iron pit, the people in charge of mining are some slaves.

Generations of slaves.

These men were prisoners of war, traitors, and slaves who could not afford to pay their debts, but what they all had in common was that they had almost said goodbye to the sun forever by coming to the pit and picking up tools.

Anyone who has played Minecraft has had the experience of digging a crypt overnight, but it was a game after all - in fact, it is unimaginably difficult to carry out a heavy excavation operation in a dark, confined space.

There was no sunlight, no fresh air, the slaves were barely clothed, all they could do was dig day after day, eat, excrete, sleep, and keep digging.

There are no rebels - because underground, there is no point in resisting.

The owner of the pit only had to seal off the mine's ventilation system, and the rebels would die quietly in the pit – a situation of extreme asymmetry.

The Noxians have never been deferential to civilization - they are mostly ambitious - but not a single rebellion has succeeded in the mines.

No matter how resolute and united the slaves were, the best outcome would be to drag a few hapless overseers to hell with them - it was impossible for the owner of the pit to go down to the pit to supervise their work, and the slaves could only find hired overseers and transporters to operate the minecarts.

And that's not even the scariest of all.

The most terrifying thing is that Rhodes saw the ugliest thing after he came to Valoran - the slave family.

In order to maintain the number of slaves, the owner of the pit would find special women to give birth to the slaves, and these women were called "wives of black iron" - and among the children born, the boys would become the new digging slaves, and the women would become the wives of the next generation of black iron.

They weren't somebody's wives, they were the wives of Black Iron.

The long history of Fort Dig has resulted in the birth of countless offspring of slaves and wives of Black Iron, and Rhodes was able to easily distinguish which slaves were new and which were the ones who worked here......

It's a peculiar structure that's hard to imagine.

Slaves could not resist, and neither could their descendants—and the lack of recreation and instinct kept their descendants high......

Rhodes doesn't consider himself a warm-hearted man - he would even take a direct part in the rebellion in Noxus in order to verify the 1 in 10,000 chance of the Burning Legion, even if it caused the death of a large number of innocent people.

But even so, when he saw the scenes in the black iron pit, he still felt pain.

Especially in the abandoned tunnel-turned-"recreation room", Rhodes meets the children who are destined to become slaves and wives of black iron when they grow up.

These children were born in darkness, and they can only live in darkness for the rest of their lives.

They had never seen trees, no animals other than tunnels and rats, and no better life.

The children's imitative instinct was discovered by the overseers, who instinctively took small shovels and dug in abandoned tunnels - like digging sand on the beach, and the slag they excavated would be turned into mud by them, and they would make the unimaginable existence of the stories they heard.

A "princess" who is not clothed, a "dragon" who looks like a mouse with a lobe in front of her mouth, and a "god" who always holds a leather whip......

The tiny pit constrained the children's bodies, their minds and imaginations, and Rod couldn't even imagine what it meant to live his life in such conditions.

Although instinct caused the slaves to want to pass on their knowledge and experience, and the overseers and mine owners brought them some "harmless" knowledge in order to retain the slaves' IQ that could at least work, the result was that the slaves' IQ was relatively stable.

It's still not seeing the light of day, and it's a lifetime of labor.

Of course, maybe the situation was not as painful as Rhodes felt - there was no hope, so how could you appreciate despair?

In fact, the slaves who grew up in the pits never resisted.

Like the "wolf children", these children still retain a certain level of language ability and intelligence, but in general it is difficult to return to a normal level.

Rod could barely breathe from what he saw in the mines, and he even wondered who was the real demon - the humans, or the Burning Legion.

Leaving the pit, it took Rhodes a while to regain his composure.

After going down to the pit himself, Rhodes was finally able to confirm that it was not feasible to incite a revolt of the miners in the mines.

With the exception of a very small number of new slaves, no one will answer their call - no one can help the exploited when they are completely unable to recognize their own situation.

Even if Rhodes did free them, except for the children who could still be saved, the other slaves and the wives of Black Iron would collapse because they couldn't adapt to their new lives.

Thinking of what he had seen, Rod closed his eyes in agony—the children he had seen reappeared in front of his eyes.

Rhodes didn't even dare to tell Cana what he saw and heard in the black iron pit - if the freedom-loving Cana knew all this, maybe the entire Fort Dig would be ploughed under the wrath of the storm.

And that would most likely mean that Jana would not be able to become a demigod before the Night of the Eclipse.

Time is getting tighter, and Fort Dig has become Cana's last chance.

No, there must be some way!

Rod casually added an Olympiad of wisdom to himself, then took a deep breath to calm himself, he subconsciously pressed the tip of his tongue against his teeth, and began to press his fingers one by one.