After walking a turn before the Gates of Hell and returning, Sberg felt like a changed man, suddenly struck by a new understanding of life and death.
In the past, he had undoubtedly been a coward. The wasteland lay just beyond the towering walls, yet he had never dared cast even a single glance at it.
Now, however...
Rather than death itself, he feared leaving this world with regrets.
The things one wished to do were best done without delay.
To see the person one wished to see didn't necessarily require waiting until next spring...
Inside the reading room of Shelter 404.
Sitting before the Alliance's Administrator, Sberg looked restless and uneasy. Although he had mentally prepared himself, his heart still fluttered with tension.
He had just trudged through a vast expanse of snow, his boots soaked as if steeped in water, leaving muddy smudges all over the floor.
Watching Sberg constantly shifting his posture, Chu Guang couldn't help but chuckle.
"Don't be nervous. Do I look that terrifying?"
"Not at all... I was just worried about dirtying your sofa, sir," Sberg scratched his head and muttered softly. "These clothes of mine haven't been washed in days, and they're the same ones I wore in prison."
Chu Guang suggested, "There's a shower room in the gym next door. You can take a quick shower first."
"Thank you... that's a wonderful offer, but let's wait a bit." Sberg drew a letter from his breast pocket, placing it gingerly on the coffee table and nudging it toward Chu Guang. "When Miss Alisa learned of my destination, she asked me to deliver this letter to you."
Alisa?
Chu Guang had quite a favorable impression of that clever young girl. He recalled she was Melvin's daughter, whom he had met once during the celebration.
He picked up the envelope, tore it open, and pulled out the stationery.
The handwriting was delicate and elegant, carrying a faint fragrance.
The letter recounted the sweeping upheavals currently taking place in Boulder City, outlined the pledges and appeals of Boulder City's new administration, and earnestly expressed a hope for Alliance assistance.
[...We endorse the Alliance's ideals of materialism and equality. The currents of authoritarian thought shall be eradicated from our society, and we shall formulate a new body of law that everyone must abide by henceforth. We are willing to make changes, and willing to do our part for the people of the wasteland, fighting for the dream of bringing an end to the Wasteland Era. In this brand-new era, we hope to join you, or at least become comrades fighting side by side with you.]
[We also earnestly plead for you to extend a helping hand and assist us.]
Furthermore, Alisa noted in the letter that since chips were now obsolete, the debts the Administrator had borrowed by his own capability were wiped completely clean...
Chu Guang couldn't help smiling upon reading this.
Partly at Alisa's sly wit regarding the debts, and partly in pleasant surprise at her growth.
It seemed that in these short two months, quite a lot had truly transpired among the Alliance's neighbors...
Had it been Melvin, he likely would have played the chip-denominated debt as a bluffing economic card. In fact, the old man had already done so, only for the Alliance to prepare principal and interest covering the next five to ten years.
You want chips? We'll give you chips.
Alisa, however, was different from her father. She had found another way to play it—
Since the card had effectively been rendered worthless anyway, why not voluntarily discard it, turning an economic card into a diplomatic one?
This was not an act of self-harm meant to garner the Alliance's pity.
Rather, it signaled the stance of Boulder City's new administration: they intended to make a clean break with the past and truly embrace the ideal of equality.
Barring those who took pleasure in harming others and themselves, anyone would help them weather this crisis—to say nothing of the Alliance and its declarations.
"Quite the grand gesture... Waiving over 3.5 billion in debt just like that. If we don't show any goodwill, we'll look rather petty."
Chu Guang chuckled without poking holes in it. Folding the letter, he looked at Sberg and continued, "When you head back, carry a message for us. We will help."
Sberg offered an abashed smile. "I'm terribly sorry to trouble you."
Chu Guang shook his head. "Think nothing of it. We are all descendants of the Human Alliance, not to mention we are practically neighbors."
In fact, he was already taking action.
The two hundred or so players who had remained in Boulder City hadn't merely been watching the spectacle and livestreaming it to the official forum.
The residents of the shelter possessed their own discipline and code of ethics; seeing troublemaking mercenaries and marauders, they wouldn't stand idly by.
Still, the majority of the chaos had indeed been resolved by the people of Boulder City themselves. The players truly hadn't occupied center stage this time around.
This revolution was fundamentally an uprising launched by Boulder City's survivors because they could no longer bear the nobles' exploitation. If the Alliance had played any role, it was using economic leverage to dismantle the nobility's grip across every social class—the equivalent of confiscating the bullets from their guns.
The chips issued by the masters had turned into worthless junk. The soldiers didn't want to fight for their masters; the workers didn't want to toil for their masters; everyone would rather believe in an abstract, fictional Boer than trust a single word uttered by House.
And the masters were hardly as clever as their sycophants imagined. Not only had they made blunder after blunder, but they had also playfully lit matches near powder kegs time and again, driving the citizens caught in the middle to largely side with the outer city.
This revolution had already been won before it even began; all the people had lacked was the courage to make that final leap.
Even so, Chu Guang had to admit that this was a once-in-a-lifetime miracle.
Though blood had been shed, it hadn't painted entire streets crimson.
Judging from the players' broadcasts on the forum, malicious violent incidents hadn't been entirely absent that night.
Some had been discovered and stopped by the players, but far more tragedies swallowed by murky corners were ultimately known only to the all-burying snow.
Yet over the past century of history, the residents of Boulder City had paid a toll in blood countless times.
It was about time they succeeded once.
After suffering the tortures of darkness to the limit, they had finally joined hands to ignite a fire to drive it away. This revolution was both a miracle with less than a one-percent probability and an inevitable outcome that was bound to happen.
There was a small slip of paper left inside the envelope.
Chu Guang shook it out and unfolded it in his palm.
It was still that delicate handwriting, but infused with a touch of youthful exuberance and lightheartedness.
[Thank you for your encouragement! If not for your words, I never would have bravely stepped forward at that moment!]
[Alisa will definitely live up to your expectations and become an even more remarkable person! ^-^]
Looking at those bright, cheerful words, Chu Guang froze for a second, his heart suddenly tightening.
He looked at Sberg and said seriously, "Could you tell me what happened with you all?"
Sberg was taken aback, then nodded. "Of course..."
The folks from the Workers' Union had asked him to do just that in the first place.
He hadn't come here merely to keep an appointment or deliver a letter for Alisa; above all, he was here to bring the story of the Workers' Union to the Alliance.
As a hostage of the Inner City residents, it wasn't until the dead of night, amid the people's deafening roars, that he was released by the Inner City "surrender faction."
He hadn't personally experienced those miraculous hours before night fell, but the folks in the Workers' Union had recounted everything to him:
How they had nearly abandoned their baseline principles in silence to become accomplices to mob violence, and how that little girl named Alisa, through her sincere apology, had reminded them of their guiding doctrine—the deeds and words of Boer.
The militia had proven surprisingly formidable against mercenaries, yet had raised their muzzles when facing their fellow compatriots... This, too, was utterly different from—indeed, the exact opposite of—the simulations he had witnessed in the screening room.
Clearly, Mr. Fang Ming's calculations had taken the ugliness of human nature into account.
Yet in the model it simulated, only that ugly side seemed to exist.
One couldn't blame it.
After all, over the past century and a half, what humanity had presented before it was almost entirely ugly, growing progressively uglier along a foreseeable trajectory, drifting ever further from the first-generation inhabitants who had created it...
Yet human complexity lay precisely in the fact that a human being was not something that could be defined by a few simple "tags."
Those militiamen who had never seen real combat were not spineless cowards; the one who had tucked tail and fled was Weilun in his power armor.
The ten-man squads and hundred-man companies dispatched across the city districts to execute orders had staked their lives and courage when they knew they were carrying out a righteous command. Yet when ordered to carry out certain "unconventional" tasks, they too hesitated.
Especially that centurion named Joy.
His family had been held as "hostages" in the Inner City.
Yet upon seeing Alisa standing with open arms, he ultimately chose to take his stand as a "human being," resolved to "bring victory and glory back to his children"—
Rather than letting his choice become a shameful tale he couldn't bear to mention, rendering himself a disgrace beyond words in the eyes of his children.
Sberg frankly recounted everything he had seen in the projection room:
Boulder City's past, the hundreds of simulated possibilities, and the tens of thousands of potential outcomes he had never managed to finish watching.
"...To be honest, not to mention Mr. Fang Ming, even I thought Boulder City was beyond saving. But how things turned out surprised me. Perhaps, just like a green-haired girl said in one of the 'endings' I saw, we actually possess the capacity for self-correction. We haven't truly developed a sense of superiority from being slaves."
Speaking to this point, Sberg let out a sigh of profound relief, suddenly bursting into delighted laughter like a schoolboy who had just walked out of an exam hall.
Having listened through this lengthy tale, Chu Guang felt heartfelt joy for these people who had achieved self-redemption, yet his predominant feeling was a lingering chill of fear.
Back then, he had merely spoken casually off the cuff, never imagining he had nearly gotten a kindhearted girl killed.
If she hadn't gone back to pick up that hairpin, she wouldn't have fallen behind; if she hadn't held herself to such exacting moral standards, she wouldn't have stepped forward at that critical moment.
In truth, the woman she had saved was hardly a good person either.
Though the ultimate outcome was not bad, if what Sberg said was true, she had practically been walking a tightrope with bottomless abysses on either side.
That was the abyss of human nature.
Had there been no Workers' Daily, no Workers' Union, and no stories of Boer, with the people lacking even something that could pass as a guiding doctrine, or if this pen-pusher before him had written with slightly less restraint, a catastrophe might have already come to pass.
Chu Guang broke into a cold sweat on her behalf.
Her survival was nothing short of a miracle...
Of course, she wasn't the only miracle.
If Fang Ming hadn't intervened, this fellow Sberg sitting in front of him would have died in prison. To have bounties placed on his head by two inhuman masters simultaneously, only to be plucked out by an AI that had awakened to "humanity," was luck on par with hitting the grand lottery jackpot.
The fact that this guy was still alive, peacefully sitting here telling stories—that was the greatest miracle of the "Boulder City Revolution"!
"Who is your leader now?" Chu Guang asked the question he cared about most.
Sberg shook his head.
"None for the moment... Some suggested copying Ideal City and establishing a council without a director, carrying on the first-generation inhabitants' ideal that 'Boulder City has no living castellan.' But we all feel Ideal City's method isn't suitable for us just yet."
"Your instincts are right," Chu Guang nodded, continuing, "Doing that is tantamount to creating a new Inner City."
"So others suggested the militia and the Workers' Union each nominate representatives to take turns serving as castellan... But Joy thinks having someone from the militia become castellan is a bad idea; he suspects opportunists are lurking in his ranks. In the end, we hadn't made up our minds, so we set up a Crisis Response Office first, aiming to draft a constitution before gradually transitioning to the new administration."
Speaking up to here, Sberg said sheepishly, "They also asked me to ask you... if you would be willing to take over this mess. We've read your constitution. What we want is practically what you're already doing."
Ideal City's ideals were poison to almost all wastelander survivors except themselves, but the Alliance's "survivors unite" fit the reborn Boulder City like a glove.
They were separated by merely twenty to thirty kilometers; drawing rigid lines between them felt too distant.
Yet the Inner City residents had poked such an enormous hole in things that the people of Boulder City now felt like impoverished beggars, too embarrassed to ask: please let us move into the same house with you.
Looking at the uneasy Sberg, Chu Guang's feelings were mixed.
Originally, he had only intended to poach a brick from their wall, never expecting the entire wall to collapse right into his lap.
Of course.
He certainly wouldn't leave them out in the cold.
Never mind five hundred thousand people—even if it were five million, as long as they proactively embraced progressive ideas and didn't barge in to turn his and the players' community into a chaotic mess, they were comrades on the same battlefront.
If one asked why:
There was only one reason.
Because the Alliance was no empire; it was the Human Renaissance United Front—an alliance where all survivors joined hands.
He had never forgotten the words he once spoke: this was a place for survivors to huddle together for warmth.
"Welcome!"
Chu Guang looked at Sberg with a smile. "We welcome you into the Alliance's big family. You have made a clean break with the past, and we are thrilled to have another comrade on the battlefront to end the Wasteland Era."
Sberg stared at him in pleasant shock. "You... agree?"
Chu Guang nodded. "However, we will not admit you immediately. You are a settlement of five hundred thousand people; we need a period of smooth transition. Please understand our difficulties as well."
Sberg nodded vigorously. "I understand! Not just me... everyone else will understand too. If we threw open the gates of the towering wall right now, all of Qingquan City would be swarming with marauders."
"Not just marauders, but also the coming year's Tide. We need Boulder City, as a fortress, to absorb some of that pressure." Chu Guang paused, then asked, "Who is the representative of the Workers' Union?"
"Lovett," Sberg answered promptly. "We unanimously agree that his speech in the newspaper's broadcast booth played an indispensable role, mobilizing at least half the workers and preventing more than half the atrocities."
Lovett?
Chu Guang paused, a strange look flickering across his face. "Is he by any chance also a carpenter?"
Sberg's eyes widened in astonishment. "Do you know him?"
"No... it's nothing." Chu Guang shook his head.
Perhaps it was just a coincidence.
History was inherently an inevitability woven from countless coincidences.
Pausing, Chu Guang looked at him earnestly and said, "I will have a copy of our laws made for you. You can solicit opinions from everyone to make additions. Furthermore, I will dispatch commissioners to assist you. Among them will be staff from Refugee Home, experts from the shelter... They can help you resolve practical problems."
"Thank you so much!" Sberg scratched the back of his head sheepishly. "Oh, right... we still need to choose someone to call the shots. That's a consensus among us. Would you like to decide?"
"You can decide such matters yourselves. The Alliance only provides macroscopic planning, ensuring that Alliance law is executed properly according to protocol across every settlement, overseeing military security, and so forth..."
Seeing Sberg's trepidation, Chu Guang smiled and continued, "In fact, there's no need to consult me. You have done splendidly so far; you are fully capable of taking that final step yourselves and electing a new castellan.
"Of course, if that new castellan performs poorly or betrays our ideals, I will remove him from office without hesitation."
If a pack of born lackeys had won, Chu Guang would never have granted them the right to determine their own destiny—after all the maneuvering, it would only devolve into games of thrones, and he wouldn't even have consented to their joining the Alliance.
Following behind the Alliance as collaborators like Lion and Honey Badger would have been their fate, awakening only whenever they finally saw the light.
Yet the survivors of Boulder City proved salvageable after all; they had achieved their own redemption and voluntarily shut down that man-eating casino.
Such a miracle was overwhelmingly unlikely to occur.
Yet since it had occurred, it deserved to endure.
The first-generation inhabitants of Boulder City had said that Boulder City had no living castellan; respecting those great figures' wishes was the right thing to do.
Sberg felt a touch of regret, but Chu Guang's words made sense. Besides, this would appease the voices within their ranks that distrusted the Alliance—the Workers' Union would rather choose a fellow worker as castellan than have the Alliance install a new master over them.
Who would have thought that the Alliance didn't care in the least which of them stepped forward as representative, and harbored no intention of becoming masters riding on their backs?
Sberg breathed a sigh of relief.
"Be that as it may... I hope you can take over the militia and equipment inventories as soon as possible. Joy is a good man, but at a juncture like this, being a good man isn't enough."
Chu Guang nodded. "No problem. I will deploy the Alliance's First Corps and the Burning Corps over there to maintain order and reorganize the Boulder City Militia. Henceforth, the salaries of those militiamen will be issued by the Alliance Logistics Department."
Silver coins were already circulating inside and outside Boulder City, and parts of the Burning Corps had already moved in; this task wouldn't be too difficult.
Sberg nodded in understanding.
Now, only one question remained on his mind...
"The castellan... I mean, Mr. Fang Ming. Has he really left?"
He remembered Fang Ming telling him that it intended to stay on the north shore of Ling Lake for a while, spending its final moments there.
The Boulder Building had collapsed this morning.
It was undoubtedly gone...
Perceiving the reluctance to let go in Sberg's eyes, Chu Guang pondered for a moment before speaking slowly:
"My assistant told me that when it departed, it carried no regrets, and felt profound comfort that you embarked on an ending it had never envisioned.
"If you don't want to disappoint that gentleman, then carry its memory forward as you stride toward the new era."
"You're right... We can't always count on the castellan to solve everything." Saying this, Sberg seemed to find peace as well.
Seeing this fellow worker stand up to leave, Chu Guang suddenly remembered something and called out to stop him.
"Right, I said I'd let you try on my gear."
He had nearly forgotten such an important matter!
Halting in his tracks, Sberg was stunned. Clearly not expecting the Administrator to say this, he laughed wryly.
"Ah? Are you serious? Just chatting with you like this has already made my day. That really won't be necessary."
He didn't deserve such an honor.
Chu Guang didn't mind in the least, walking over with a chuckle.
"I'm not joking. Since you're already here, give it a shot... Follow me."
Feeling out of his depth, Sberg nodded and followed Chu Guang out of the reading room, heading all the way to the elevator lobby on Floor B3.
The azure power armor stood right there.
Looking at the open hatch, Sberg squeezed in gingerly, and with Chu Guang's help, fastened the rear armor plates and the helmet visor.
Looking at this worker whose silhouette had more than doubled in bulk, Chu Guang smiled and asked, "How does it feel?"
The blue tin can stood motionless for a long while before an anguished cry drifted out from within the armor:
"I... I can't move."
Chu Guang was caught off guard, then slapped the back of his head.
"Almost forgot... Xiao Qi, crank the armor's engine output power to 100%."
Xiao Qi's reply sounded in his ear: "Understood!"
As electricity generated by cold fusion surged through every part of the armor, Sberg, clad inside, was finally able to move.
Albeit clumsily, like a drunken man.
Watching him stumble around, Chu Guang couldn't help recalling when he had first acquired the power armor from Shelter 117, feeling quite nostalgic.
Ever since breaking through Level 30, he had mostly kept it in unpowered mode to conserve energy, relying solely on his physical strength to drive the armor.
After reaching Level 40, he had grown entirely accustomed to the weight of power armor; even without turning on the power at all, he could stride about freely.
Fang Ming had become human in the end.
Yet he himself seemed to be drifting further and further from the identity of "human"...
After savoring the feeling of immense strength for a little while, Sberg crawled out of the iron can.
Massaging his aching arms, he looked at Chu Guang hesitantly, unable to contain the shock in his heart, and asked in a low voice: "Do you... usually not turn on the power at all?"
Chu Guang smiled and said modestly, "I switch it on when needed."
"Unbelievable..." Sberg stared in wide-eyed awe, his eyes nearly popping out of his head. "You can actually wear it like regular clothes."
Just how strong was this guy?!
His stories had still been far too conservative; in all likelihood, Boer in power armor wouldn't even be his match...
Chu Guang lightly patted Sberg on the shoulder and laughed heartily.
"So as it turns out, an Awakened truly can defeat power armor. Take that news back and tell your fellow workers.
"Your headline wasn't an exaggeration at all!"
...
Boulder City.
On the plaza bordering the Inner City and Outer City stood a crowd of crestfallen, disheveled people.
They were all Inner City residents holding black cards.
Surrounding them was a cordon of militiamen with live ammunition.
Notably, Weilun, chiliarch of the First Cohort, had been found.
The coward had donned his power armor and holed up inside a warehouse in the outer city, barricading the door shut. He had probably intended to flee the city once the heat died down, yet had forgotten to disable the tracking beacon.
It was laughable, really: having never even served in a discipline corps, he didn't even remember his power armor had such a function.
The militiamen who had seized the command post quickly tracked him down following the locator signal.
He was the first to order fire; though his subordinates had raised their muzzles, several protesting residents had still been killed.
Ashen-faced, he knelt in the square, eyes lifeless. It was unclear whether he regretted giving the order in the first place or regretted not putting up a desperate last stand in his power armor.
Perhaps he could have taken a few down with him...
Perhaps.
Incidentally, that he could kneel here begging for mercy made him comparatively fortunate.
Militia Commander Zhao Yongxu had died at the hands of mercenaries eyeing his wealth while trying to flee. And Joy's immediate superior, Russell, hadn't even had the chance to slip into power armor before being gunned down by his own mutinous subordinates.
Of the five chiliarchs, he was the sole survivor.
Although Chiliarch Weilun was the only one kneeling while the vast majority of Inner City residents remained standing, their faces were equally pale as dirt.
There were 1,507 black-card residents in total; four to five hundred were under sixteen, and over three hundred were past sixty.
Everyone was waiting for the verdict of the furious populace.
Accompanied by several workers, Alisa spotted her family in a corner of the plaza and sprinted over frantically.
"Mother! Brothers!"
Warfield stared unblinkingly at Alisa running toward them. Without answering, he suddenly raised his hand and slapped her across the face with all his might.
Smack—!
Having gone without sleep all night, Alisa's head was already buzzing; the slap stunned her completely. She tumbled sideways to the ground and sat there dazed, unable to get up.
Warfield was swiftly pinned to the ground by two militiamen. Fuming with rage, Joy stepped up and kicked him, cursing the coward under his breath.
Held against the dirt, Warfield didn't even seem to notice the kick. He spat at Alisa, his bleeding face contorted into a snarl: "Get lost! You're no part of this family! Drop dead somewhere far away!"
Clutching her stinging cheek, Alisa stared blankly at the hysterical Warfield, tears welling up in her eyes once more.
Yet she didn't let herself cry.
"Brother..."
"Are you crazy?! She's your sister—!" Gish glared furiously at his elder brother, rushing forward to help Alisa up, but was hauled back firmly by their mother.
Garnis shook her head, casting a pleading look at her younger son.
She didn't know why.
The moment they were surrounded by those lowlifes, she had thought they were dead for sure.
Yet seeing Alisa safe and sound, she suddenly didn't feel so afraid anymore.
It was good enough if one of them survived.
She only hoped those people would just shoot her quickly and not do anything worse...
"Enough! Are you trying to beat him to death?"
A resonant voice rebuked the militiamen thrashing Warfield.
Lovett strode over to the bruised and battered man. He intended to reach down and haul him to his feet, but seeing that twisted sneer, he pulled his hand back.
"I feel ashamed for you, sir." Lovett looked at the wretched creature with pity.
Even now, he still assumed everyone was as ugly as he was.
"Then shoot me!" Spitting out a mouthful of bloody saliva, Warfield glared fiercely at him, glanced around at the surrounding militiamen, and suddenly cackled, "Go on, shoot! Kill me!"
As if he knew where he was heading, he wasn't afraid in the least.
Lovett looked him straight in the eyes. "I will not."
"Why?! Shoot, damn you! Why won't you shoot?!" Silent at first, Warfield suddenly shrieked like a madman, clawing at Lovett's boot, only to be dodged.
Lovett kicked his filthy hands away, the pity in his gaze gradually hardening into contempt.
"Why? Are you still asking that question?
"How many times do I have to say it? Because we are not you."
Warfield froze.
Those words sounded awfully familiar.
Yesterday, someone seemed to have said the exact same thing to him...
Did these people coordinate in advance?
Why did they even share the exact same tone...?
Lovett continued with calm composure: "If we kill you, it will be because, starting from when the sun rose today, you violated our laws—not because I'm itching to chop you into mincemeat for the dogs and take a gun to shoot you dead. Though I'd wager someone like you has treated your own words as hot air countless times, we are not you."
With lips swollen like sausages, Warfield looked utterly shell-shocked, staring dumbly at this bearded man.
Lovett paused, then added: "We have a doctrine. It can hardly be called perfect, but we keep our word. If we said we only want a fresh start, then a fresh start is all we want.
"We will confiscate your ill-gotten wealth; after all, it was fleeced from us in the first place. Don't try to haggle with us; we are tallying the accounts right now.
"From now on, you are citizens of Boulder City. You will have to find honest work to feed yourselves.
"Of course, if you fear us, pack your bags and get the hell out of here!"
Glancing one last time at the cowering wretch, Lovett sneered disdainfully. "Consider those punches a lesson. Assaulting someone on the street, right in front of the guards—according to the crisis management regulations, you ought to be flogged."
He helped Alisa up, instructing a medic to take her away to rest, then picked up a megaphone and stepped before the Inner City residents.
He shouted in a booming voice: "Listen up, residents of the Inner City!
"This is the joint decision made after deliberations among the Militia, the Workers' Union, and the Crisis Response Office. You now have two choices.
"First: come clean about all your assets in Boulder City and voluntarily surrender everything you took from us. Then, as citizens of Boulder City, start anew alongside us. From this day forth, there will be no distinction between Inner City and Outer City!
"Or, if you don't trust us, take your luggage, get the hell out, and go find your utopia out in the wasteland!
"Naturally, we will audit your assets. You will have to account for the source of every major deposit in your accounts and the destination of every major expenditure. We won't let thieves slip away: either pay your fines, or serve time in our new prison!"
Having finished, Lovett waved his hand. Several staff members from the Crisis Response Office set up a table on the square, leaving these masters who had lost their black cards to decide their own fate.
Bonnie wept until her eyes were bloodshot.
This upheaval had stripped her of almost everything.
Her husband was dead, her brother was dead, her family... more than half the senior officers in the militia had perished last night.
She gripped the hand of her younger son, Kermit, her tear-blurred eyes brimming with despair and confusion about the future.
"Why must they be so heartless..."
What were they supposed to do now?
Outside was the man-eating wasteland...
Kermit was the same. Stripped of his fair-weather companions, his face no longer bore any trace of youthful arrogance or swagger.
He glanced around in terror, teeth chattering with fear.
Last night, his father had summoned him to the council hall. Seeing the S-coins wiped out in an instant, Kermit had been too frightened to go.
He had hidden under his quilt, shivering in the dark until dawn broke the following morning, only to hear the news of his father's death from his mother...
Perhaps his father was the truly "wise" one, departing alongside that "glorious" era to keep the ancestral masters company.
He too ought to have died in that collapsing building.
Yet he simply couldn't muster the courage...
Watching those sniveling wretches, the electrician standing next to Lovett couldn't help cursing: "Damn it... just put them out of their misery. A bunch of cowards!"
Lovett shrugged. "I understand how you feel, but think about those outer city residents who took shelter inside the Inner City."
The electrician frowned. "What do they have to do with this? They were hostages. We already decided not to settle scores with them."
"They only became hostages after the militia revolted," Lovett corrected him, looking him in the eye. "Before that, they were accomplices to the Inner City nobles, or had licked Master Stephen's boots and whips. Otherwise, why would they have been allowed to hide inside back then? Was it out of the master's charity?"
The electrician fell silent. Thinking it over, it did make sense; logic was never one-sided—every coin had two faces.
Lovett sighed. "To purge 'them,' we would have to purge 'them' too, an endless cycle of 'thems.' First we'd have to purge militiamen who accidentally killed civilians in the riots, purge those who did bad things but stopped midway, then purge those whose loyalty wavered, and those who stood by silently witnessing the atrocities of Master Stephen... Enough. None of us are entirely pure either. We stayed silent once; we nearly became them.
"We have already eliminated all the Master Stephens; now they are merely our ghosts. Let it end here. Neither you nor I want to see the filthy filth we nailed into coffins crawling back out."
This was also the reason he hadn't killed Warfield.
He certainly had the power to do so; at most, it would make Alisa cry her eyes out once more, while many more would cheer. Those who thought it inappropriate would keep silent, biting their tongues amid the "correct" atmosphere.
He understood a simple truth: both nutrient paste and cake were real things that existed in this world, having nothing to do with reality versus fairy tales—merely a matter of quantity.
Yet wanting both the sweetness of cake and the filling sustenance of nutrient paste was the truly impractical fairy tale.
Crossing the line or not crossing it—in the end, they could only choose one. Claiming to cross it while not crossing it, or selectively crossing parts of it, was pure delusion.
Boer had countless opportunities to become Master Stephen; he had all the strength in the world. But he had only one chance to become Boer.
Lovett was aware of many things Alisa was oblivious to.
The militia hadn't turned their cloaks out of sympathy for her tears or cuteness. A month ago, most militiamen had proposed that their wages be paid in dinars or silver coins, only to be rejected. That was the real reason most soldiers stood with the outer city residents.
Their ranks were not devoid of bad apples; some had taken advantage of the riots to loot residents, but upon realizing those residents were penniless paupers just like themselves, they had wryly let them go. Only then did those mutinous soldiers unite with the rest.
The Workers' Union had stated over the broadcast that the past was wiped clean, and they would honor their promise.
The militia hadn't spoken up, but that didn't mean the soldiers were blind; the eyes watching them were not without vigilance.
Settling old scores with the nobility was something the soldiers supported; they disliked those masters and didn't mind looking the other way.
Yet once this started, where would it end?
Would scores be settled with them next?
Either way, it was an alarming signal for them; once cracks formed in trust, greater disasters would brew.
Lovett remembered every word he had spoken.
They would establish a law that everyone had to abide by, cutting ties cleanly with the past. From now on, everyone would live in the sunlight of a new era, remaining vigilant against this settlement ever turning back into a dark jungle.
Just then, a militiaman walked over.
"Comrade Lovett, someone at the gate wants to see you."
Lovett turned to him and asked, "Who?"
The militiaman replied, "Melvin. He brought five truckloads of grain and daily supplies, probably bought from the Alliance... He's begging us to spare his family."
Lovett narrowed his eyes. "A trade?"
The militiaman shook his head. "Doesn't seem like it. He handed over the food first, then dropped to his knees begging for mercy... I pulled him up. The man seems to have lost his mind."
Lovett remained silent for a moment, the sharpness in his eyes softening somewhat.
"Tell him that we haven't forgotten the fire from five years ago. We remember all the even more vile things the others did, too. We will nail their past to history's pillar of shame alongside that collapsed skyscraper.
"But the purge ends here."
Even if they killed Master Stephen, it would only add one more corpse to the street and a few more flies.
Yet now, they stood united—
And every Master Stephen would fear them!
Of this, Lovett had no doubt whatsoever...
...
With the audit and reckoning of the Inner City residents complete, the curtain had officially fallen on Boulder City's dramatic upheaval, and people began cleaning up the wreckage left in its wake.
With their backs to the midday sun, people dragged frozen corpses from the snowdrifts.
Among them were men, women, children, and the elderly. Some had been discovered in the streets; others were hauled out of back alleys.
Aside from grieving in silence, all people could do was carve this painful memory onto their gravestones and carry their share forward into the future.
At that point, someone suddenly proposed that since Boulder City was in such dire shortage of food, why not take things to their logical conclusion and make them truly a part of our bodies?
It was an abhorrent, hideous notion, yet from a purely practical standpoint, this settlement of over five hundred thousand people seemed to have precious few choices.
The nutrients provided by slime mold fruiting bodies were far too sparse, and hunting those things on a large scale was impossible in the dead of winter.
When driven mad by hunger, humans would commit mad deeds. In a sense, marauders were simply people who had gone mad on the wasteland.
They hadn't turned into new masters.
Yet at this moment, they faced the danger of turning into something else...
Fortunately, things took a fresh turn.
They were not as utterly isolated and helpless as they had been a century and a half ago; their closest neighbor lay just twenty to thirty kilometers across the city ruins.
Just as people wavered over whether to feed their deceased compatriots into the nutrient paste synthesizer, startling good news swept in from outside the towering gates:
The Alliance had arrived!
Chapter 544