1972 Hypocrite!
Nothing but silence could be heard. Everybody held their breath and waited for Gu Zhengyang’s decision.
Gu Zhengyang did not look at the saber next to his feet at all. “I will not kill you.”
Zhao Lie coughed violently again and vomited blood that was almost solid. He finally got back to his feet, shaking. After staring at Gu Zhengyang with complicated feelings for a while, he turned back and walked outside without looking back.
“Zhao Lie, you can stay in the Village of Peace as the captain of the exploration team!” Gu Zhengyang shouted. “n.o.body is kicking you away. You are truly a very distinguished captain of the exploration team!”
Zhao Lie heard none of it. He staggered forward, and when he was out of the circle of iron tanks, he looked at the wounded soldiers around and suddenly said, “Leader, after the fierce battle last night, a lot of wounded enemy soldiers were left behind. Other than our own people, there are still the captives that the other villages did not take away. How do you prepare to deal with those people? Kill them all?”
Gu Zhengyang was slightly dazed. He shook his head and said, “You know that I will not kill them. Throwing them to the other side of the red line will be enough.”
Zhao Lie smiled and continued. “The weak, the old, the sick, and the disabled from other villages, you won’t kill them, will you?”
Gu Zhengyang continued shaking his head. “Of course I will not kill them.”
Zhao Lie’s eyes turned sharp again. “Even if those women and children were involved in the battle last night and killed our own warriors?”
Gu Zhengyang hesitated for a long time. He then sighed and said, “Like I said just now, a reckless a.s.sault is too risky. I only want to take our brothers and a.s.sets back to the Village of Peace as soon as possible.”
“Hahaha!” Zhao Lie suddenly raised his head and laughed, both miserably and devastatingly. He turned around and pointed at Gu Zhengyang, shouting, “Leader, you think it is an action of mercy when you do not kill the lost soldiers and captives, don’t you?
“But you do not know that those heavily wounded people will die all the same when they do not have enough medicine and food to recover!
“Without the protection of the young warriors, how will the non-combatants, including the women and the children, survive in the Land of Sins? They will either starve or be enslaved by gangs and other big villages as soldiers and prost.i.tutes. Their outcome will be even more miserable than death!
“Hehe. By killing them now, you are actually granting them a quick, clean death. But your act of ‘mercy’ will bring torture and agony that is a hundred times more insufferable than death!
“Have you really never thought of that? Or maybe you are merely persisting in some boring morals because you do not want your own hands to be stained by blood…
“It is useless. In the Land of Sins, your hands have been stained with as much blood of the weak and old as mine have. You will never be able to make them clean again!”
Gu Zhengyang had not been knocked down by Zhao Lie’s b.l.o.o.d.y claws just now, but his internal organs seemed to have been seriously wounded by his words. He grunted, and his face turned pale.
“From my own perspective, I should naturally thank you for letting me go today,” Zhao Lie said gloomily. “However, from the perspective of the Village of Peace, it is only more proof that you are an indecisive, wavering coward. A man like you does not deserve to be the leader of the Village of Peace or have the capability to keep the safety of so many people, no matter how strong you are!
“Let me ask you one last time. The saber is right below your feet, and my neck is right here. Will you kill me or not?”
Gu Zhengyang ground his teeth, and his veins jumped crazily on the forehead. Struggling for a long time, he finally declared as rough as iron, “Get lost!”
“You will regret it.”
After saying that, Zhao Lie walked out step by step, like an eagle whose wings were broken.
Zhao Chong watched in a daze for a long time. Finally, he looked at Gu Zhengyang and Han Te with obvious hatred and rushed forward to catch up to his father.
The father and the son supported each other and disappeared into the ruins and the undying dust.
A lot of the villagers seemed to have something they wanted to say, but Gu Zhengyang simply stopped them and said, “There’s no need to say anything. Treat the wounded and collect our a.s.sets. Let’s return to the Village of Peace as quickly as possible!”
…
Despite the heavy casualties in the Bliss Ceremony that year, there were far more trophies than usual. It took them an entire day to move all the a.s.sets back to the iron-sh.e.l.led boats of the Village of Peace. Then, they activated the power rune arrays on the bottom of the s.h.i.+ps, sailing them back to the center of the lank to be anch.o.r.ed again.
Gu Zhengyang, however, seemed to have been heavily wounded. His previous sickness had returned after the fierce battle. He entrusted all the organizational work to other people, and he simply locked himself in the greenhouse where the Gold Barley was grown.
When Han Te and Liu Li went to check on him with Li Yao, he was holding some Gold Barley and smelling the fragrance of the plant, not moving at all.
“Dad, are you alright?”
Liu Li jumped forward and grabbed Gu Zhengyang’s heavily wounded hands worriedly.
“Rest a.s.sured. I’m fine.”
Seeing his daughter, Gu Zhengyang finally put on a rigid smile. He opened his fingers and rubbed his daughter’s hair. He then looked at Han Te and said, “Thanks to the amazing electric currents that ran randomly inside Han Te’s body caused by the mutation half a month ago, I was able to have an epiphany when I studied the trajectories of the electric currents. That’s why I could temporarily recover my past level and defeat Zhao Lie.”
“Master, you’re the best!” Looking at Li Yao, Han Te grinned. “What ‘Blood Eagle’? He is nothing more than an old hen. Of course he is not a match for you!”
“However…” Gu Zhengyang’s smile vanished, replaced by gloom on his face. His eyes were somewhat hollowed as he said in a low voice, “Although I defeated Zhao Lie, I couldn’t convince him. I cannot even convince myself.
“Am I really right? Is Zhao Lie really wrong? Should we really not attack the camps of other villages at dawn today? At the last moment, should I really have let Zhao Lie go?”
“Dad!” Liu Li grew anxious. “What—what are you talking about? Of course you are right. Didn’t you always say that we are good people—or people, at least? We cannot do the same as the insane, atrocious guys!”
“But the result is all the same,” Gu Zhengyang said in depression. “Zhao Lie was quite right. Even though we did not kill the wounded soldiers and their families, they—they will not survive long. They will either brutalize each other for the scarce a.s.sets or be enslaved by the gangs and the large villages, with an outcome even more miserable than death. Eventually… everybody will be killed. Even the strongest person is still destined to be swallowed by the Land of Sins!
“If Zhao Lie is a real scoundrel, I am a hypocrite. I knew that they would certainly die but did nothing about it. I just did not want to kill them with my own hands, which would make my hands dirty.”
In front of his daughter and his disciple, Gu Zhengyang’s seemingly solid armor finally collapsed, and his voice shook violently.
“That is not our fault!” Han Te waved his arms hard anxiously. “There are limited resources and too many starving people in the Land of Sins. We can barely save ourselves. Are we really capable of saving other people? There’s nothing we can do!”
“Yes. There’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing any of us can do…” Gu Zhengyang coughed in pain again. He coughed so hard that he almost vomited his internal organs.
In the middle of his coughs, he seemed to make a decision. Pus.h.i.+ng away his daughter and his disciple’s hands that were extended to him, he said, “I’m fine. Liu Li, there… there’s something that I need to tell you. Han Te, you should listen to it, too.”
Han Te and Liu Li looked at each other, both surprised at the unprecedented solemnity in Gu Zhengyang’s voice.
“Or rather, it is a story that your mother told me before her death, about a group of very special people,” Gu Zhengyang said. “A story about the Cultivators.”
Li Yao’s soul shook so hard that it almost spread out of his steel sh.e.l.l.
He did not expect that he would find the Cultivators hiding in the Martial Meritocrats Sector, or the Land of Sins, so quickly!
He increased the sensitivity of his soul to the highest level without letting go of Gu Zhengyang’s every heartbeat to make sure that the guy was telling the truth.
Han Te and Liu Li looked at each other. Obviously, they did not know the first thing about the history of Cultivators. “What are Cultivators?”
“A groundless legend, a bizarre story, or maybe a bunch of indecisive and imprudent cowards.”
Leaning against the wall, Gu Zhengyang kept his eyes half shut and mumbled, “Before, I was hesitating whether or not to tell you about the Cultivators because they and their story are too different and incompatible with the Land of Sins and the entire world that we are living in. They are almost entirely contradictory! I almost feel like the story of the Cultivators will not bring you any good. Instead, it will more likely bring a destructive catastrophe to the Village of Peace and even the entire Land of Sins.
“However…”
After a miserable smile, he said, “I have already thought it through. The Land of Sins is already as bad as can be. How can any disaster make it any worse?
“Besides, according to Zhao Lie, the gangs of Double Dragons Valley are making preparations to deal with the Village of Peace. If I don’t tell you right now, I will probably never have the chance to in the future.
“Liu Li, do you know how your mother came up with the idea of growing Gold Barley to save everybody in the Land of Sins? It was because of a story that she accidentally heard when she was very little. The story said that a long, long, long time ago when the Land of Sins was still known as the Martial Meritocrats Sector, there were a bunch of people named ‘Cultivators’.”
With the most solemn expression, Gu Zhengyang took out a vintage metal box from a bag on his waist. He opened the box carefully, and there was a very delicate piece of velvet with a chip the size of a fingernail inside.
After scanning with his soul, Li Yao concluded from the structure and the hundred rune arrays on the surface of the jade chip that it should be some sort of storage chip the size of a mini jade chip.
Judging from the scratches on the edge of the chip, it must have been made a long time ago. Perhaps it had been pa.s.sed on for hundreds of years.
There was also a shallow crack on the surface of the chip, which caused irreversible damage to the structure.