Chapter 86: Once Again at the Crossroads of Life

When word spread that Lin Wang’s team would be leaving Sparkfire Town for a while, Zheng Tian and the others fell into a brief revelry after silently praying that Lin Wang and the rest would die quickly out there.

The gunfire and fights from the films, the music, the noise, the chatter, and the clinking of glasses in the courtyard of the Iron Curtain Second Generation went on for a long time, lasting until midnight.

No one worried about disturbing the neighbors.

This was the slums. By half past nine, the wastelanders had already moved themselves like ants relocating a nest into the communal sleep pods.

The wastelanders did not even have the right to choose where they slept tonight.

Even if some remained at home for special reasons, or if the neighbors around them had already been kept awake by the racket before nine, no one dared come knocking.

To provoke a semi-professional scavenger team with a second-rank practitioner, one that was rising fast, took tremendous courage.

And there was plainly no such courage in the slums.

So even if they were unhappy, they had to endure it.

Chen Hanyu was as quiet as always and went to bed early at nine.

But when Ou Youning, Zheng Tian, and Wen Lei chatted excitedly, they made no effort at all to keep their voices down.

Especially after Wen Lei had accidentally drunk a bit too much and become slightly tipsy, and then took out his pocket watch to look at Ai Jiasan’s photograph, his voice grew even louder.

Of course Wen Lei still remembered the lie Ren Zhong had once told.

In the world built by Ren Zhong’s lie, Ai Jiasan was still very much alive.

Wen Lei believed it without a shred of doubt.

Holding the pocket watch, he began to imagine the day when he and Ai Jiasan would meet at some street corner in a city somewhere, and before he knew it, he was wearing a foolish, lovestruck grin. Naturally, this drew Ou Youning’s mockery.

If Bai Feng had not used his long arms and the greater strength of an armored warrior to pull the two apart, Ou Youning would have been beaten senseless on the spot by the enraged Wen Lei, so badly even a xenobeast would have lost the appetite to bite.

Ren Zhong did not take part in the group’s horseplay. He merely held his teacup and sipped slowly, every so often glancing at the tablet beside him, where stock prices were flickering.

He was memorizing the time points of the recent price movements of those wildly surging stocks over the past twenty-four hours.

Two days earlier, he had switched to a new computer with internet access, so he no longer needed to enter the wrist device every time he checked the market.

A slightly drunk Zheng Tian leaned over, put his face in front of the tablet, and seemed to rest his chin, deliberately or not, in the crook of Ren Zhong’s arm on the table as he said, “Brother Ren, you never buy stocks yourself, so why do you always like watching them? Are you studying them? Tell me, once you’ve figured them out, if we manage to save up enough money in the future, how about we try buying some stocks too? With your wisdom, Brother Ren, you ought to be able to make money, right?”

Ren Zhong shook his head and slapped Zheng Tian’s head aside. “This is not an area you should meddle in. Nor is it for me. I can’t figure it out, and no one can.”

“Oh. Then why do you watch?”

“I am experiencing the cruelty of the world, and also imagining a beautiful future.”

“Uh...”

Zheng Tian understood nothing at all.

Recently, Brother Ren had become more and more enigmatic, and the bearing of a great master around him grew more and more pronounced.

Truly worthy of having once been a citizen. Educated people were different.

...

After midnight, Ren Zhong lay in the spacious, ventilated, airtight armed sleep pod. The night light shone starkly on his face, and in his ears faintly sounded the whisper of wind stirred by the ventilation system, while purified air brushed softly past his ears.

It was clearly a comfortable environment, yet he lay there with his eyes wide open, unable to fall asleep.

He had not turned on the wrist device’s hypnotic function.

When facing important thoughts, he preferred the old-fashioned method of keeping the body awake.

Lin Wang and the others had left temporarily.

Should he continue to bide his time, or seize the chance to act without restraint?

At first glance, this seemed like nothing more than a small choice concerning only the action plan for the next few days.

But Ren Zhong, who had grasped part of the nature of society, knew that in truth it was a choice of life and death.

Once again, he stood at a fork in the road of life.

Left, or right?

One step back, the world opens wide; one step forward, a corpse is laid out in the wilderness.

His heart was in conflict.

If he kept a low profile and continued to lie dormant, controlling the pace, then he would surely live longer. Perhaps he would truly have a chance to leave with Lin Wang’s team, wash his hands of everything, and travel far away.

Perhaps after leaving Sparkfire Town, he could live for a very long, very long time.

And of course, the longer one lived, the more one learned. Then if he should suffer misfortune and die again to regress, the spiral ascent would be even faster.

But Ren Zhong also had another choice: ignore everything and unleash himself completely. If he died, then so be it; dead was merely sleep. In the opening stage, he could force out every last shred of spiral potential he could possibly squeeze from time.

He had once thought he could achieve perfection this time, but now it seemed there were still many imperfections to remedy and many details to improve.

For ordinary people, time reversal might be a blessing, but for a perfectionist researcher, it was actually torture.

Because beyond perfection there was always something even more perfect.

Ren Zhong thought that if he gave up on developing the opening stage to the utmost and simply left, then no matter what heights he reached in the future, he would surely feel regret.

Turning the page.

The next page.

Like the college entrance examination: if someone is lazy at the starting line and fails to unleash their potential, regret will follow them for life.

No matter what heights one ultimately reaches in this life, when the hair has turned white and the years have turned golden and youth has faded, one will still inevitably look back and wonder: if back then I had worked a little harder at that fork in the road of life, what would I be now?

This does not differ according to social standing, achievement, or wealth.

On the contrary, the more driven and struggle-minded a person is, the more likely they are to fall into such regret when old age comes.

Ren Zhong was exactly that kind of person.

His life was full of self-reproach, and he abhorred regret to the extreme, even when he knew full well it could be remedied.

He began to think.

If he chose to lie low, to keep his present posture and continue down this road, then the final outcome could only be what Madafu had said before the census: leaving with endless regret and with only a small number of wastelanders who still trusted him, departing in lowliness toward the place Madafu believed existed, though in truth it did not.

Because at this pace, the town would certainly fail the census, and it was impossible to break free from the threat of the demon infant.

Then, assuming he could live on forever, when many years later he finally returned in glory, facing the ruins of Sparkfire Town and the bones strewn across the ground just like in Bone Valley, what would he think?

I would surely think this:

If I had taken one more step back then, even if it meant dying one more time and getting past that hurdle, what would Sparkfire Town have become?

Could I bear that kind of guilt?

Could I ever walk out of such regret?

Would I perhaps think that if my one death, my one extra bout of suffering, could buy life for twenty thousand people, then what was so impossible about that—and choose to take my own life outright?

And then, when I used the strength accumulated over a lifetime and bloomed anew in this Sparkfire Town, effortlessly accomplishing the once unimaginably difficult goal and saving everyone...

Would I truly have no regret then?

Would I have no new regrets in the future?

Ren Zhong found that he could not answer this question.

Because his fear of death had gradually been dissolved by the experience of constant rebirth.

He did not deny that this town was full of darkness and filth.

Perhaps many wastelanders, like that burly man surnamed Huang, were not worthy of living at all.

But from this soil thick with grime, there had still been born Yu Jin, that deceived little girl, Wen Lei, Ai Jiasan, Chen Hanyu—these people who ought to live on.

They were the scant light in the darkness.

Ren Zhong also knew that there must be more such people he had not yet seen but who nevertheless existed, struggling in their own way and barely hanging on.

Not seeing them did not mean they did not exist.

At the thought of what the scene would be like after he left, Ren Zhong’s breathing gradually quickened.

How could I bear to extinguish the hope in my own heart for them?

Something like that, even once, I do not want to do.

Because I do not want to leave a crack in my own memory.

The feelings Ren Zhong placed in the hands of the wastelanders of Sparkfire Town were no less than those he had for Madafu.

This was the starting point of his ideals, the nursery where he had planted the first spark that belonged to him, and more than that, it was the meaning of his continued survival on Origin Star as a human from the twenty-first century.

Though he had not been here long, he truly felt deeply for Sparkfire Town, and he had never tried to restrain that feeling; on the contrary, he deliberately indulged it.

Only thus could he remember who he was, where he came from, and what he was meant to do.

Rather than, like everyone else, immediately merging into a new social stratum once their position changed.

Tonight’s wanton noise and revelry from Zheng Tian and the others were, in the end, nothing more than the result of their having already adapted to the identity of being the strongest semi-professional team in Sparkfire Town.

They had become utterly indifferent to the feelings of others.

The next step was becoming utterly indifferent to the lives of others, whether those others were good or bad.

That was reality.

Even with Zheng Tian, Wen Lei, and the others still by his side, things inevitably became like this.

This world was too terrifying.

At present, Ren Zhong was only a mech warrior with barely rank-three strength. After gaining even a little of Lin Wang’s trust, he had already begun to live the extravagant life of someone above others with enviable ease.

Power and status here were far too easy to become addicted to.

These were all traps of assimilation, sugarcoated bullets like Pan Fenglian’s body and Lin Wang’s tea leaves.

These were temptations from the whole world, omnipresent and penetrating everywhere.

Only the most steadfast revolutionaries could resist them.

Ren Zhong, who had only recently set his resolve, did not know whether he counted as the most steadfast of revolutionaries, but he wanted to become such a person.

Therefore, he knew that if he did not actively take hold of these feelings, sooner or later he too would sink into this pyramid of social strata and become a beast that merely looked human but was not really human at all, like Lin Wang.

Ren Zhong did not want that.

So he had to remind himself constantly: it is precisely because revolutionaries bear a compassion for the weak so deep it cannot be worn away that they become revolutionaries.

Ren Zhong wanted to help the wastelanders, and in turn, how could the wastelanders not be helping him in secret as well?

Their fate was the brick wall that supported Ren Zhong in maintaining his own clarity.

At half past one in the morning, Ren Zhong quietly clenched his fist.

He had just finished calculating an account using the economic knowledge he had roughly learned in the stock market, combined with the common sense from his life in the twenty-first century.

The cost of nurturing a high-level practitioner was simply too high; the social leap within the economic pyramid was truly terrifying.

He had not even begun wearing rank-three equipment yet, and any further advance in equipment involved funds measured in tens of thousands.

No wonder Lin Wang and the other professional team members who wanted to reach rank five had to transform into ravenous bloodsucking gluttons, crouching over the scavengers of Sparkfire Town and sucking their blood in gulps.

Because they had no choice either!

The economic system of this world was inherently and naturally broken!

Without money, one could not take a single step!

Only by charging forward!

I promised everyone that I would liberate this age!

Every step forward here is a cage, so what I am fighting is the world.

Then I cannot always pin my hopes on the distant future, nor can I rely on mere tricks; that would only wear down my will.

My life cannot have regrets. I must seize every step!

Now. Right now! I live in the present!

Unless I truly exert my utmost and still cannot break through the prison of Sparkfire Town, I will never admit defeat!

He had already made his decision.

Though ten thousand men stand in my way, I shall still go forward, and though torn to pieces by a thousand blades, my face shall not change.

Is that not what a revolutionary ought to be?

If not now, then when?

Even if the opportunity conceals immense risk, he would seize this rare chance and see just how far his full-power exertion could go.

If he could kill Bei Lihui once, he could naturally kill him a second time.

If he could kill Bei Lihui, then naturally he could also kill Lin Wang.

He had to break every prison he could see before him, every cage within reach.

At quarter past seven in the morning, everyone was having breakfast in the courtyard.

After hearing what Ren Zhong said, Zheng Tian covered her mouth and cried out, “What! We’re going to the abandoned mine pit today? Brother Ren, you’re... not joking, are you?”

One hundred and seventy kilometers west of Sparkfire Town lay a gigantic hollowed-out molybdenum-iron mine pit.

Once one of the largest iron mines on Origin Star, it had been abandoned more than two hundred years ago, before the era in which Bone Valley was born.

The surface opening of the pit measured roughly eight kilometers in diameter.

After the ore within the mine pit had been exhausted and the site abandoned, underground ruinbeasts gradually began to arise there, carving out rootlike tunnels that spread in every direction and formed a three-dimensional network.

Within that tunnel network, large numbers of rank-two and rank-three ruinbeasts roamed, along with a small number of rank-four ruinbeasts.

For this reason, the abandoned mine pit was known as the second most dangerous place in the region of Sparkfire Town, after only Bone Valley, and ordinarily only professional teams would go there to hunt.

Ren Zhong nodded. “I’m not joking.”

Zheng Tian said, “But there’s no need for us to take such a risk. Isn’t it fine as things are now?”

She did not quite understand why Ren Zhong had suddenly shifted from his usually cautious style to the opposite extreme.

After thinking for a moment, she suddenly understood.

Because Lin Wang and the others had left.

Lowering her voice, Zheng Tian asked cautiously, “Brother Ren, are you planning to rise up at this opportunity?”

Ren Zhong nodded. “Lin Wang’s leniency toward us is built on many misunderstandings. Paper cannot wrap fire; lies can never become the foundation on which we stand. Continued hiding would at most mean living a little longer. What must die will still die in the end. Only by gaining strength that even they fear can we truly protect ourselves. So there is nothing to hesitate over. Let’s do it. This is reality, and I hope you understand.”

In truth, the others did not understand very well.

But in a single month, Ren Zhong had already established absolute authority within the team.

Since he said to do it, then they would do it.

Because Mister Ren always had considerations beyond anyone else’s grasp, yet they were always correct.