RotA – Chapter 68

“The disaster that befell humanity… was it because of me?” Chu Ci asked softly, her gaze no longer as calm as it once was.

Ye Qing considered for a moment, shook her head, and said gently, “Don’t always take all the responsibility upon yourself. You’ve done nothing wrong. From beginning to end, you never had a choice.”

Chu Ci couldn’t help but blink, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears.

“Dr. Yi asked me to tell you not to blame yourself or be sad.” As she spoke, Ye Qing smiled.

She stood up, walked to the window, pushed it open, tilted her head back slightly, and took a long, deep breath. “I think Dr. Yi is right.”

“I’ve read some history from the Old World. Our ancestors, for the sake of more food and better survival, constantly migrated across the Earth. They went from one place to another, and in just a few thousand years, they drove many, many large creatures to extinction,” Ye Qing said. “They were later called Homo sapiens, and the first wave of their colonization, in retrospect, was definitely a catastrophe for the biological world of that era.”

“Scholars of the Old World believed that long before humanity entered an age of civilization, Homo sapiens had already caused nearly half of the large beasts on Earth to disappear completely.” Ye Qing turned around, leaning her back against the window, letting the wind tousle her shoulder-length brown hair. “Later, humanity entered an agrarian age, and more species on Earth began to lose their rightful habitats due to agricultural development. And later still, just as they had finally managed to adapt to the new environment created by human agricultural production, humanity entered the industrial age.”

“All at once, large-scale pollution was generated, the quality of human life improved significantly, and the population grew explosively… The development of one civilization caused the Earth’s biodiversity to plummet like an avalanche.” Ye Qing closed her eyes and sighed softly. “If we’re talking about right and wrong, humanity is the most lethal creature in Earth’s history. Before human civilization, every mass extinction on Earth was accompanied by terrifying, cataclysmic natural disasters, or was a long process spanning millions of years. Yet humanity, in the less than thirty thousand years since its emergence, has caused an extinction of a similar scale.”

“Scholars of the Old World said long ago that after entering the industrial age, humanity must move towards an ecological civilization, or else it would surely head for extinction. But in reality, our ancestors continued to greedily exploit the world’s resources—we destroy this world, so the world, to protect itself, will eliminate us. The black vines, containing unknown energy tens of thousands of meters deep within the earth, might just be the ‘clearing plan’ that Mother Earth prepared for humanity from the very beginning of its conception.”

“The disaster wasn’t brought by you. All of this is humanity’s own doing.” Ye Qing said, opening her eyes and raising her brows in a smile. “But we will not compromise. The Floating City and the Underground City have promised each other that until the very last moment before destruction, we will not give up on finding a new path for humanity.”

After speaking, Ye Qing turned and left, leaving only a notebook behind.

The living room was quiet. The television was off, because one could guess that on TV these days, aside from the research institute’s strenuous efforts to prove the positive uses of the inhibitor, there were only those unchanging slogans of light and hope.

The wind blowing in from the window carried a hint of chill. The Floating City was always like this—the sun blazed high above, yet it remained cold.

Chu Ci gazed at the closed notebook in her hand, and Chai Yuening gazed at her.

They had long known that the truth, so desperately concealed, would be cruel, but the reality still exceeded their expectations.

The silence stretched on for an unknown length of time before Chu Ci suddenly said in a low voice, “So I’m not human.”

She pressed her lips together, her expression dazed, her joy or sorrow unclear. “The past before I was sixteen… it doesn’t belong to me… I don’t have a human past.”

Chai Yuening: “…”

Chu Ci: “I’m not a human who successfully fused with the black vine. I’m just a black vine that fused with a human…”

Chai Yuening frowned. “Is there a difference?”

Chu Ci bit her lower lip, silent for several seconds, then said in a low voice, “I ate that human girl. Just like how every mutated beast devours a human, I stripped her of her life, her genes, her everything…”

“And I thought I was her.” Chu Ci gave a self-deprecating laugh, her eyes devoid of light. “Using her identity, I deceived everyone and lived like that for so many years…”

She wasn’t human. She was a mutated beast hiding among the crowd. From the very beginning, she was incompatible with everything here, a being that deserved to be hunted and killed by humans.

Chu Ci’s eyes couldn’t help but turn red, and tears, like pearls from a broken string, dripped uncontrollably down her cheeks.

Her emotions burst like a dam in that instant.

She didn’t know what was wrong with her. She was the one who had insisted on dragging Chai Yuening back to find the truth, yet now that the truth was found, it felt as if something was blocking her heart. It wasn’t intensely painful, but it was an unspeakable discomfort.

Chu Ci didn’t understand. Human joys and sorrows, human emotions—she only vaguely grasped them, as if she could reach out and touch them, yet couldn’t always feel them.

She couldn’t help but wonder what kind of emotion she was supposed to be feeling now, from a human perspective.

Was it sadness?

If Dr. Yi hadn’t lied to her, she had felt sad when Chai Yuening left the Floating City.

The feeling back then was different from this moment…

Chai Yuening suddenly took her hand, and that indescribable emotion in her heart intensified in that instant.

Chu Ci gripped Chai Yuening’s entire hand tightly. She wanted to say something, but before she could speak, Chai Yuening gently pulled her into an embrace.

She trembled uncontrollably, and after a brief moment of daze, she couldn’t stop herself from crying even harder.

Like a newborn infant, letting out its first cry to the world.

Without reason, without logic, as if wanting to use up every last bit of her strength.

She suddenly couldn’t say a word. She didn’t understand human joy, anger, sorrow, or happiness, yet in the end, she was still easily swayed by so-called emotions, just like a human.

She hadn’t understood why she was sad, but the moment Chai Yuening held her, she understood the reason for her sorrow.

She wasn’t human anymore. She came from a new ecosystem, and that ecosystem would destroy everything humans knew, including the human race itself.

She could feel it: the ecosystem was deteriorating, her power was growing stronger, and humanity’s destruction was ultimately something she could do nothing about.

Whether she was willing or not, the facts could not be changed.

Her kind were humanity’s natural enemy.

Her destination was humanity’s grave.

She was destined never to be with the human before her forever. The moment humanity vanished from this world, Chai Yuening would die too.

At that time, where would she go? What would she do?

No one was there to help her choose, no one to show her the way. The people who had brought her into this world no longer existed. Even if she could find the way “back,” what would be there when she returned?

She had only just learned how to live like a human…

She couldn’t go back.

She hated so much that she didn’t belong here.

“Dr. Yi once told me that human emotions might be our greatest obstacle to integrating into the new ecosystem.” Chai Yuening gently patted Chu Ci’s back. She looked up at the clouds rolling and unrolling outside the window, her own eyes filled with tears. “Because of them, humans are incredibly fragile. Because of them, we can’t maintain a higher degree of stability during the fusion process.”

“But the reason humans are called human, the reason we’ve been able to carry this fragile civilization on to this day, is also because of these innate emotions.” Chai Yuening said, then asked the person in her arms softly, “It’s just an identity. Is it that important? You’re crying, you’re sad. These emotions belong to you. They are human emotions.”

“But…” Chu Ci’s words were choked back in her heart. “I don’t belong here…”

“Who did you eat? Whose life did you take, whose everything?” Chai Yuening said, her heart aching for her. “Why would you say that about yourself?”

“Why must it be that you harmed a human? Couldn’t it be that a human… infected you?”

“You have her appearance, her kindness. You dedicated yourself to human science in her place…”

“You… are continuing… her life.”

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