Li Yao was silent. Li Jialing's words were rather reasonable and rendered him speechless.
Before he came to the Imperium of True Human Beings, from the perspective of a Cultivator of the Xing Yao Federation, it was easy for him to misunderstand the sharpest contradictions within the Imperium and consider the exploitation of the "true human beings" against the "hominoids" as the main problem.
After he came to the Imperium and saw the social forms and the conflicts of interests in person, Li Yao finally realized that the "ordinary people who were bullied by the Immortal Cultivators", who were caged in the assembly lines of the factories and the industrialized farmlands, were in fact not the most miserable ones.
It was true that those ordinary people were indeed treated inhumanely, but they often had a stable source of food, relatively clean drinking water, safe housing, and even a meager salary. In order to increase their enthusiasm for work and exploit more surplus value from them, the Immortal Cultivators would even provide them with a certain degree of mental food. For example, the "slaughter streams" of the Martial Meritocrats Sector were exactly anesthetics aimed at the labor class, which could at least give them mental pleasure.
As the saying went, "It is better to be a dog in peace than a human being in chaos". In the areas where the authorities of the Imperium could and were willing to implement effective governance, they would still provide the minimal public services and carry out the infrastructure to maintain the order of the society. Also, theoretically speaking, there were laws that could protect the legal interests of most people. Even though the laws that were riddled with loopholes were often broken by the Immortal Cultivators openly, they were still better than nothing.
After all, the government of the Immortal Cultivators was still a government, not a nest of bandits.
The residents of the "forgotten towns" numbered more than 10000 ten thousand meters below the ground were not even qualified to be enslaved and exploited. In other words, they could not be slaves even if they wanted to be. Naturally, the authorities of the Imperium would not provide the slightest public service for those places at all and simply left them to their own devices.
In such a dark and quiet world, there was no sunlight, little clean drinking water, and little food. The damage of earthquakes was hundreds of times more intense than on the ground. Now and then, landslides would happen, and destructive magma would even spurt out. Li Yao did not know whose life was more miserable, the slave laborers who crouched behind the assembly lines of the magical equipment factories for their entire lives, or the abandoned folk below the ground who had been forgotten by the entire universe.
Long Yangjun mentioned the ocean in her metaphor to Li Jialing. It was true that the world of the Abandoned People was like an abyssal plain. No matter how intense the tides were raised on the surface of the ocean, and how ferocious the beasts were fighting each other, the sand at the bottom of the ocean would not be affected at all. In the eyes of the dominators of the ocean, the fish and shrimps that were struggling to survive in the sand at the bottom of the ocean did not exist at all.
However, Li Yao could understand why Long Yangjun brought him and Li Jialing to this place. Right now, Blackstar the Great's scheme had been activated, and it was possible that the entire Empyreal Terminus Sector was under his control. Whichever city they hid in, they would not be able to escape the surveillance of the overwhelming, ubiquitous crystal cameras.
Even most of the towns deep below the ground were still within the scope of the authorities' control. A lot of crystal cameras had been deployed and connected to the wireless Spiritual Nexus. As long as they left a fuzzy shadow in one of the crystal cameras, it was possible that a lot of pursuers would be attracted.
Only the forgotten cities numbered after 10000 did not have the Spiritual Nexus and the crystal cameras. They were not enough to catch the attention of the high-level Immortal Cultivators at all. They were the 'paradise' where they could treat their wounds and rest in peace.
Li Yao and Li Jialing were from a world of sunlight. Naturally, their appearance was slightly different from that of the human beings below the ground who were almost transparent. Their casual stroll in the town attracted the attention of a lot of locals below the ground.
However, most of the locals only dared to hide behind the stalagmites and mushrooms, covering themselves in the dense fog while observing them carefully, not daring to make eye contact with them at all.
Wherever their gazes fell, the underground people would shrink their necks and flee into the mist.
Only the innocent children dared to stare at them. Seeing that they didn't have any malicious intentions and didn't look too dangerous, a few of the boldest children finally followed behind them, turning into a string of small tails, swaggering and imitating them.
Li Yao turned around and grimaced at the children. The children exclaimed at first and dispersed. After a while, seeing that Li Yao did not do anything else, they gathered again and grimaced like Li Yao. They even shouted in a weird tone, "Black eyes! Yellow eyes! "
The children who were born below the ground had never seen real sunlight. Even the illumination rune arrays above their heads could only be adjusted to the dimmest level due to the lack of energy, barely illuminating the interconnected chains among the stalagmites and the stalagmites. The brightest thing that the children had ever seen in their lives was perhaps boiling magma.
After ten thousand years, their eyes had mutated, too. While they boasted night vision, their pupils were also slightly red. Li Yao's black eyes and Li Jialing's brown eyes became anomalies here.
The children's laughter attracted the adults' attention. Several pairs of hands suddenly extended out of the dense fog and dragged the children back, covering their laughter in the rough hands.
Li Yao slightly frowned. Feeble spiritual energy flowed out of his eyes, and his sharp eyes pierced through the hazy fog, allowing him to see clearly the locals who thought that they were well-hidden.
He discovered a very weird phenomenon. As the locals grew older, they seemed to be less capable of expressing their feelings.
Those innocent and carefree children would cry, laugh, and play around, freely expressing their emotions and feelings.
However, the tall adults were always frowning, with wariness and panic beaming out of their eyes, as if they were looking for a crevice to hide themselves in at any moment. It seemed that the arrival of Li Yao and Li Jialing disrupted the solemn air in the place and made them very uncomfortable.
The seniors below the ground who were slightly older and whose faces were full of wrinkles, however, did not even have the glimmer deep inside their eyes anymore. They were like statues made of stalagmites that squatted next to the stalagmites without moving at all, as if they had been melded with the underground world.
Li Yao also saw some people in gray capes. They were as peaceful and tranquil as the girl who delivered the food to them just now. They were sitting cross-legged everywhere in the underground town. Their breath was extremely feeble, as if they had entered the weird hibernation state.
Li Yao narrowed his eyes and asked solemnly, "Have the people here all been brainwashed by Long Yangjun? Have their feelings and desires been washed away?"
He had thought that it must be the truth, but after a moment of hesitation, Li Jialing shook his head and said, "I asked Sister Long about it before, but she said that it wasn't the case. The people here have always been as lifeless and tranquil as her.
"According to Sister Long, the so-called intense feelings and desires are based on the abundant material foundation and the developed information exchange network. As the saying goes, 'when you are well-fed, you will think about your desires'. If you can't even have enough food, you can't even guarantee your basic survival and safety. You will have no time to care about 'feelings', 'desires', and 'free will' when you are starving every day.
"Sister Long said that we modern people live in the highly-developed post-industrial society and the information age. We can find ten thousand kinds of food to stimulate our appetite and ten thousand ways of entertainment to trigger our intense feelings, so that our desires and feelings are stimulated to the maximum. As time goes by, we take such a high level of desires and feelings for granted.
"However, in many worlds that are severely short of materials, such as the world of ancient Cultivators and the underground world right now, the shortage of food is the norm, and there is no guarantee of safety. There are not many ways of entertainment either. The worlds of gods are extremely empty and lacking. How can the people here have intense feelings and desires like the people on the ground?
"Think about it. If a baby is born here, he has never seen the sun, the birds, and the flowers. He does not know what a forest or an ocean is, nor does he know what a singer or a movie star is. He does not have novels, games, or virtual friend platforms. The only meaning of his life is survival and reproduction. Also, he has to worry about the lack of food, earthquakes, and magma every second. As time goes by, how can he not become numb and indifferent, like the underground residents here?
"Sister Long said that when she just came to the underground world a few years ago, the adult residents of this place were exactly like that. They were silent all year round like stubborn rocks because they had nothing else to do in their lives in the first place, and they did not have any resources to support their redundant feelings and desires.
"That's right. She did teach the underground locals some arts to suppress their pain, curb their desires, and calm their mind, but that was all. If the resources in this place were abundant enough for them to enjoy themselves and play the best games on the Spiritual Nexus, only an idiot would've followed her to practice the inhumane arts!
"Sister Long also said that not just this place, she estimated that the situation was similar even in the territory of the Holy League. Who would be willing to eat plain bread when there were meat buns to eat, and who would be willing to go hungry when there were plain bread to eat? If the territory of the Holy League was abundant enough to satisfy everybody's feelings and desires, who would be willing to give up the most beautiful things in their life? The problem was that they were not! The worlds under the governance of the Holy League were barren in the first place. It was estimated that after the bloody battles in the past ten thousand years, the few resources in the first place had mostly been used up. It was only because they could not survive anymore that they had to abandon their feelings and desires and devote all the remaining resources to the only thing that mattered — the continuation of their life.
"Sister Long also said —"
"Enough!"
Li Yao interrupted Li Jialing's rambling. "It has occurred to me that your stance is very problematic, fellow Cultivator. Why do you keep repeating 'Sister Long's words' all the time? Even if you are not on the side of Brother Yao as a Cultivator, you are at least an Immortal Cultivator who should support feelings, desires, and free will, right? You haven't learned much after following Brother Yao for half a year, but why have you been fooled by Long Yangjun after only ten days? Your belief is not good enough. You have to work on it! "
-----
A friend asked, "Old Niu, are you writing a contradiction? Earlier in the Flying Star Sector, it was possible to empty a planet to build a super-enormous starship. Why can't you dig through the mantle at the center of the cosmos?"
Old Niu replied, "It is not a contradiction.
The planetary warship that was built in the Flying Star Sector was a very, very small planet similar to 'Pluto'. The difference in size between a large asteroid and a small one can be thousands of times smaller! As for a "habitable planet", in Old Cow's opinion, it would at least have a thick atmosphere and a stable solid structure. In that case, it couldn't be much smaller than Earth. It definitely couldn't be a small planet like Pluto, right?
Also, there was no requirement to empty a planet in order to build a planetary warship. It was not necessary at all.
How did 'Wandering Planet', one of Master Liu Cixin's masterpieces, do? To put it simply, just install thousands of engines on the surface of the Earth and push out people on orbit. The so-called 'planetary warships' were nothing more than adding turrets, hangars, and military bases on the basis of engines. Those things could all be done within the range of the Earth's crust. It was economical and convenient to fight a war. There was really no need to hollow out the entire planet!
In any case, Pangu, Nuwa, and human beings were all lives that originated from the surface of a planet. However developed they were, as long as they kept the fleshly bodies of carbon-based lives, the mantle tens of thousands of meters below the ground could not be a comfortable residence. Unless it was absolutely necessary, it was impossible to empty a planet and live inside it, right?
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