Chapter 212: Population Scale

Luo Qi looked at Du Zhengyi; his expression remained calm, but Luo Qi could tell he had already made some kind of decision. Vaguely, he had a premonition that today Du Zhengyi would say some things, things whose outlines he had already vaguely guessed. In a few months, perhaps three or five years, he might regret hearing these things, but for the moment, he could no longer care.

"According to the oath of the Gushan Guard, I should not have said these things, but I also never thought there would come a day when I would not be in the Qionglin," Du Zhengyi said.

Luo Qi muttered under his breath, "Right, right, you were just born for the Qionglin."

"Shut up, Luo Qi," Majiang said, though he said it with a bit of listlessness.

As it turned out, for some reason, Du Zhengyi was uncharacteristically serious; he turned his head and said to Luo Qi, "I certainly was not born for the Qionglin."

"Damn, this is fun, can you two stop arguing?" Majiang said, causing both Luo Qi and Du Zhengyi to look over at him. He gifted them both a massive eye-roll. "If you two put in a little more effort, you might have a chance to be promoted to the advanced class and be classmates with Guan Xinyue."

Guan Xinyue looked at the three men, all of whom had unpleasant expressions, and stood up helplessly. "Du Ge, Luo Qi, why don't you both sit down, and we can talk about this slowly. I know I have no standing to say this, and perhaps even no standing to be standing here, but..." She bit her thin lips, "I really want to know what kind of work my grandfather was actually doing, and why my entire family ended up ruined."

This was indeed the biggest reason Guan Xinyue had persisted until today; Luo Qi walked over and sat down beside her.

Du Zhengyi stood still, turned his head, and looked out the window, gazing down at the roof of the front building. On the human roof stood giant outdoor air conditioning units; they seemed to have a problem, and several workers were repairing them. They were methodical, calmly carrying out the daily work that had to be completed every day. In human cities, there are countless people like this, constantly repairing and maintaining the city every day, hammering and knocking, painting and cleaning.

"Do you like air conditioning?" Du Zhengyi asked suddenly.

Majiang was stunned for a moment, the look on his face suggesting he wanted to go check Du Zhengyi's brain immediately. Luo Qi, who had been about to reach for a drink on the tea table, froze at these words and turned his head to look earnestly at Du Zhengyi's back.

Only Guan Xinyue felt helplessly that she had become the one who had to pick up this sentence. She thought about it helplessly and said jokingly, "Who doesn't like it? That is, after all, the greatest invention of humanity."

"Yes," Du Zhengyi said in a low voice. "Mages like it too. A long time ago, mages could only move around like migratory birds, looking for comfortable places to live; those were not comfortable times."

Guan Xinyue still felt somewhat bewildered, feeling she couldn't keep up with Du Zhengyi's train of thought, and she looked to Luo Qi for help.

Luo Qi said, "It means that no matter how many pretentious theories the Lotus Burners have, we mages are parasitic organisms living on top of the human world."

Majiang glared at him in disapproval, but Luo Qi ignored him and continued, "In ancient times, we were gods, enjoying the offerings of humans. Even now, do we still rely on enslaving humans to survive?"

Guan Xinyue looked at him in surprise. "Enslaving?"

"I certainly don't agree with that viewpoint; Luo Qi is clearly a different extreme of mage, the opposite of the Lotus Burners," Majiang said loudly, using his mind to push the soda can that Luo Qi had been trying to grab without standing up even further away. He had always enjoyed bullying Luo Qi; even now, Luo Qi still couldn't remember that he was a normal mage—when he wasn't teasing the cat, all his behaviors were no different from a human's.

"Then who do you think grows the food we eat? There have never been mage farmers in this world, and there is no farm Magic in our system," Luo Qi said, giving up on the soda; he was already used to being bullied by mages and truly couldn't remember that he could use his own abilities to snatch the soda back.

"I," Majiang said, "as a Doctor, I earn currency from human society through medical services to support my family. I don't enslave humans; sometimes I even give their children quick-healing treatments."

"Oh, how magnificent," Luo Qi said dryly. "How many hours do you work a day?"

Majiang hesitated and did not answer. Luo Qi continued, "How many days a week do you work? Do you know how many days a week human doctors work, how many hours a day they work, and how much work pressure they have? I guess you only work when you feel like it? Most mages in human society are like this. Or they easily obtain jewelry and treasures to sell to humans at high prices; that doesn't seem very consistent with human economics, does it?"

This time Majiang did not speak, and Luo Qi said again, "And there is the issue of the exchange rate. If we work for the Qionglin, we get credit points, and credit points can be exchanged for human currency. Xinyue, you have already exchanged money; you probably already know that you are almost wealthy enough to rival a nation, right? Haven't you ever thought about how easily mages can obtain large amounts of human currency? Just making a tiny contribution to the Mage World is enough to live easily as a rich person in human society."

Guan Xinyue asked hesitantly, "Credit point to currency exchange... who sets this exchange rate?"

"Good question," Luo Qi said. He looked at Majiang, whose expression seemed somewhat weak. "It is set by the Qionglin. To ensure humans don't discover it, and to reasonably measure the contributions of mages, the Qionglin specifically established a system of Calculators to perform the calculations. It even includes sending Mind Mages to key nodes to interfere with key human figures, squeezing the wealth mages need out of human wealth. Honestly, it's fortunate that there are so few of us."

"What Luo Qi said is basically correct," Du Zhengyi said. "When the Mage World first had its great integration, there was a thought to limit the scale of human development, and they even tried to do it."

"How did you do it?" Guan Xinyue asked with some fear.

"War, and the derivatives of war," Du Zhengyi said, his face shrouded in the shadows by the window. "We cultivated madmen among humans, interfering with human group reactions in the form of a Magic Array; humans began to pledge loyalty to the madmen and kneel before them. Humans began the largest-scale war in history. Even now, humans are still studying why they collectively went mad, why they placed madmen on pedestals. Not just one madman, not just one group of people; humanity as a whole almost stepped into the Abyss of destruction."

"Then why did the war end in the end?" Guan Xinyue asked. "Did the mages' control over humans fail?"

"Certainly not," Luo Qi said. "I think it went out of control. The scale of humanity shrank to be even smaller than the mages had anticipated, and the warlike nature of humans also exceeded the mages' expectations. The result was that humans stopped producing, the mages themselves were almost starving to death, and the comfort of daily life was getting worse by the day."