Chapter 4361: Justice League: Assembly (16)

Silas Stone sat in the chair in the interrogation room. He tilted his head slightly, gazing at the lightbulb above his head. A small flying insect had flown into the lightbulb and was helplessly circling the filament. The light baked his eyes until they were very dry. The discomfort coming from his body left him almost unable to think, but the more this was the case, the clearer he became.

"Are you still counting on the military to come and save you?" the agent opposite said. "They just treated you as a tool. Protecting you was only so we wouldn't find you, so they could ask for an exorbitant price. They just didn't expect that times have changed; it's not 9/11 anymore."

"By the way, you probably don't know yet, right? That car accident that ruined your family was actually manufactured by them. They installed a tracker on your wife's phone, then used a car accident to kill her and severely injure your son. You thought it was them showing mercy, using alien technology to save your son, but in reality, they just needed a more useful tool."

"Threaten you with your son, then threaten your son with you. In this way, whether it's an expert researching alien technology or the world's most powerful hacker, they will all be controlled by them. We are the ones who are actually here to save you this time."

"The military will only let you use your intelligence to wage war. But we are different. For years, we have ruled this country, manipulating elections just to make America greater. Join us, and both you and your son will have a better future..."

"What stops human progress has never been ignorance, but arrogance," Dr. Stone opened his mouth with a hoarse voice. "We can acquire more knowledge through learning and inheritance to solve our ignorance. However, if one holds profound arrogance toward things one cannot fully understand, it will eventually destroy everything."

He lowered his head slightly and then said: "The moment I knew the car accident happened, I had already guessed who the culprit was. At the time, I thought they wanted Victor to go to the hospital, and then use the high medical expenses to force me to work for them. This was a cruel plan, but standing from their perspective, it was effective enough. If they had really done that, I'm afraid I would indeed have had no power to resist."

"However, I never expected that they would dare to take me to the Red Room. Even though I had already warned them thousands of times that that box from outer space came from an alien high-tech civilization that humans couldn't imagine at all. Merely touching it was equivalent to opening Pandora's box. But they didn't believe it. They thought I had already cracked the mysteries of the box and was just unwilling to tell them. So, they made me take the already severely injured Victor inside, thinking that only then would I take the initiative to use the box and put the secrets of the box before their eyes."

"I indeed had no choice but to do so," Dr. Stone took a deep breath and then said, "They didn't realize at all what kind of monster walked out of the opened Pandora's box. Perhaps even Victor himself doesn't realize how powerful he is."

"The officers thought that box was just a weapon, just like you think Victor is just a hacker," Dr. Stone looked at the agent opposite with eyes full of bloodshot veins. "Soon you will know what kind of mighty power the materialized cosmic truth created by the top civilization in the universe has."

As soon as his voice fell, the entire prison began to dissolve.

It wasn't being lifted, nor was it being smashed, but like a model in a virtual world, it was being dissolved bit by bit from top to bottom. First the glass on the top floor, then the thick concrete walls, various signal shielding devices, special alloy railings... all the security measures taken to suppress superpowers were dissolved at the same time.

This scene didn't look like it was happening in the real world at all; instead, it was like a movie. It was as if the movie director had racked his brains to use special effects to show how the things built in the virtual world were collapsing. Everything was disappearing for no reason.

Bit by bit, slowly, gradually being erased from the world. It seemed as if a deletion progress bar had appeared above everything, and as the progress bar gradually filled up, junk files were deleted one by one, and the disk's storage capacity was released. And the computer operating system remained silent about this because this was a high-privilege user operation in the real world, detached from the virtual world. Files within the system couldn't possibly have the power to resist.

First the walls, then the floors, immediately followed by all the furniture and items, and finally, all the agents in the entire prison.

Whether it was objects or people, they were all slowly fading and disappearing from top to bottom. It was as if they had all been tied to the same fade-out special effect animation; it looked quite clumsy in a computer, but appearing in the real world, it was incomparably eerie and terrifying.

The agent sitting opposite Dr. Stone didn't even have time to scream before he completely disappeared along with the tables, chairs, and lightbulbs in the interrogation room. With a *plop*, the stool fell to the ground. When Victor, whose whole body was flickering with a metallic luster, descended onto this empty space, Dr. Stone remembered the indescribable excitement he felt when he first saw his son outside the delivery room years ago.

Victor was also filled with mixed feelings. He heard the words his father said in the interrogation room and also understood why his father had been absent from his life for so long. It wasn't that he didn't love him, it was just that he had to participate in another more arduous and desperate war, and in order to protect his mother and son, he absolutely couldn't lose.

But Victor couldn't help but think, what did his father do wrong? Dr. Stone was talented, had a high academic level, and was an excellent scientist who could leave his name in human history. Why did he exhaust half his life working hard, and before he could even experience a bit of the warmth of the most ordinary family life, his family was already broken and his loved ones dead?

"Calm down, Victor," Dr. Stone stood up and then said, "Don't let anger cloud your judgment."

Victor finally came back to his senses, but his face was cold as he took two steps back and then said: "Why can't I be angry? We didn't do anything wrong, but someone destroyed everything!"

His face finally revealed a bit of emotion; even on the half of his face that was already covered by machinery, one could see indescribable sadness. "My mom was still so young, I wanted to use the prize money from that game to buy her a pair of gold earrings, I even picked out the style... but everything is gone, everything is gone!!!"

In the end, Victor was already roaring.

The helicopters in the sky gradually gathered, and Dr. Stone looked up. But in just that one second, the control systems of all the helicopters completely failed, and they fell in different directions like meteors.

The light in Victor's mechanical eye was getting brighter and brighter. And in his field of vision, countless images were flickering.

The cameras in the Capitol building suddenly rotated at an angle, the indicator lights of the Presidential Palace's safe box flickered, and the nuclear missile dispatch office suddenly sounded a sharp and ear-piercing drill alarm...

"I know you've been donating money," his father's voice suddenly rang in his ear, "to those impoverished black communities, to those single mothers who can't afford to feed their children. You know how hard those people have it, just like when your mother was taking care of you alone."

"But even though it's already been so difficult, they still want to make it through this winter, doing their best for it. Even if it's very painful, they still want to live. Back then, your mom also felt tired and painful when taking care of you, but she never gave up. You don't have the right to choose to end it for anyone."

"If you choose to destroy the world, you will also kill many people's mothers. In their eyes, you are no different from the executioner who killed your mother. Never choose to be a terrorist, Victor. Your mom would be very disappointed."

In an instant, all the flickering lights went out. Victor staggered back a few steps and then knelt down halfway. He felt cold all over, as if he had suddenly been placed on a snowfield. He covered his eyes somewhat painfully, unable to believe what he had just wanted to do.

Then, he felt himself being helped up by his father, and then heard his father continue to say: "Destroying everything just because you lost everything will only create more tragedies. What we need to do is take back what we lost."

"But my mom can't come back," Victor said, "she's already dead, her death anniversary is coming up soon... she will never be able to see me win the world championship..."

"Yes, things that are lost won't come back. But there are more people on the road to losing, and you have the ability to avoid these tragedies from happening, to save more people like you. Don't you?"

Victor closed his eyes, and many images flashed before his eyes: one gray high-rise after another, only lights lit up in the lower areas, sparse firewood in the fireplace, those desperate and helpless faces and the sound of breaking down in tears.

When he brought them money to buy firewood and milk powder, the surprise and worship in their eyes pulled him out of the abyss of despair over losing his mother, making him feel again that he was still alive. He originally thought he just enjoyed the respect of others, just like enjoying the cheers of the audience on the field.

The sad and tired faces of those single mothers always overlapped with his mother's in his memory. So when he saw them, he couldn't help but think of himself. Perhaps when he was young, his mom had also aged because she was too tired, and cried because of anxiety.

However, his mother had also always felt incomparably joyful because of the money his father sent, or his occasional return.

Freud believed in "loving the mother and imitating the father." This term might sound a bit ambiguous at first, but in reality, it refers to: if people are more dependent on their mother, they will observe more from their mother how her emotions change for the father—what the father did that would make the mother angry and sad; and what he did that would make the mother happy.

In order to affect the mother's mood and change the mother's emotions, they will unconsciously imitate the father to do these things. And in family relationships, if the father always makes the mother sad, and the child imitates this side too much, then after he forms a family in the future, he will also unconsciously imitate the father's behavior to affect the other half's emotions. And vice versa.

Victor now remembers that although his father rarely came back, he would send large sums of money every month, keeping him and his mother well-fed and clothed. Every time his mother received the remittance, she was very happy, constantly praising his father to him, saying he was a capable person, a brilliant scientist, constantly telling him the process of how they met, and expressing that she had never misjudged him. There was satisfaction in these words.

Not to mention, when his father occasionally came back, his mother was completely immersed in happiness. And facing the situation where his father couldn't attend important moments in his life, she had also always been speaking for him, even at the cost of arguing with her own son. His mother's feelings for his father had always been filled with love and worship.

So, when Victor felt empty and lost, his first reaction was to donate money to people in down-and-out communities. Because he knew they would be very surprised and would worship him just like his mother worshipped his father. He was imitating his father's behavior.

He thought he hated his father, but in reality, for many years, the education he received from his family made him actually enjoy playing the role of his father, which was to make people feel happy through giving.

So even if the two of them didn't live together for a long time, they still became almost the same person. This is the power of "teaching by example" in education, which is sometimes much more useful than appearing in the child's life in an all-around way and educating the other party with words every moment. ===== CHAPTER 4362 =====