Chapter 261: Curse

"Help me plant bombs at these locations."

Yagami Light was already prepared; he pulled a map from beneath his chair and spread it across the table, where several addresses—including the water tower, the unfinished building, and the abandoned factory—had already been circled in red ink.

"Why not send your own people? Judging by elite combat power, the gap between the Infected and the City Hall isn't that large, is it?"

Li Cheng did not agree immediately but instead asked, "Moreover, the Infected possess the advantage of carrying Glitch Syndrome material; it's like dipping a mop in shit or Lü Bu being reborn—

when fighting, it forces the opponent to hesitate for fear of damaging their own assets."

"... I shall temporarily ignore this rather offensive and inappropriate analogy."

Yagami Light sat back in his chair and said coldly, "The Infected exiled to the Lower Nest still have friends and family on the surface; when we established this camp, we received no small amount of smuggled aid from the surface.

Asking my people to defend the borders and prevent the Anti-Riot Squad from charging through is one thing,

but asking them to go to the surface to cause destruction is a bit of a stretch—they only wish to live out their remaining days in peace."

"Very well." Li Cheng nodded and asked, "Next question: why do underground Infected live much longer than those on the surface, and why are their symptoms so much milder?"

Yagami Light raised an eyebrow. "Are you here to negotiate a partnership or to ask questions?"

Li Cheng spread his hands. "Gathering more intelligence helps motivate me."

Yagami Light leaned back in his chair with an noncommittal expression, pondered for a moment, and said, "Glitch Syndrome is not merely an infectious disease spread through physical contact and unknown means, as the City Hall propaganda claims.

It is more like a curse—a curse upon all of us toys."

Li Cheng made a gesture indicating he was ready to hear the details.

"The predecessor to the City Hall building was the Toy Factory. The first toy to possess self-awareness, Dumbledore, walked off the factory's automated assembly line."

Yagami Light continued, "The toys partially retain the memories of their 'prototype characters,' and through mutual exchange, they learned the truth of being toys."

Li Cheng nodded. "It's like toys set in the 21st century knowing about The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, or Star Wars stormtroopers set in the distant future knowing about Genshin Impact and Fate/Grand Order."

Gray Rain couldn't help but retort, "I recall Star Wars is set thousands of years in the future? What version would Genshin Impact and FGO have to be updated to for that?"

"The earliest batch of toys, myself included, has been researching this, yet we have never been able to fully comprehend the factory's principles and mechanisms.

We only know that the factory's assembly line operates on its own, and the factory's furnace fire is similar to the AllSpark in Transformers, capable of granting life to inanimate objects."

Yagami Light ignored the remark full of snark and said, "Approximately eight years ago, the factory's furnace fire began to weaken, and fewer and fewer new toys were produced on the assembly line.

The City Hall chose to recycle the corpses of citizens who died naturally, recasting them into initial parts within the factory, and producing new population by issuing birth permits to citizens."

When Li Cheng first entered this script mission, he had witnessed the City Hall distributing Infant Hero Fragments to the neighbors, so he was not surprised.

Gray Rain raised her hand and asked, "If one doesn't like the newborn model, can it be returned within seven days no questions asked?"

Yagami Light answered briefly, "No."

"What about trading two for one?" Gray Rain asked unwillingly, "I've heard that newborns occasionally spawn near the toilets or garbage piles of high schools, vocational high schools, and technical secondary schools."

???

What kind of hellish joke is this?

Yagami Light's eyelid twitched, and he continued, "In any case, as time passed, the furnace fire grew increasingly faint.

For Toy City, it is the source of all things, and its influence reaches every corner.

The temperature of the entire city is subtly dropping, and the heat emitted by the sun is decreasing.

Watching the furnace fire head toward extinction, Mayor Dumbledore chose to follow the research team's suggestion and throw the corpses of deceased toy citizens into the factory's furnace to be burned.

This action was equivalent to returning the spark to the fire; while it delayed the flame's extinction, it also produced catastrophic consequences—the furnace fire became contaminated.

A disease named Glitch Syndrome began appearing randomly throughout the city; its essence is the degradation of the sparks within the toys, and it can spread through physical contact.

It is just like how white tin with a tetragonal crystal structure, upon contacting gray tin with an amorphous structure, gets converted by the latter.

The degraded sparks cause the toys' 'lifespan' to shorten drastically, trending toward scrapping."

"Understood."

Li Cheng nodded and said, "I saw City Hall personnel chop up the corpses of Glitch Syndrome patients and throw them into the cooling water of the nuclear power plant..."

"As far as I know, the City Hall separated the furnace fire from the factory and placed it in the nuclear power plant."

Yagami Light said, "We, the group of Infected, are no different; we built our own thermal power station underground, extending our lives by throwing the corpses of our deceased compatriots into the fire and absorbing the 'thermal radiation.'

Both sides are drinking poison to quench their thirst.

If the furnace fire goes out completely within ten years, so be it; at worst, all things return to silence.

The most terrifying scenario is the furnace fire becoming completely degraded, unable to produce a single healthy newborn, turning everyone into deformed, ugly monsters who slaughter each other on a hopeless wasteland, fighting over the last scraps of survival resources."

He paused, his expression becoming ferocious, and said, "At that time, everything beautiful, civilized, and worth remembering that we built with our own hands will be destroyed."

Li Cheng raised an eyebrow and asked, "So you intend to use bombs to blow up the factory and the City Hall right now?"

The original version of Yagami Light was a near-pervert, extremely narcissistic perfectionist who, relying on the Death Note, sought to kill every criminal on Earth and become the god of the new world.

"That is not the case."

Yagami Light calmed down and said indifferently, "I possess memories of a previous life; I have already failed once and will not fail a second time.

What I want is simply to launch a rocket and break the invisible barrier shrouding Toy City, located over a thousand kilometers above.

If we can break the barrier, we can rush into the boundless universe, seek a substitute for the furnace fire, and continue our civilization.

If we pierce the barrier only to find nothingness outside, causing everyone to die as oxygen runs out, that would still involve less torment than slaughtering each other on the wasteland."

Li Cheng wiped the cold sweat that didn't exist on his forehead; buddy, one careless move with your operation and you could easily end up with a KDA of 8,000,000/1/0.

Even Gray Rain swallowed hard; as a kill-kill-kill enthusiast who loved life, she had at most thought about slashing her way from Penglai East Road to the Southern Heavenly Gate, but she had never seen anyone attempt to extinguish an entire super-large modern city in one go.

You seem a bit too extreme.

"I have already told you everything you wanted to ask."

Yagami Light took six golden, glittering bombs from a cardboard box in the corner of the room and slapped them onto the table. "Now we can discuss the terms, right?"

(End of Chapter)