Chapter 594: Clash of Ideals

Outside the interrogation room.

More than a dozen people stood behind the one-way glass, no one speaking.

Jiang Yuan crossed his arms over his chest, staring at the man inside the glass whose posture was relaxed. Su Ming leaned against the wall, his pupil color so deep you couldn't see the bottom. Liang Wen, unusually, didn't strike any pretentious pose, his fingerless gloves gripping his knees, his peach-blossom eyes full of coldness.

Qin Zhixia stood at the position closest to the glass.

Her mechanical prosthesis hung at her side, her other hand gripping the hem of her clothing. The arc of force in her knuckles was mostly covered by the cuff.

On the other side of the glass, Wei Gong spoke.

"Chu Che."

The projection of an old man with white-and-gray hair sat opposite the interrogation table, his Zhongshan suit buttoned to the top button.

"I've looked over your resume. East University clinical medicine major, doctorate, studied under a cardiothoracic authority. You've published multiple SCI papers, your success rate as lead surgeon nearing a hundred percent. The year your mother passed away, you personally funded two impoverished students to finish their studies."

Wei Gong paused.

"How did a doctor who tried to save people become a monster who treats all living beings as consumables?"

Chu Che sat in that chair. Eight metal rings plus three layers of chains, his posture remained composed, spine straight. The lenses of his gold-thread glasses were clean, reflecting the white light of the interrogation room.

He did not answer right away.

He simply raised his hand.

The chains clinked. The motion was slight, just pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. That habitual little gesture was exactly the same as when he treated students' wounds at Qiu Ce Yuan.

"Wei Gong, I'll correct your wording."

He spoke. His voice was steady, his enunciation clear, without any ripple.

"Not 'become' but 'see clearly'."

Wei Gong did not move.

Chu Che continued: "You looked into my mother's medical records. The heart transplant waiting list was fourteen months long; after finally getting a match, it was snatched by an entrepreneur with an acute condition using connections. That surgery was the one I flew to perform. I personally sewed the heart that should have been my mother's into the chest cavity of someone who obtained the organ through bribery."

His tone showed no change.

Just like reading a postoperative report.

"You think this made me hate humanity?"

Chu Che tilted his head, the chains swaying with it.

"No. This just made me start calculating a bill."

His gaze fell on Wei Gong's face, his speaking speed neither fast nor slow.

"Human civilization spans six thousand years. Cumulative war deaths exceed one billion. After every technological innovation, the first application is always weapons. Nuclear weapons have existed for seventy years, yet no country has truly destroyed its stockpiles. The wealth gap has expanded forty-sevenfold over the past thirty years. Statistically significant large-scale famines occur on average every twelve years. The annual turnover of the organ black market exceeds sixty billion."

He said these words without anger.

Without pain.

Without pity.

Only an extremely calm statement, like a doctor explaining a condition to family.

"I modeled it. I fed all variables of human society into it: resource allocation models, power structure evolution, group psychology parameters, technology development curves. I ran multiple simulations."

Chu Che paused.

"The results were consistent."

"Without external intervention, from now on the median survival time of human civilization is forty years. The most optimistic model gives sixty years. After that come resource wars, nuclear winter, or total collapse from internal class conflict."

Outside the interrogation room.

Su Ming's brows furrowed. Not because of the number itself, but because of Chu Che's expression when he said those words.

Too calm.

Not a feigned calm, but a genuine exposition of a fact he had long accepted and digested.

Jiang Yuan's hand loosened from the card bag, then clenched again.

Wei Gong sat opposite, his spine utterly still.

"So what is your conclusion?"

Chu Che smiled slightly. The corner of his mouth curved just a bit.

"My conclusion is that I'm not crazy."

His voice dropped half a degree.

"It is the human species itself that is the lesion."

Outside the glass, Liang Wen sprang to his feet.

"Greed, shortsightedness, selfishness, violent tendencies etched into our genes—these are not acquired traits, but evolutionary leftovers. You"

Chu Che shook his head.

"Cannot be cured. Because the very agents carrying out these measures themselves carry the pathogen."

His fingers tapped lightly on his knee twice, the chains clinking.

"Only pain and pressure can unite humanity. Only true elimination can screen out the qualified. Look back: every advance the Investigation Bureau has made since its founding—hasn't it been built on corpses? Jiang Yuan, Su Ming, Qin Zhixia— which of you wasn't selected from desperation?"

"When there's no weirdness, what are you doing? Infighting. Corruption. The privileged devouring people. I merely turned this screening process from passive to active."

Wei Gong's finger lightly tapped the tabletop once.

"You call this screening."

"I call it surgery." Chu Che corrected him.

Outside the interrogation room, Qin Zhixia's breathing grew rapid.

She walked to the speaker.

As her finger pressed down, the metal joint of her mechanical prosthesis emitted a soft sound.

"Chu Che."

Her voice came out from the speaker in the interrogation room.

Chu Che lifted his eyes toward the one-way glass. He couldn't see the person behind it, but his gaze landed precisely where Qin Zhixia stood.

"Your surgery?" Qin Zhixia's voice trembled, but each word was crisp. "How many people did the Cavity Persons kill? How many minors did the Midnight Nightmare kill? How many civilians died in the Blood Moon? Chicago was wiped out by a nuclear bomb. Dongdao became a quarantine zone. Thousands were assimilated by the Road Fighters, nearly losing consciousness for life."

"What crime did those people commit? They were just alive—going to work, eating meals, picking up their kids from school. Then they became the 'healthy flesh and blood' you said must be cut out."

Chu Che finished listening.

He didn't rush to answer.

He leaned back against the chair, and the chains clinked.

"Zhixia."

He called her name, his tone the same as in the debugging room half an hour earlier.

Qin Zhixia's hand holding the speaker trembled.

"When removing a malignant tumor, the blade must go beyond the tumor's margin, taking some seemingly healthy tissue, because the edge cells have already been infiltrated. You can't see it with the naked eye, but if it's not cut clean, the whole body will metastasize in three months."

"When a surgeon removes a tumor, they inevitably cut away some healthy flesh and blood."

"This is the pain that must be endured to heal this world."

Qin Zhixia's hand let go of the speaker.

No one spoke.

She wasn't persuaded. It was something more complex lodged in her throat, preventing her from saying the next sentence.

Beside her, Su Ming spoke softly: "He's switching concepts. A tumor is objectively existing pathological tissue, but those civilians are not. He himself defines who is the tumor and carries out the excision. This isn't treatment; it's dictatorship."

Chu Che couldn't hear the conversation outside the glass.

But he seemed to know what the people outside were thinking.

He withdrew his gaze from the glass and landed it on Lord Wei.

"Lord Wei."

Lord Wei didn't move.

"The Dragon-Rearing Plan." Chu Che's voice was unhurried. "Feed the harmless Fierce Ghost that retains self-awareness to nurture the Taotie Core inside Lu Yu's body. Zhao Bei of the Ferry Port, whom you sent in as feed—you know he still has consciousness."

Lord Wei's fingers paused on the tabletop.

"The Scavenger Plan. Have Jiang Yuan alone slaughter three hundred eighty-six Fake Persons in the dead of night. Some of those Fake Persons had formed emotional bonds with humans, unable to tell whether they were human. You gave the same order."

"Before the Ouyang Feng incident. You released the Ghost Wall from the containment facility to use as a pawn. Have you counted how many civilians died?"

Chu Che's mouth curved into a gentle arc that didn't change in the slightest.

"The difference between you and me, Lord Wei, lies not in the means but in the scale."

"You kill a hundred people and call it 'a necessary sacrifice for the greater good.' I kill ten thousand and become a monster."

He tilted his head slightly.

"Essentially, you and I are doing the same thing: protecting some people while sacrificing others. You are a shepherd, and so am I—only my pasture is larger."

The temperature inside the interrogation room didn't change.

But the air grew heavy.

Lord Wei sat there, his white-and-gray hair like a light frost under the lamp. Those old eyes stared at Chu Che.

The silence lasted a full eight seconds.

Then Lord Wei stood up.

The chair made no sound. His movement to rise was slow, yet his spine was straight as an iron nail.

"You're wrong."

Lord Wei's voice wasn't loud.

"The difference between me and you isn't in scale."

He walked to the edge of the interrogation table, leaving only a table's width between him and Chu Che.

"I am human."

Those three words were spoken softly.

"So I will get my hands dirty. I will feel guilt. In the sleepless hours of night, I will go through the files of the dead. I will remember each of their names."

"The Dragon-Rearing Plan was approved by me. The Scavenger Plan was my order. These accounts are on my head; after I die, history can judge however it likes."

"But when I do these things——"

Lord Wei's eyes locked onto Chu Che. Those cloudy old eyes were wide open now, and what lay within sent a chill down the spine.

"I know I am making a mistake."

"And you?"

His tone grew heavier.

"You sit there, turning tens of thousands of lives into numbers on a surgical record. No guilt, no hesitation, not a moment feeling you might be wrong. Do you call that rationality?"

"That is losing humanity."

Lord Wei straightened up.

"Humanity will never be penned-in sheep."

Chu Che looked at him.

The reflective surface of the gold-thread glasses concealed the emotion in his eyes.

He did not rebut.

He did not mock.

He simply sat there quietly, wearing an expression that made it impossible to tell whether he was smiling or not.

Outside the interrogation room, Jiang Yuan's clenched hand relaxed.

Su Ming straightened his body from the wall.

Liang Wen exhaled a breath.

Everyone was waiting, waiting for Chu Che's response.

Ten seconds passed.

Chu Che's gaze moved away from Lord Wei.

He glanced at the wall clock.

The hands moved past the hour.

Then he laughed.

"The theory part is done."

He looked at Lord Wei again; the pupil behind his lenses contracted by an extremely tiny arc at that moment.

"Now——"

"Let's proceed to the final surgical step."

Lord Wei's pupil contracted sharply.

He hadn't even had a chance to speak when all the suppressive glyph arrays on the six walls of the Interrogation Room lit up simultaneously.

It was not the activating white light.

It was the final flicker before it went out.