Chapter 126

The piercing wind howled as Hels pounced almost instantly, choking Bai Yin’s neck and pressing him into the sofa.

“You know exactly what happened back then!” Each word squeezed out through gritted teeth.

Bai Yin’s face turned beet red from the chokehold. He slapped at Hels’s hand until Hels gradually calmed down and released him.

Bai Yin coughed several times before recovering, then slowly said, “When Horne pressed the self-destruct button, he himself didn’t pass, but Ben Yian did. It seemed Ben Yian had obtained access through some method long before, without Horne knowing. Afterward, Ben Yian swapped the wiring on the Control Tower buttons, so Horne really pressed the overclock, but what actually triggered was the self-destruct.”

His fingertips turned white, and the muscles and veins in his arms bulged completely. Hels nearly wanted to tear down the dried corpse hanging from the city gates and torment it all over again.

He had caused Horne…

Those months, neither able to live nor die.

Hels’s mind buzzed. He took a deep breath to suppress his racing heartbeat.

He had never trusted Ben Yian. It was just that back then, Ben Yian’s pain and struggle seemed too muddled, while Ganal’s ambition was too blatant.

“How did you know about this?”

When Hels asked this, Bai Yin fell silent again. He lowered his head, burying his face in his callused palms, and his voice unwillingly leaked through his fingers. “The government higher-ups all knew. I’ve seen the firsthand evidence in my father’s hands. Do you think… do you think why he took that bullet for Horne!!”

By the end, it was an uncontrollable rasp.

He lifted his head and stared straight at Hels. His lips trembled, and his teeth chattered.

“Do you think why I want to preserve the human species?” Bai Yin’s voice carried a sob. He wanted to roar, anger surging to his throat, only to be forcibly swallowed back down.

“I just! I just… just don’t want everything my father did to be meaningless!”

“He was cowardly! He didn’t dare resist when Ganal was around. Thirty years, and I was cowardly too. I thought avoiding it would preserve us! What did it get us?” Bai Yin’s chest heaved violently. He stared fixedly at Hels, breathing deeply from grief.

“My father died, but I’m still alive. I can’t… can’t!”

He couldn’t let the fire go out. Whether obsession or pride, humanity’s flame couldn’t extinguish, even if that fire was forged by Prometheus.

“Although Ganal’s government wanted to eliminate Horne, they wouldn’t go so far as to do something that insane for him!” Bai Yin closed his eyes, veins bulging on his neck. “After the incident, they traced it to Ben Yian and planned to deal with him quietly. As for Horne, they had no time to handle him at all! They just wanted to go with the flow, lock him up, and let him fend for himself. But the residents disagreed. They demanded the truth, so the truth was fabricated! Back then, no one… no one was normal at all!”

“Do you understand? Hels. This is humanity. No one knows what others will do, or what one thing will lead to. Everyone just keeps doing, keeps… like a snowball, one thing after another, eventually forming a result that everyone has to bear together. That result isn’t what anyone wanted, but it happened!”

The more agitated Bai Yin became, the calmer Hels grew, so calm that he smelled the steady stream of woody scent wafting over, as if he could see Horne sitting nearby, the fragrance coming from his hair.

Would Horne ask him, ‘Hels, what do you choose?’

The scent grew richer, thick enough to fill his lungs.

What did he choose? What should he choose? What did he want?

He wanted Horne to wake up, in a future where humanity still existed.

Hels leaned back on the sofa and asked coldly, “Ganal and that bunch of idiots like Leon are all dead?”

Bai Yin’s clenched fists loosened, and he let out a long breath, slumping back in exhaustion. “I don’t know.”

He paused, then continued, “Didn’t you hear it that day?”

Hels found it amusing and countered, “What was I supposed to hear?”

“The explosion, two weeks ago.”

Two weeks ago? That was around when Hels returned from the alien hive. Before that, he hadn’t been in Loch City and didn’t know what happened here. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have cared, just like the occasional gunshots outside now.

Bai Yin explained directly to him, “Two weeks ago, Ganal’s government announced the ‘Desperate Battle Plan’.”

Hels frowned but said nothing.

“Some in the government opposed it, saying we should prioritize self-preservation now, but Ganal controlled some half-failures—unstable mutants from fusing aliens and humans. They wanted to incite infighting among the aliens to disrupt their attacks. There had been precedents of aliens betraying before.”

That precedent was himself. Hels scoffed but didn’t mention it. He just found human behavior utterly contradictory. “Back then, Ganal’s government wanted to continue the human race, and now they changed tactics?”

Bai Yin spoke quickly, “I don’t know. There was infighting inside. I heard it got very heated, but they had to make a decision. Everyone brought their families… Maybe many higher-ups had plans to flee with their whole households. They must have prepared escape routes long ago. I even suspect they built their own doomsday bunker somewhere. But that day, an accident happened—a penetrating bomb fell from the city edge into the government building.”

Perhaps premeditated, but no one knew. That day, a massive explosion erupted from deep underground. The building collapsed in an instant, blasted from below upward. Dust spread, and a large area of Loch City felt the underground tremors. In the end, a deep pit and a pile of rebar and ashes remained.

Hels’s frown deepened. “A penetrating bomb? Isn’t that from the Military District?”

“Yes, and few had authorization to deploy it, so I suspect there was a huge disagreement among them. But…” Bai Yin looked toward the gray ruins outside the window. “At this point, even with internal divisions, they should unite against the external enemy. This isn’t solving problems; it’s pushing humanity into the abyss.”

“So they clashed with the Military District? Leon?”

Bai Yin shook his head, his gaze turning cold. “I don’t know. I checked the Military District logs—no deployment records. I lean more toward some anti-human individual seizing the opportunity.”

Anyway, no one would survive. No hope. Might as well go out with a bang before dying.

Bai Yin grew irritated thinking about it—clueless, unprovable. “But if it was an anti-human individual, how would they even know how to use it?”

“Self-destruct?” Hels snorted.

“I don’t know. The whole building collapsed, communications cut off. All government personnel and their families perished. No organization would check for survivors afterward. And then… it ended.”

No bodies, but no one could survive that bomb’s power. They destroyed themselves with their own ambitions and desires. In any case, everything ended. The government vanished, the Military District fell apart days later, and the survivors just clung on as ordinary humans, seeing who lasted longer. They mourned and prayed for a savior to rescue humanity.

Now humanity was cornered, alien attacks hastening their extinction. So Bai Yin thought of the Underground Base—hiding there could prevent alien invasions and preserve genes. But the problem was, they might be slaughtered before the Underground Base was complete.

Hels let out an “oh” and smiled. “I can solve it. But there’s one condition.”

“What condition?”

“I want human society to run smoothly.”

Bai Yin didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

Hels opened the coffee table drawer and pulled out a storage box from below. He opened the lid, revealing various masks he had made before.

“Masks… why do we have to wear masks?”

Bai Yin didn’t understand the reason either. When Hels held the mask, one could see the layer of xenomorph particles attached to it—this wasn’t human tech; it was pure alien creation. But once handed to him, it looked no different from a human-made ordinary mask. Wearing it on the face felt nothing, left no trace.

“Will wearing the mask stop the aliens from attacking?”

In the church shell, hundreds or thousands held masks. They questioned and feared, but one wore it, then the second did too. Doubts sank into the priest’s eulogy, masks covering each other.

That was when Bai Yin, representing the Military District, formally surrendered to Xienobo. The aliens stopped attacking from that day.

“Your demand was completely unexpected.” Bai Yin expressed his view to Hels again. He couldn’t fathom why Hels would trade for such a condition.

Loch City’s ruins remained ruins, but people gradually dared to come out. They cleared debris, gradually gathering under Bai Yin’s lead. With no government or Military District, they made a leader.

“Mm,” Hels’s reply was indifferent. He and Bai Yin handled the Military District ruins. “I don’t want humanity to go extinct.”

This time, Bai Yin asked “why.” He now knew Hels was an alien. Hearing “don’t want humanity extinct” from an alien’s mouth—even knowing Hels wasn’t truly living among aliens—was still surprising.

“Because of Horne.”

“Where is he now?”

“A safe place.”

Bai Yin automatically took it as Hels wanting to fulfill Horne’s wish.

“If you can order the aliens not to attack, why make us wear masks? Redundant.”

Hels paused in his work and looked at the people silently working without interacting. He snorted.

“Because I don’t want the aliens exterminated either.”

They needed to maintain this brief peace.

He wanted to see Horne.

“For these survivors in desperation now, it’s a single-choice question: submit or die,” Hels’s voice was deep, more mature than when Horne was still around. “What about decades or centuries later?”

Now, humans had experienced war and cruelty, seen death’s shadow, and feared taking another step. But far in the future? No one could guarantee no awakeners would appear in humanity, nor that all humans were cowardly, incompetent, or afraid of death. As long as aliens existed, when humans awakened and resisted, vowing to reclaim their home, what price would they pay? In the name of noble spirit or fate.

Violent threats ensured temporary obedience; willing numbness ensured lasting stability.

To turn humans from a species that thought, resisted, and questioned rules into animals pursuing only safety, stability, and food—to make them feel that happily living healthily was most important, and to make them firmly believe from now on that this was the best blessing, passing it to their children generation after generation. What they wanted should just be surviving, not how they survived.

The mask wasn’t deception; it was isolation.

“Pa!” A stone fell and shattered on the road. Bai Yin went to clear it. After hearing Hels’s words, he rarely smiled.

“You’re building a world for after Horne returns, but if he did, would he really want to see this world?”