Lü Zhongqi's voice was as gentle as his gaze, without the slightest hint of aggression, as though they were merely chatting about trivial household matters.
Yet as Meng Chao followed his words back into that age of collapsed order, bloodshed, cruelty, and utter darkness several decades ago, he found that, just as Lü Zhongqi had said, he truly could not find a single path toward the light.
Amid those ruins where the strong devoured the weak.
Every road to survival had been paved with heaps of corpses and endless blood.
"If even such choices leave you torn and unable to decide, then what about the choices that come next?"
Lü Zhongqi continued, "Suppose that, as Dragon City's ruler at the time, you discovered a Mutated Zombie Virus. This virus might kill more than half the city's elderly, weak, sick, and disabled, those with weaker resistance. Yet it would also be highly likely to awaken the gene banks that had slumbered for hundreds of millions of years within healthy adults, extracting from the deepest reaches of humanity's Gene Chain a powerful weapon known as 'Superhuman Power.'
"Would you conduct further research, mass-produce it, and secretly release this virus throughout the city—killing some people while making others taller, faster, and stronger?
"And if you developed a Gene Serum that could raise the odds of humans awakening Superhuman Power by twenty to thirty percent, at the cost of raising the risk of Cultivation Deviation by twenty to thirty percent as well—where Cultivation Deviation could mean shattered meridians and severe injuries at best, or boiling blood and being burned alive into a dried corpse at worst—would you conceal the truth, or even force people to take it?
"And if you knew that repeating dozens or even hundreds of biochemical experiments could greatly reduce the