Lü Fanghui fell silent for a long while after saying this.
For several seconds, he stood as motionless as a statue.
Yet violent ripples spread across the red wine in his hand.
As though a miniature stormy sea had been whipped up, revealing that his heart was anything but calm.
"Strength—or rather, cultivation realm—is something utterly objective. It requires enormous amounts of time, energy, and cultivation resources to build up and maintain."
Lü Fanghui finally spoke. "When we wasted so much time helping ordinary citizens repair their homes, rebuild their neighborhoods, and plant crops, naturally we had no time to improve our own combat power.
"And when we obtained large quantities of crystals, but instead of refining them into Gene Serum for ourselves, stimulating cell growth and breaking through the limits of life, we consumed those precious cultivation resources on the old, weak, women, and children, then apart from their heartfelt gratitude and laughter, naturally we gained nothing.
"We hadn't realized this in the past.
"While our elders and siblings who remained in the Nine Gangs seized every opportunity to plunder resources and cultivate madly, growing stronger and stronger, we so-called 'idealists' were actually another kind of cold-weather bird, smug over superficial 'kindness' and nitpicking 'justice,' never realizing that a deadly winter was silently descending.
"Now, we had to pay the price for our stupidity.
"The members of the Red Heart Association were all iron-boned, unyielding men. Faced with monsters ten times stronger than themselves, no one flinched, no one fled. Not a single brow furrowed as everyone charged forward without hesitation.
"But so what? Even if you glued your brows in place, you still couldn't escape the fate of being torn to pieces by monsters, swallowed into their bellies, and turned into shit.
"Many people died, including the Red