The subway station near the old residents' resettlement site.
Two hunched elderly mutants stood at the subway entrance, surrounded by five young mutant warriors. They held white flags in their hands and stared anxiously at the armored vehicles and mounted machine guns not far away, their faces filled with trembling fear.
Those two decrepit old things were priests of the Qi Tribe. One was Gomo, while the other was named Hank, a representative of the Ancestral Faction.
Unlike the Secular Faction, the Ancestral Faction consisted of Singularity City's earliest mutants. Their views had undoubtedly been radically progressive by Singularity City's standards a century and a half ago, but compared with the present-day Qi Tribe, they were so conservative that they were practically turning back the wheel of history.
Rather than hunting humans as prey, they preferred to keep those born on farms as livestock, while treating the remaining free people as slaves.
After all, most farm owners in this land did the same. Villages like Hope Town, where more than half the population were free citizens, were few and far between.
They even opposed eating people. There were more productive and nutritious sources of food, after all, and they had promised those unwilling to become mutants that they would at least not turn them into pies... Though that promise had actually meant nothing, because the moment they won, the residents unwilling to become mutants had effectively lost all their rights.
Without outside interference, the conservatives of any society would eventually grow old. The Qi Tribe was naturally no exception.
Although the Ancestral Faction possessed a whole range of "advanced technologies," including midwifery, it still could not change the fact that the tribe's younger generation was steadily growing in number, nor stop the Secular Faction, which was "more focused on mutant