A Small Matter

"There's a lake... cough! What's that smell? It's so pungent..." Qiu Ran coughed, unable to help but ask.

"Dummy, in this freezing Outland, what kind of normal lake do you think can emit a faint glow?" Nomi lowered herself, looking down and stroking the snow on the ground.

"Tire tracks."

Li Aoz saw it: "The tracks are fresh. A convoy passed by not long ago—looks like one vehicle separated from the group."

"Is it the White Fang Gang?"

"Not sure. Could be other wanderers."

Li Aoz shook his head. It was hard to say. He took out his short knife and blades from his backpack, and stuck them in his waist.

"We can't drive over there!" Nomi said, "There's a landslide over here. We can't drive that way. Let's get closer and take a look."

"You stay here and watch the car. We'll go over there."

Li Aoz gave some instructions, then camouflaged the vehicle and walked towards the lake with Nomi.

The storms in the Outland were too strong, and the soil was unstable. Even with a map, it was useless. The wind could blow people away, and a hillside could turn into a depression overnight.

Judging from the tire tracks, there shouldn't be many people. It's possible that Outland wanderers were looking for a warmer place to escape the cold.

After walking a few hundred steps, they saw the truth of the shimmering lake: from the distant hills, ten truck-sized pipes protruded from the mountain pass, continuously discharging dirty, scalding wastewater. It poured down from a height of dozens of meters, and all kinds of garbage, waste, pollutants, and corpse remains were naturally washed and piled up on the shore, forming a levee.

"Damn... Frostplate bastards!"

Nomi cursed:

"Look! Over there—what's that thing?!"

Li Aoz followed her finger: next to a rock, there were several messy discarded tanks, and a clear, eye-catching yellow and black radiation symbol was painted on them.

"Radioactive waste."

Li Aoz said:

"So it's Frostplate's sewage pipes. Not surprising. There was even a country with a pretty good life that specialized in dumping nuclear wastewater into the sea."

"These bastards, these beasts, worse than pigs and dogs, heartless and ungrateful scum! It's because the Four Nations have been doing this kind of thing to the Outland that Azure Planet has become like this!"

Nomi gripped her wrench, filled with righteous indignation: "Bah! Talking about human rights and justice, industrial development, necessary sacrifices—the people of the Four Nations are sucking the blood of all the people of Azure Planet to have their hypocritical and disgusting prosperity... And yet, they call our Rose Army terrorists, (purifying society) Frostplate, Heavenly Ring, Righteous Dawn, Red Arrow! Every single one of the Four Nations is the biggest terrorist!"

Li Aoz didn't deny it. Although Nomi's words were a bit harsh, she wasn't wrong.

He checked the surrounding environment. Someone had indeed been here, resting briefly to warm up before leaving.

"Someone was here, sitting on the wreckage of this broken TV. He must have just been in the wastewater, leaving a pool of vomit here, with blood clots in it... He must have gone into the wastewater to scavenge for food."

Li Aoz followed the footprints left on the ground and soon found a corpse, with a self-assembled car next to it.

Just a wanderer. He vomited everywhere. In his pain, he shot himself in the head.

Li Aoz stabbed the corpse's eye socket with a knife to confirm the kill, then rummaged through the body. The other party's equipment was terrible, not even as good as his own.

Nomi stood behind him, cautiously searching the surroundings.

Fortunately, he had no companions. Nomi climbed into the assembled car and rummaged around, only finding a tattered copy of Children's Story Reader and a paintbrush the length of a little finger.

After looking through it for a while, Nomi threw the book away. A page with a gentle female illustration was covered with various disgusting parts, and there were some yellowish-white dirty marks... Nomi didn't need to think to know what the book's owner had done to it.

Hearing Li Aoz's analysis of the deceased's cause of death, Nomi muttered, "What could there be to eat there... What a moronic idiot."

"He's already dead, don't be so malicious—this car has 42 liters of fuel left. Go get the jerrycan from our car and drain the fuel."

"Okay." Nomi rubbed her hands and ran back to the car, retrieved the straw and jerrycan, and collected the remaining fuel from the car.

"By the way, did you find anything on the body?"

"I found a letter. His name should be Benedickson. He heard from a friend that his mother was killed by robbers, so he's going to join the Rose Army to take revenge. There's also a keepsake his mother gave him: a ring made of a pull tab from a soda can."

Since it didn't trigger a mission, Li Aoz crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it away. The ring keepsake made of a pull tab was even more meaningless garbage, and he threw it directly into the wastewater lake.

[Your actions have decreased Nomi's favorability towards you by -3]

"Huh?"

Li Aoz glanced at Nomi; she looked expressionless, but it turned out she cared about this kind of thing.

Although it lowered her affinity a bit, Li Aoz didn't really care.

Anyway, Nomi was just a temporary teammate he had coaxed over; once he was done with her, he could kick her aside.

"Benedickson... sigh, he really is a pitiful guy, but the Rose Army doesn't have time to deal with the Outland bandits."

Nomi shook her head: "As long as the Four Nations are defeated, everything will get better."

"Behind the rise of every nation lies the bloody history of another group of people. Throughout history, empires have never been sacred," Li Aoz shrugged.

"Then we'll smash all these empires, tear them apart, and trample them underfoot," Nomi said.

"And then?"

Li Aoz casually said, "Then you'll find that in order to manage the power sufficient to overthrow the empire, you have to create an even stronger, more stable imperial regime. Repeated replacement—history has proven that humans are just humans; they never transcend history."

"I can't think that far."

Nomi shook her head: "I'm just a stupid idiot. The instructors all say that I'm often useless, just a little wildcat who knows how to fight."

"But even a wildcat like me can't tolerate the world being like this."

"I don't know if others will have better choices, and maybe there will be tyrants and new officials in the future, and the world will be even worse—but I would rather make mistakes hundreds of times than maintain the status quo."

She gazed ahead, her single eye filled with determination: "Under this red and black sky is a world buried by white snow and yellow sand, a world full of despair."

She turned her head and looked at Li Aoz:

"Don't think of all this as too indifferent; this is our world. Whether it's me or you, aren't we also part of this world?"

"This isn't some silly game. For us Outlanders, the Rose Army—no, all those who resist the Four Nations—are our faith."

"In fact, anyone with eyes knows that fighting the Four Nations is impossible—but we insist on doing it. Even if it's just using our teeth and nails to bring a little pain to the Four Nations, such a struggle is enough to prove one thing to them:"

"We, we these crawling insects eking out a living in the Outland, are just as human, just as alive, as those in the Four Nations who enjoy warm air, eat steamed buns, and can watch TV and read books."