A Small Matter

"There's a lake... cough, cough! What is that smell? It's so pungent..." Qiu Ran coughed from the choking fumes and couldn't help asking.

"Idiot, in this freezing hellscape of the fucking Outland, what kind of normal lake could possibly give off a faint glow?" Nomi crouched down and ran her fingers over the snow on the ground.

"Tire tracks."

Li Aoz spotted them. "They're fresh. A convoy passed through not long ago—looks like one vehicle split off from the group."

"White Fang Gang?"

"Not sure. Could be other Wanderers."

Li Aoz shook his head. There was no way to tell. He took a short knife and some blades from his backpack and tucked them into his belt.

"We can't drive over there!" Nomi said. "There was a landslide here. We can't go any farther in the car. Let's get closer on foot."

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

After giving Qiu Ran some instructions, Li Aoz camouflaged the vehicle and headed toward the lakeshore on foot with Nomi.

The storms in the Outland were too fierce, and the soil was unstable. Even maps were useless here. The wind could blow people off course, and a hillside turning into a hollow overnight was nothing unusual.

Judging by the tire tracks, there probably weren't many people. It was possible that Outland Wanderers had come looking for a warmer place to escape the cold.

After walking a few hundred steps, they saw the truth behind the shimmering lake. From a distant hill, ten truck-sized pipes protruded from the mountainside, continuously disgorging filthy, scalding wastewater. It poured down from dozens of meters up like a torrential rain. All kinds of trash, scrap, sludge, and remnants of corpses had been naturally washed ashore and piled into an embankment.

"Fuck... those Frostplate animals!"

Nomi cursed.

"Look! Over there—what the hell is that?!"

Li Aoz followed her fingertip. Beside a rock lay several messy discarded canisters, each clearly marked with a striking yellow-and-black radiation symbol.

"Radioactive waste."

Li Aoz said, "So it's Frostplate's sewage pipe. Not surprising. There used to be a country that had it pretty good and specialized in dumping nuclear waste into the ocean."

"Those bastards, those animals, worse than pigs and dogs! Heartless scum! It's because the Four Nations keep doing this to the Outland that Azure Planet ended up like this!"

Nomi gripped her wrench, filled with righteous indignation. "Pah! They talk about human rights, morality, industrial development, necessary sacrifices—the people of the Four Nations built their disgusting, hypocritical prosperity by sucking the blood of everyone on Azure Planet... And then they call our Rose Army terrorists? Purify Society, Frostplate, Sky Ring, Zhengxu, Red Arrow! Every last one of them—the Four Nations are the biggest terrorists!"

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

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

"Someone sat here, on this wrecked television shell. He must have just gone into the wastewater. He left a pool of vomit here, with clotted blood in it... He probably went into the wastewater to rummage for food."

Li Aoz followed the footprints left on the ground. Before long, he found a corpse beside a crudely assembled car.

Just a Wanderer. He had vomited everywhere, then, in his agony, blown his own head off with a single shot.

Li Aoz drove his knife into the corpse's eye socket to confirm the kill, then searched the body. The man's equipment was awful, worse than what Li Aoz had on him.

Nomi stood behind him, cautiously searching the surroundings.

Fortunately, he had no companions. Nomi climbed into the assembled car and rummaged around for a while, finding only a battered copy of Children's Story Reader and a paintbrush no longer than a pinky finger.

After flipping through it for a while, Nomi tossed the book away. One page featuring an illustration of a gentle woman had been smeared over with all kinds of disgusting stuff, along with yellowish-white stains... Nomi didn't need to think to know what the book's owner had done to it.

When she heard Li Aoz's analysis of the dead man's cause of death, Nomi muttered, "What could there even be to eat in there... What a stupid fucking idiot."

"He's dead. Don't be so malicious. This car still has forty-two liters of fuel. Go get the fuel can from the car and siphon it all out."

"Got it." Nomi rubbed her hands hard and ran back to the vehicle, bringing back a hose and fuel can to collect the remaining fuel from the car.

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

"I found a letter. His name was probably Benedickson. He heard from a friend that bandits had killed his mother, so he was going to join the Rose Army and get revenge. There was also an heirloom from his mother: a ring made from a pull tab."

Since it hadn't triggered a quest, Li Aoz crumpled the letter into a ball and casually threw it away. The pull-tab ring was equally meaningless trash, so he tossed it directly into the wastewater lake.

Your actions have reduced Nomi's Favorability toward you by 3.

"Hm?"

Li Aoz glanced at Nomi. She looked expressionless, but she actually cared quite a bit about this sort of thing.

Though her Favorability had dropped a little, Li Aoz didn't care much.

Nomi was just a temporary teammate he had talked into joining him. Once he had used her enough, he could kick her aside.

"Benedickson... Sigh, he really was a pitiful man. But the Rose Army doesn't have time to deal with Outland bandits."

Nomi shook her head. "As long as we defeat the Four Nations, everything will get better."

"Behind every nation's rise is another group's history of blood and tears. From ancient times to the present, empires have never been sacred." Li Aoz shrugged.

"Then smash all those empires apart, tear them to pieces, and grind them beneath our feet," Nomi said.

"And then?"

Li Aoz spoke casually. "Then you'll realize that to manage a force powerful enough to overthrow an empire, you'll need to create an even stronger, more stable imperial regime. The cycle repeats—history has proven that humans are humans. They never transcend history."

"I can't think that far ahead."

Nomi shook her head. "Me? I'm just a stupid idiot. Even the instructor said I'm usually useless, just a little wildcat who knows how to fight and kill."

"But even a wildcat like me can no longer stand seeing the world become like this."

"I don't know whether other people might have better choices. Maybe there'll be tyrants in the future, new officials, and the world will get even worse—but I'd rather make mistakes hundreds of times than maintain the status quo."

She stared ahead, determination filling her single eye. "Beneath this red-and-black sky lies a world buried under white snow and yellow sand. A world full of despair."

She turned to look at Li Aoz.

"Don't act so detached about all this. This is our world. Aren't both you and I part of this world?"

"This isn't some stupid game. To us Outland People, the Rose Army—no, everyone who resists the Four Nations—is our faith."

"Anyone with eyes knows resisting the Four Nations is impossible—but we insist on doing it anyway. Even if all we have are our teeth and nails, even if we can only bring the Four Nations a little pain, that struggle alone is enough to prove one thing to them:"

"We—us vermin barely surviving in the Outland—are people too, just like those in the Four Nations who live with heating, eat steamed buns, watch television, and read books. We are lives too."