1947, God of Decay (Part 2)
Shepard had been relieved of duty.
For two reasons—the extermination of the Xilu people, and the handover of the human battery technology. In both matters, her decisions had run counter to Tang Xiao's orders.
Regarding the Xilu people, Shepard believed that no matter how atrocious the crimes committed by the Ssi-ruuvi Imperium had been, only its upper echelon needed to bear responsibility. The Xilu civilians were innocent and absolutely should not be punished for the mistakes of their leaders.
Therefore, she had firmly opposed the Extermination Order against the Xilu people.
However, the officials sent from the Duchy of Dawn told her that, according to their investigation, the Ssi-ruuvi Imperium had exterminated at least seven species during its expansion, turning all of them into human batteries and slaughtering at least ten billion people in total. The crimes of the Ssi-ruuvi Imperium were truly beyond reckoning.
Moreover, the use of human batteries had permeated every aspect of Xilu life. Even the energy they used to boil water came from human batteries. In other words, even ordinary Xilu civilians could watch a living being writhe in agony atop a human battery without batting an eye, then coldly extract energy from their bodies.
Thus, every Xilu person was an accomplice to the genocide committed by the Ssi-ruuvi Imperium!
In contrast, although the Pia'ek people occasionally used batteries, they relied on conventional energy most of the time. Even in the warships they built, human batteries accounted for no more than one-third, and those were all irreplaceable components of technologies based on human batteries.
Therefore, the Xilu people had to be exterminated. Every Xilu person had come to take contempt for the lives of other species as a matter of course. If such a race was not exterminated, were