"Is he your friend?" Sun Hang asked.
"Friend? What is a friend?" Noor asked in return.
Sun Hang could not help falling into confusion. Did the concept of "friends" not even exist among the Sand Sea Remnants?
"Are you... close with him?" Sun Hang rephrased the question.
"I've known him since we were children," Noor replied.
Known each other since childhood? So they were childhood friends?
This guy had killed his childhood friend without the slightest hesitation. He was ruthless, all right.
"Didn't killing him make you sad?"
"If I didn't kill him, he would have killed you, then told the High Priest about this. By then, the High Priest might kill me, or turn me into a condemned one. So I could only kill him," Noor answered honestly.
What a fine example of sacrificing others to save oneself... In an apocalyptic environment, only people selfish enough could become the last survivors. But the Sand Sea Remnants had already formed a settlement of considerable size, with a socially organized division of labor and cooperation. Logically, the people in the same settlement should not have been locked in a dark forest where it was kill or be killed.
Even if Noor had been forced by circumstances to kill Baha, he should have felt at least some regret or shock. Yet Sun Hang sensed no negative emotion from Noor beyond tension and fear.
He had killed Baha as naturally as a hunter killed prey.
Both were acts of survival, but to humans, killing a beast and killing one's own kind surely felt completely different—unless one was a battle-hardened veteran, numb to slaughtering fellow humans... Put another way, in Sun Hang's view, Noor's mental state and social understanding differed enormously from what he considered a "normal person."
"Is murder illegal in your settlement?"