After a noticeable pause, Shaja smiled. He didn't pick up that thread, but instead asked, "Do you believe in the law of cause and effect?"
Xu Huo made a "please, go on" gesture, inviting him to continue.
"You reap what you sow. Everything we see at any given moment may be either a cause or an effect. Some effects are bitter, but those who suffer them aren't necessarily truly pitiful. They may have sown evil in the first place." Shaja sat across from him, speaking calmly. "Conditions in District 026 have always been harsh, and nothing changed when Evolution began. Mutated Plants that can devour people in other districts can't even sprout here. But while it's easy to share hardship, sharing prosperity is much harder."
"The settlements in Sector 01 used to look out for one another. They collected acid rain in containers and struggled to survive. So even in those conditions, new cities were still established. But the more people there were, the fewer resources were available, and some people would inevitably have to be sacrificed."
"So someone proposed cutting off resources to the outlying cities and letting those with smaller populations fend for themselves."
"Most cities approved the proposal. Resources were shared among them: those with more helped those with less, and those who had helped those who didn't. The burden on everyone was heavy."
"But some disagreed. If we abandoned the weakest people today, who would we abandon tomorrow? That was just a way of fooling ourselves. The important thing was to solve the resource problem, not to reduce the number of people using those resources."
"Central City was nowhere near its current size back then. It was just a medium-sized city. Because it strongly opposed the proposal to abandon cities, the others shunned it and cut