"Hm?" I looked at Qin Shu in confusion.
Qin Shu explained, "When you go elsewhere to look for a job, someone local loses that opportunity. When you settle there, one of the homes there gets rented or sold to you, an outsider, and housing prices might rise. And then there's marriage. You might not marry a local woman, but you could get married there, and your wife and children would settle there with you."
"Most people would just see it as normal population movement. But some might feel resentful because of it," I said.
"To them, moving and killing are just like moving house and settling down to us."
"They'll come into conflict with each other." I thought of the successor to the new thing who'd been killed.
To be precise, the one who'd died after being besieged by the Ghost Kings should have been the successor to the successor to the successor of the new thing.
"But to them, we're just 'jobs.' We don't have 'human rights.' We're not even people!" Qin Shu said agitatedly. "When you look for a job, do you consider whether the job itself wants you to do it? Who would think that way?"
I stared blankly at Qin Shu.
I hadn't expected him to take such a roundabout way of explaining this to me.
In fact, I'd known the Ghost Kings' nature longer than he had. They all had their own ways of doing things and completely different personalities, but they shared one essential trait: as Qin Shu had just said, they didn't regard people as people.
They didn't just fail to regard living people in the real world as people; they didn't regard the living people of the future world, who had once been just like them, as people either.
As Qin Shu