After a day of fermenting online into a pot of boiling water, the Federal Central Government finally put the lid on it itself.
Faced with overwhelming public pressure, the Federation's upper echelons barely delayed at all. In an extremely short time, they decided how to punish the officials who had committed crimes.
Every one of the officials involved was sentenced to death.
With charges piled one on top of another—crimes against humanity, embezzlement and corruption, human trafficking, abuse of authority, and multiple offenses punished together—the death penalty was practically the lightest possible outcome. Not a single one escaped.
Although the Federation's credibility and reputation had been barely preserved, most people online were still dissatisfied with the punishment.
The radicals believed they should all be sentenced to death by a thousand cuts, sliced one cut at a time so they could feel the victims' pain and slowly die amid the ultimate torture, paying for one life with another.
As for the conservatives, their ideas were even more extreme—they thought the radicals were far too conservative. The officials' souls should be extracted and refined, they said, so that they could never rest even after death and would be unable to reincarnate for all eternity.
The argument lasted a full day online. All kinds of extreme opinions took turns appearing, as if everyone were competing to see who could be more ruthless.
But no matter how noisy public opinion became, at least the heat surrounding the matter was gradually suppressed.
The Federation's heavy hand did not directly ban discussion of the topic. Instead, it released other news and created new hot topics to divert the public's attention, shifting people's eyes away from the matter bit by bit.
After all, continuing to argue would certainly do the Federation no good.
As for the many