"Why? Why did you leave so soon?"
"If you could have held on a little longer, if you could have endured it, I wouldn't have become the lowest-ranked student in class! I wouldn't have taken your place as the thorn in the teacher's side, let alone been locked up in that terrifying Study Room!"
"I was tortured to death!"
When Zhang Chen uttered the word "death," his expression turned dazed.
"That's right. I'm already dead. I was tortured to death."
"If you hadn't left, I wouldn't have died."
"Xiao Lou, you killed me!"
Zhang Chen's words no longer made much sense. He simply hated Xiao Lou with a mad intensity for leaving before he did. Clearly, Zhang Chen believed that as long as Xiao Lou could keep living, keep bearing the teacher's wrath and his classmates' bullying in his place, he could go on living peacefully as before-a "peaceful" life in which he turned a blind eye to whether Xiao Lou lived or died.
But just as before, Su Bai heard another voice speaking in his mind at the same time.
"Why? Why did you abandon all your people?"
"If you hadn't left, if you'd continued to lead us as our next leader, we wouldn't have been called Remnants! Those beings on high wouldn't have treated us as expendable test subjects, let alone forced us into the Void Sea to die!"
"We were tortured to death!"
"It wasn't just me! So many of our people died because you left!"
"If you hadn't abandoned your people, your body, and our race's power, your abilities would surely have let you survive the experiments. With your abilities... you could have endured any amount of pain! Then the rest of our people wouldn't have had to suffer. That's what a leader should do, isn't