Meng Chengfei staggered back a few steps, looking utterly lost.
Xu Ye caught him, his own heart filled with shock.
"Captain..."
"I'm fine." Meng Chengfei waved him off and forced himself to stand steady, his eyes bloodshot from the turmoil in his mind.
Even Gu Muhan and the others wore expressions of horror.
"So it was you. Why didn't I think of that?" Meng Chengfei gave a bitter smile. "I thought I'd orchestrated everything, but you saw through it all. You kept refusing to act, maintaining that illusion for ten years, just to wait for this moment, didn't you?"
Cheng Tianming lowered his eyes and took a bright red fruit from inside his coat. He sighed. "Ten years ago, when I was at sequence 6, I already noticed signs of contamination."
"Xiao Meng, you understand. I am the Dawn Blade, the sword of Sky City, the guardian of this city's hundreds of millions of people. Nothing can happen to me, or it would cause tremendous upheaval."
"You're afraid of dying." Xu Ye saw straight through him and suddenly spoke.
In his previous life, he had come close to death several times, and he had witnessed far too many deaths in the hospital.
No one could face death easily.
Whether you had boundless wealth or overwhelming power, whether you were optimistic and brave or had nothing left to hold on to... no matter who you were, when faced with death, there was only one emotion-fear.
Cheng Tianming paused, then shook his head with a rueful chuckle. "Yes, I'm afraid of dying. No one isn't, and I'm no exception. Protecting others-perhaps that was just an excuse I found for myself."
"And then this fruit appeared."
"I knew your father loved your mother deeply. He would never give me this fruit. And with