Chapter 432: Prophecy and Public Opinion |
Guan Tong sat down. "Moon… may I ask what I should call you?"
"Just call me by a nickname. My real name is irrelevant, it perished with the bygone era. In this brand-new age, a nickname often reveals a person's true inner self," Moon Key said.
Guan Tong raised an eyebrow slightly. "You said the past era perished?"
"After the Fire Thief descended, the world became a new world. The nicknames we use on the Terminal Panel are our names in this new world. Your nickname is 'Shadow'. It's not just because of your ability, is it?"
"You're wrong," Guan Tong said. "My name exactly matches my ability. There's no other meaning."
Moon Key smiled without replying.
"Let's get to the point," Guan Tong said solemnly. "I want to commission you to look up someone for me."
He had just returned from space and, without resting, came straight to Moon Key. Of course it was about the Suzuki matter.
He had told Uenoshi before that when clues run cold, special channels should be used. Diviners like Moon Key were one of those special channels.
"Not necessarily," Guan Tong said, taking a tablet from his storage ring and bringing up a map before setting it on the table. "Beixing Country has thirty-six administrative regions. I'll start with region one. You can prophesy whether I'll find him there. If not, we'll move to the next."
Moon Key paused at his words. "Exhaustive search?"
"Exactly." Guan Tong's eyes were firm.
He disliked giving up halfway. Once he decided to do something, he did it to the end. He would not rest until he had an answer.
"…What information do you have about the person you're looking for?"
Guan Tong pulled up a surveillance photo of the woman and the name she had registered under, "Wei Huo."
Moon Key examined it carefully, then after a moment of thought said, "I can help, but on one condition."
"Reasonable. What do you want?" Guan Tong asked.
"I don't want Ascension Coins or items. I want you to save someone."
"Who?"
"Adam."
"Save Adam?" Guan Tong frowned. "What do you mean?"
Moon Key lifted her eyes, a faint sadness flickering across her face.
"In my prophecy, I saw his death."
"…"
Guan Tong felt a prick of alarm.
He respected Adam's strength. Adam could manipulate force fields, and before leaving Liruo'an City, Guan Tong had sensed a change in Adam's aura—he seemed to have entered the Second Stage of Ascension.
Across the world, Ascendants who reached the Second Stage were vanishingly rare, each a top-tier powerhouse. Such a figure should not die easily.
"How exactly does he die? Where?" Guan Tong pressed.
Moon Key shook her head lightly. "I can't foresee every detail. I only saw his corpse drifting in the sea. If you agree, how to find and save him will be your task."
"I agree." Guan Tong did not hesitate. Even without Moon Key, if he found Adam in danger he would still lend help.
He did not view Adam as a rival. The two had already been in contact; Adam was comrades with Bai Xuewu, and, most importantly…
Guan Tong remembered that during the Nightmare Beasts rule, he had exchanged private messages with Adam about the Kimos Star fragments. From then on he realized Adam also wanted to explore alien civilizations and the truth about the Fire Thief.
He had even thought that, if the chance arose, he might invite Adam to join the Trace Origin Travel Troupe he intended to form to investigate secrets. But Adam belonged to Suroma's official Ascendants, so an invitation would have been unlikely.
"Alright, then it's settled."
Moon Key said this and placed both hands on the crystal ball.
She closed her eyes. A misty purple light rose from her palms and slowly settled onto the crystal. As the purple light filled the interior, the ball began to rotate, its smooth surface flashing with strange images.
Guan Tong watched silently, saying nothing.
This was the first time he'd seen a prophecy-type ability and he felt some curiosity.
He did not believe in fatalism, so he found prophecies somewhat unreliable. But since he had come on his own accord, his personal skepticism didn't matter—if it was useful, that was enough.
About five minutes later, Moon Key opened her eyes.
Though looking at Guan Tong, her pupils seemed focused on a distant point, as if staring into the void behind him.
"I see you travel across Beixing, using Shadow's ability to search everywhere… but you find nothing… finally, in… a certain city you seem to discover something…"
Crack!
A crisp sound. Her left index finger suddenly cracked and bent. Guan Tong jumped to his feet.
Moon Key came back to herself, glanced at her finger, then nonchalantly let her left hand drop beneath the table. To the puzzled Guan Tong she said, "Complex prophecies exact a price. It seems this time it's a finger. Don't worry about it."
"…Sorry." Guan Tong felt a bit apologetic.
"No need. I accepted this commission myself." Moon Key took out paper and pen, quickly sketched a simple drawing with her right hand, and pushed it toward Guan Tong. "The city I saw was vague. This is roughly what it looked like."
Guan Tong picked up the sketch. After a moment he felt an odd familiarity. When his gaze landed on a tall cylindrical tower in the drawing, a flash of recognition hit him. "This is Yunhua!"
Indeed, the city outline Moon Key had drawn was Guan Tong's hometown, Yunhua City. That was why it felt familiar. The tall smokestack was the towering chimney in the city's industrial park.
"You just said I will find something in this city?" Guan Tong looked up at Moon Key.
"The prophecy was like that."
"I didn't expect it to be this."
Guan Tong had not imagined the matter would end up in his hometown Yunhua.
He had not returned there in a long time.
He also remembered that Yunhua, being a coastal city, had been swept and destroyed by surging tsunamis during the Earth Dragon Rolls Over rule…
Guan Tong folded the sketch and put it into his pocket. He told Moon Key, "Thanks. I'll head there as soon as possible. I'll also try to contact Adam. Do you have his direct contact?"
He could message Adam through the Ascendant Home account, but that was not as direct as a phone call.
"I don't have a phone," Moon Key said calmly.
"…I figured as much."
Her still-living-in-a-wooden-house, low-appliance lifestyle made that obvious; she appeared to value a low-modernity way of life.
"If anything progresses, I'll come tell you."
"I'm about to leave New Covenant City. If you ever need me, go to the Argan Grasslands."
Guan Tong was surprised. "You're leaving? So you won't take commissions anymore?"
He had found her because her address was listed on the commissions site. That visibility was why many people sought her out and why she had a reputation.
Moon Key looked at the crystal ball. "I've seen too many futures. I want to see the present. The Argan Grasslands have tribes that revere natural living. I'm going to join them."
The Argan Grasslands… Guan Tong had heard of them: a vast tropical plain far to the east, home to many wild animals and some indigenous tribes.
Although he found the idea of a modern person living in a tribe hard to accept, he understood Moon Key's choice.
"Very well. Goodbye then."
After Guan Tong left, Moon Key raised her left hand and looked at her broken index finger, whispering, "'Shadow's' future a kind of taboo? For a prophecy tied to him to cost a severed finger… what is his future connected to?"
…
After past rules ended, people would celebrate.
Especially after the most dangerous survival-type rules, people rejoiced at surviving another ordeal and often held wild festivities.
Governments welcomed this as a way for citizens to relieve stress. If people lived too long under oppressive circumstances, even if not killed by rules, they could be driven to extremes by depression and despair; such incidents were not rare.
But after this rule ended, festivities were not as raucous as usual. Multiple bad pieces of news weighed on people's minds.
For example, the parasitized legion's counterattack on a Joint Force base killed many soldiers. That rattled civilian populations across the Human Consortium, renewing deep fear of the parasitized despite previous underestimation.
Then there was the destruction of Dream Boat One.
The Human Consortium had tried many times to communicate with Robert, but he refused to change his mind. In helplessness, the Consortium finally decided to launch several missiles and destroy the spacecraft.
When the incident became public, people learned the astronauts' deaths were linked to Scarlet Fear. The higher-ups' long-known fact that "Rules' power can take effect before a rule is officially released" began to spread widely.
Yet the most terrifying news was about the "Demon Race."
The Human Consortium had not planned to disclose this information so soon, but internal leaks forced them to admit it. They clarified that the "Demon Race" information came from Robert alone and its truth remained unverified.
That clarification barely mitigated public response. Learning that Scarlet Fear was created by an individual belonging to a species shocked people. Worse, that species had threatened to find humanity's Mother Planet and seek revenge, which heightened panic.
If a single "individual" could make humanity too afraid to look at Terra or browse the internet, what if an entire "Demon Race" came? Humanity would be doomed.
After the Consortium's statement, a flood of related information spread online.
The content did two things: one, hyped the terror of the "Demon Race"; two, claimed Ascendants caused Scarlet Fear to dissipate the day before the rule ended.
These two pieces combined into a chain of inference and quickly exploded across the web.
"Who exactly did it? Why kill that 'demon' early? Aren't we inviting disaster onto Tianshui Star?"
"Right, if they'd just waited one more day the rule would end naturally. Why rush and do something like that? Now that the 'demon' is dead, its species will want revenge. What do we do?"
"If the 'Demon Race' wanted revenge, they should go after the Fire Thief. We humans killed that 'demon', now its species will retaliate against us… I'm furious…"
Countless comments appeared on major social platforms.
On one anonymous site someone even offered a key piece of information.
"Rumor, unverified. I heard the person who killed the 'demon' and caused the rule to end early was Beixing's 'Shadow'—yeah, that 'Shadow' deity…"
Once the name "Shadow" appeared and was tied to the incident, the heat grew even more intense.
Before this, opinion about Shadow on the web had been mixed. Given that he had saved many people several times, positive voices were stronger, though critics pointed to his destructive actions in other countries.
But after this, public sentiment turned sharply against him. A surge of denunciations erupted across platforms.
Even on Ascendant Home, the forum with many Shadow fans, numerous posts questioned his actions.
One thread titled "Did Shadow Protect Us or Bring Catastrophe?" quickly gathered tens of thousands of replies.
The original poster wrote: "Granted, Shadow and those in the Human Consortium who aided him may have had good intentions, but looking at the result, good intentions caused harm.
Whether the rule ends one day earlier or later hardly affects humanity. Yet if an early end brings the hatred of a powerful lifeform in the universe, that's a catastrophic, bloody loss. The well-meaning Shadow might instead kill all of humanity! Do ordinary Ascendants have no voice in this?"
Early replies, posted soon after the thread appeared, mostly supported the OP and denounced Shadow.
"Yeah, Shadow might be satisfied, but the rest of humanity could be dragged down with him!"
"What were the officials thinking? Why would they approve such a thing?"
"I really don't get why some people can't follow the rule properly and instead try to game or hack it. How can humans challenge a godlike being like the Fire Thief? That's just asking for disaster!"
"It's like a game where some players exploit bugs to win early. Ever think that if you crash the game by exploiting a bug, other players all lose too?"
"If all humanity has to pay for Shadow's actions, I won't accept it! He takes the benefit and we split the consequences? That's impossible!"
"Support! It's Shadow causing the mess, not ordinary people. If the 'Demon Race' comes for revenge, let them go after the real culprits, not hurt the general public!"