"I can't believe that the magnificent Arbiter can only remain confined in my laboratory." Dr. Ji put the stack of materials in his arms onto the table. He asked sarcastically, "Do you need me to bring you food?"
The one sitting on the armchair originally belonging to Dr. Ji was not the doctor himself, but the Arbiter, clad in a black uniform. With a nonchalant bearing, his arms were folded and his long legs were crossed. A silver badge was missing from his chest, but the silver trimmings on the uniform itself filled in the blank space, rendering his attire and appearance as impeccable as always.
Frosty eyes scanned the silvery-white laboratory. "Do you think I'm staying here willingly?"
"I recommend that you be a little nicer to me. I'm not asking for much, just that we recover one percent of the friendship we had when we were younger," the doctor said. "You need to clearly recognize and understand the situation here. The Trial Court cannot even protect itself. If even I—your sole friend in this base—hadn't taken you in, you would've promptly been torn to shreds by the people outside. I heard that the United Front Center held three meetings in a row on the subject of whether the Arbiter's qualification to surpass all other authority and kill people, as laid out in the Arbiter's Code, should be abolished or not."
With those words, he winked slyly. "You chose to come back from the wilderness. Do you regret it now?"
He had intended to stir up Lu Feng's emotions, but failed to do so. When compared to before Lu Feng heard those words, his expression had not changed in the least.
Ever since contactless gene pollution and the composition exchanges between inanimate matter were discovered, the base had fallen into an atmosphere of desperate unease. Perhaps the magnetic poles would be defeated by distortion in the very next moment and they would become monsters, become objects, or become one with this base of iron and steel. These eight thousand people were the elites and the leaders of the military and the Lighthouse, the most exceptional of the existing humans. Precisely because of their exceptional intelligence, they were better able to sense the horror of the inexorably approaching doomsday. The dying base maintained a tense peace that was like a lake surface covered with a thin layer of ice; it appeared solid, but in fact, a single tossed stone was all it would take for everything to come crumbling down.
The cause was a shooting that occurred ten days earlier.
"If it had been anyone else, it would have blown over. You…" The doctor looked at the Arbiter, who was completely indifferent to anything he said, and gritted his teeth.
The person killed was a respected scientist of the Lighthouse. In the areas of trajectory calculation and ammunition improvement, he had made remarkable contributions—and thus was a luminary within the realm of military projects. Naturally, all the researchers within that realm supported his juniors, and the people of the military also revered him.
Ten days ago, Lu Feng and Seraing ran into this scholar in a corridor of the United Front Center, and they had even greeted each other by way of nodding.
However, right as they passed each other, Lu Feng pulled out the gun clipped to Seraing's waist. His marksmanship was as precise as always, and his pull of the trigger was both swift and decisive. The bullet squarely struck the back of the ammunition expert's head, and blood sprayed like a firework as his corpse pitched forward and toppled to the ground.
This incident alarmed almost the whole base.
Students and friends of the deceased existed throughout the base. Claiming that the deceased had a sharp mind, polite bearing, gentle disposition, and no signs of infection whatsoever, they demanded that the Trial Court give an explanation.
But a living person had died, and because the wave of substance fusions two months ago had ruined the core components of the gene testing instruments, their operations were completely halted, so no proof to support the Arbiter's judgment could be found. In this regard, the Arbiter's only statement was that he acted in full accordance with the rules and regulations of the Trials.
Many old matters were dug up, and the calls demanding that the Trial Court make its rules public reached their peak during this time. However, limited to the power granted to the Trial Court by the Arbiter's Code, they had no way of sending Lu Feng to the military court, so the controversy over the Code also reached its climax at that time as well. A young man named Colin, who claimed to be the pioneer of the original Outer City's anti-Trial movement, escaped the calamity that left only eight thousand people alive in the Main City because he himself was a teacher working in the Garden of Eden. Now, this hot-blooded young man was once again shouting the slogans that had once resounded throughout the Outer City. At the same time, he attacked the merciless trampling of human nature by the military's other institutions with all his might, and he swiftly garnered a large number of faithful supporters.
In response, after a long silence, the United Front Center chose to do all in its power to suppress him. However, the humans at the base were mainly members of the Lighthouse and the Garden of Eden. Their strength was limited, and they could not be merciless. Now, if a single person died, humankind would lose one out of eight thousand. A riot occurring in a chaotic society of eight thousand people seemed to be an unsolvable quandary.
In the midst of this tempest, a piece of little-known historical data was unearthed from the Lighthouse and spread throughout the base like wildfire.
It was a top-secret file belonging to the "Fusion Faction" from many years ago. People were very secretive about the faction's existence, but they truly did have undisputed scientific research capabilities. Over ten years of experiments and observations, they came up with an estimated probability—of the living people who had been genetically infected, they had a one-in-ten-thousand chance of retaining a certain degree of their human consciousness while obtaining monster characteristics, and one in sixty-five hundred may recover a certain degree of their human consciousness within three years of completely becoming a monster.
To make matters worse, the data was accompanied by a dispassionate remark. One in ten thousand and one in sixty-five hundred were only theoretical estimates. In reality, the true probabilities may be slightly higher.
The day this data was leaked, the entire base went into a furor.
In response, Colin wrote a lengthy essay, the topic of which was "A Hundred Years of the Trial Court—Unverifiable Sins."
At the same time, a crazed soldier hid outside the Trial Court and fired at the Arbiter. It was said that his beloved commanding officer and comrades all died to the Arbiter's gun, but unfortunately, in every aspect, the Arbiter was an officer a hundred times better than him and the bullet failed to strike true. But this action inspired others. Instantly, the Trial Court became a target in various meanings of the term.
Until Jibran submitted an application to the Lighthouse.
Dr. Ji brought up that the spore sample from the Abyss showed an unprecedented inertia against infection and being infected, against distortion and being distorted. If they could understand the mechanism via research and apply it to the human body, humans may also be able to acquire this valuable characteristic. However, this strange and lively spore displayed an extraordinary closeness with the Trial Court's Colonel Lu. When it came into contact with the Colonel, its growth speed and cell activity would both increase.