Chapter 619: A Fateful Encounter
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
Of course, the person who spoke was Zhang Lisheng. Although he was not too bothered by the horrific anti-Atlantis extremist killings, he did not want to mingle with these time bombs and asked for trouble. Because of this, he planned to use an even more bloody method to strangle these hidden dangers in the cradle.
Sure enough, as the young man had expected, the sturdy man turned his head and looked at him with a cruel gaze and a ferocious grin. “What did you say, boy?”
“I said that you’re all madmen who bring trouble. Ah sh*t! How am I going to clean up hundreds of corpses if I can’t use my divine power? Looks like I can only summon some bugs to eat them. I hope there are enough winter bugs in New York…” Zhang Lisheng muttered to himself and lowered his head as he shook his wrists. At once, a gaze that was so ferocious that it was completely inconceivable to other ordinary people flickered past his eyes in a blink of an eye.
If the brutal expression on the sturdy man’s face just now was like a fat cat that was toying with a mouse before devouring it, then Zhang Lisheng would be a beast that was about to tear up and destroy all the creatures in front of him. There was no psychopathic excitement and joy before the killing, only an endless indifference, and a suffocating tyranny.
Even though the burly man could not see the young man’s expression clearly, the unique sensitivity of a ‘butcher’ still allowed him to notice that something was not right earlier than those companions of his who were unable to control themselves over the excitement caused by weeds and strong booze. Unfortunately, how could a frog that had been locked on by a cobra to have a chance to break free? The only thing his keen intuition could bring to himself was endless fear and trembling.
However, to his surprise, when the young man was about to kill him first, a series of knocking suddenly resonated on the iron door.
“Sh*t, has trouble already arrived?” Zhang Lisheng who originally planned to slap a palm on the burly man’s shoulder to shatter his heart frowned and said, “Go see who’s here.”
“Y-yes…” The more ferocious a beast was, the more it would instinctually obey a more powerful beast. The burly man snapped back to his senses and unconsciously obeyed the young man’s command. Obediently, he turned around and opened the iron door without even daring to glance at the CCTV beside the door.
A tall graceful figure tightly wrapped in a black windbreaker bringing along four tall strong men carrying huge mountaineering bags on their shoulders strode into the bar.
Because of her footsteps that were too fast, the woman in the trench coat almost tripped over the curled corpse on the floor. That woman closed her eyes and shook her head and when her eyesight finally adjusted to the dark red light in the room, she looked down and saw the dead face with blood flowing out of its seven orifices. At once, she turned her head and howled at the burly man in rage, “Hammer! Have you bastard played that boring ‘cat, mouse’ game again?!”
“I-I…” The pale sturdy man mumbled in dumbstruck, causing strange weird snorting sounds from his friends in the bar who wanted to laugh but did not dare to.
The woman in the trench coat became even more enraged. Pointing at the young men and women around her, she yelled, “And all of you with this boring ‘duel game’! It has no use at all except for making our organization’s reputation more misunderstood! The Atlanteans would always have good conditions to seduce these traitors to betray the Earth to serve them…”
Upon hearing the woman’s relentless roar of rage, the thugs in the house did not refute at all. Instead, they began to pick up the corpses and garbage on the ground silently.
After scolding for a while and finally venting out her dissatisfaction, she ended her denouncement with a non-effective threat, “I’ll break all of your fingers if I see a ‘dirty floor’ again!”
Then, she panted a little before quietly walking to an 18-year-old blonde girl who had a look of worship and a smile on her face. “Tangerine, did you see a Ford sedan outside?”
“Yes, Big Sister, it’s the car of the members from Boston’s wolf cave.” The girl nodded. The instant her words left her mouth, Darwin stepped forward to introduce himself, “You must be the queen bee in New York’s ‘bee nest’. I’m green wolf from Boston’s wolf cave…”
Only then, the woman finally noticed that there were a few unexpected guests in the bar. She turned around absent-mindedly to have a look but froze without warning. She felt someone speaking to her but she could not hear the content at all. After a moment of dumbstruck, she stared at Zhang Lisheng and murmured, “Lisheng, w-why are you here…”
“I just returned to Earth and came across a few kind-hearted people who let me hitchhiked in the suburbs. However, I realized that something is wrong when I entered New York and I had nowhere to go at once so I accepted the invitation from these kind-hearted people and came to this lunatic asylum.” The young man shrugged.
“Lunatic asylum?” The woman gradually calmed down and said with a charming smile, “This is like a ‘kindergarten’ compared to your coldness.”
“Sheila, coldness, and madness are totally two concepts. I only crush the obstacles blocking my path and those that can be crushed by me, but these madmen here would just take the initiative to go kick the roadside stone when they see it. Are you one of them now? Oh, you even look like a leader. Oh, looks like you have changed a lot in this one year. I remember that you would always close your eyes involuntarily when you saw blood last time.” Zhang Lisheng smiled.
“Very surprising?” Sheila asked with a mixed expression on her face.
“Surprising?” The young man waved his hand. “Of course not. I once read an interesting experimental report in ‘Stanford’ and understood how close the distance between a good person and a thug is. When you chose to stay beside that unscrupulous Howard Mason, who used whatever means to instigate hundreds of thousands of people on Capitol Hill to conduct anti-Atlantis demonstrations, that time, I already knew that perhaps you would become completely different from before. ”
Upon hearing Zhang Lisheng using the adjective ‘unscrupulous’ to describe their leader’s name, most of the several dozens of young men and women in the bar glared at him at once. However, Sheila seemed to have a high status in their hearts. When they saw that the girl did not seem to be enraged, they could only swallow their anger down by force as well.
“Lisheng, I’m not a thug, but a fighter defending the sovereignty of the Earth, don’t you also hate those aliens?” Sheila explained before adding on with interest, “But that experiment you mentioned does indeed sound very interesting. Can you tell me the details about it?”
“Of course.” Zhang Lisheng shrugged and began to jabber on, “A few years ago, a sociologist called Professor Haston at Stanford has discovered a very strange phenomenon when studying social changes during the war. It seems like some specific circumstances can turn very kind people to become thugs and murderers in a very short time. They can kill their own kind, and even their former friends, without guilt. For example, in the middle of the last century, in the German Republic during the Second World War, many of the doctors and priests in their 30s and 40s who had formed a solid world view long ago and would save lives before the war were publicly recognized as people with noble morals. However, in just within two to three months after the outbreak of the war, these same people could actually release poisonous gas in the concentration camps to kill thousands of these so-called ‘inferior nations’ with an easy conscience, before creating soap and brush using their dead bodies. Such a fast disappearance of human kindness made Professor Haston feel inconceivable so he conducted an experiment to see how ugly human nature is. He recruited 100 college students including his own students as experimental subjects and divided them into two groups in a closed building. A group of them would play prisoners with no human rights at all, while the other group of students would play prison guards who could do whatever they wanted. As a result, on the third day, a very strange thing happened. The students who played the prisoners obviously knew that all of this was fake but they still became humbler as days went by. The students who played the prison guards, on the other hand, were completely the opposite. Each of them became unconsciously arrogant and strut about giving themselves air. As time went on, this polarized attitude became more and more obvious. Ten days later, the students who played the prison guards began to corporally punish students who acted as prisoners. The strange thing was, at this time, both students who played the role of prisoners and Professor Haston who played the role of a warden found this to be just a matter of course. The situation gradually got out of control, but all of the actors were not aware of it. It was only until three weeks later when the professor’s wife came to visit him in the laboratory building that she was astonished to find on the surveillance monitor in the office that a shy boy whom she had known each other for years and was always shy and introverted was wearing the uniform of the prison guard. With a Texas slang, he was scolding and beating the ‘prisoners’ with a baton in hand. Only then that things started to turn for the better. The lady who was not involved in this ‘chess game’ was completely startled. She warned her husband to immediately terminate the already uncontrollable experiment and after spending great efforts to make him see clearly, Professor Haston finally came to his senses. Just like this, the experiment that was originally planned to go on for one month finally ended early. More than 80% of the students who participated in the experiment afterward had to rely on the help of a psychologist to resume normal life, and 10% of them even had to leave school for medical treatment. Due to the abominable effect, even though related researches would be of great academic value, such similar experiments have never been carried out anymore. However, even so, the changes in human nature under certain conditions has been exposed. In a circumstance that everyone knew that it was an experiment, Haston used a special situation to trigger the evil intent from a group of students who were excellent in both morally and academically in less than 20 days and turned them into villains unknowingly. Now that the Earth has fallen into a global war for hundreds of days, I can fully understand the appearance of many weird thugs and lunatics. However, understanding does not mean acknowledgment, Sheila. As a friend, I sincerely hope that you can remove yourself from such extreme organizations like the Earth Independent Movement Organization, lest you’d be buried together with him.”
“Oh shut up, you assh*le, we are all heroes defending the independence of the earth.” Finally, someone could not hold back the anger in his heart and shouted at the young man.
“Defeat the Atlanteans with a bottle of alcohol? What a humorous guy you are.” Zhang Lisheng glanced at the skinny young man holding a whiskey bottle yelling at him and chuckled before turning his gaze back to Sheila. “Sheila, close your eyes and think about what I said. I’ll get rid of these little troubles first.”