"By your account, wouldn't these so-called Mutant Seeds be incredibly powerful?" Ning Zhe thought it over after hearing Su Fei's explanation. "Is that where the name comes from?"
"No, Mutant Seeds are different from ordinary people, but so far I haven't heard of a single one able to withstand modern weapons fire, and none could ever stand against an army. At least within the Federation, no truly overwhelming Mutant Seed has ever surfaced. But their cells divide unusually fast, and they keep generating new DNA, evolving cells that work more and more in their favor. Which means they only grow stronger over time. That's exactly why the powerful want them wiped out. These people have become a destabilizing element. Their existence threatens the position of those at the very top." Su Fei finished speaking, his expression calm, then added after a moment's thought, "Maybe the reason this particular group ended up called Mutant Seeds is that whoever coined the term had no special ability of his own. Anything different becomes a demon in someone else's eyes. More often than not, what's right or wrong in any era is just a matter of whoever holds the power deciding it that way."
Su Fei's words left Ning Zhe genuinely shaken, though not because of the Mutant Seeds themselves. It was because Su Fei simply knew too much.
Everything Ning Zhe understood of this world was confined to the small stretch of land around Stronghold 87, while Su Fei seemed to know so much more, enough to even get his hands on IV equipment. His knowledge already surpassed Old Man Lin's by a wide margin.
Su Fei touched only briefly on the subject of Mutant Seeds, and didn't dwell on it further. He then pulled a paper book from his pack and sat down beside the oil lamp to read.
Paper books were a rare sight in the refugee zone. Back when Old Man Lin had been a teacher, he'd owned only a handful of old-world textbooks, worn nearly to pieces from use.
"Romance of the Three Kingdoms, that's a banned book." Ning Zhe glanced at the cover of Su Fei's book, and at the publication date printed on it, 2022, a year from the old world.
"You can read?" Su Fei glanced sideways at Ning Zhe, as though a literate refugee were somehow more surprising to him than a man capable of genetic mutation.
Ning Zhe answered honestly. "My adoptive father was the only teacher in the settlement. He mentioned this book to me once. Supposedly it's banned from publication and circulation because it contains military strategy and political scheming."
"It's contraband for refugees, but not restricted inside the city." Su Fei nodded. "All the conglomerates and stronghold owners really need is a population with no ideas of its own, one that can generate value for them. They're terrified of refugees knowing too much, or having more fighting spirit than they should, so they keep a tight grip on all sorts of things. That's exactly why owning a firearm in the refugee zone gets you hunted down. To those at the top, refugees are nothing but tools that keep them fed and clothed. Intelligence, courage, and weapons, none of those belong in the hands of tools. Throughout every dynasty in history, there's no shortage of examples of armed force being used to defy the ruling order."
"You've been inside the city?" Ning Zhe found Su Fei's account genuinely fascinating. To a man whose entire worldview had centered on nothing but survival, Su Fei's words seemed to open up a hazier, broader understanding of the world, fragmented as it still was.
"I heard about it secondhand. Word is, people inside the stronghold don't want refugees having too many ideas of their own." Su Fei smiled faintly. "Life out on the wasteland is genuinely hard, yes, but what's even more frightening is that refugees are losing something else entirely."
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Ning Zhe found this dismissive. "What's left for refugees to lose?"
"Hope!" Su Fei's eyes burned as he looked at Ning Zhe. "They've lost hope."
"If you're saying the people inside the city want to use these brutal living conditions to wear down every sharp edge in a refugee, until survival alone makes them give up resisting, then they've certainly succeeded." Ning Zhe felt nothing at this answer. "Hope you can't even see is worse than no hope at all. Otherwise, it just adds a layer of mental torment on top of an already starving stomach."
"..." Su Fei fell silent for a moment, finding, to his own surprise, that he had no answer for that.
"You said Romance of the Three Kingdoms isn't banned inside the city. Does that mean there's a huge gap between inside and outside the walls?" Ning Zhe asked again.
"Fundamentally, there's no real difference, if anything, it's crueler inside. You live in the refugee zone, where an angry man with a knife can only kill one person at most. But the great figures who command power inside the stronghold can decide the fate of an entire crowd with a single offhand remark, laughing as they say it." Su Fei delivered this coldly, then went on. "That said, the material differences are enormous. Inside the city there's water, electricity, powerful technology, in some fields even more advanced than the old world. But that top-tier technology stays entirely in the hands of the conglomerates and a small handful of others. Ordinary people never get near it, never get to benefit from it at all."
Ning Zhe had already guessed there were classes within the stronghold too. He asked flatly, "So life inside isn't especially wonderful either, is it."
"Better than out here, at least. Their lives look a lot more like actual human lives." Su Fei opened a drawer and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette. "The break in our culture is like a blade. What it severed wasn't necessarily culture itself, maybe just the ordinary person's access to it. Knowledge and a wider view of the world can change a person's fate, but refugees don't need any of that, because it runs against the interests of those who rule. There's only a few decades of recorded history in this wasteland era we can actually trace. Everything before that is a complete blank. No one knows what happened during that gap."
"Wasn't it just the old world, before this wasteland era?" The longer Ning Zhe talked with Su Fei, the more painfully aware he became of how little he actually understood about this world.
Su Fei closed the book in his hands. "Of course not. After the Earth was struck by that swarm of meteorites, human society still held together in some kind of order. Someone deliberately turned the world into what it is now."
"Who?"
"I don't know either. But after that gap in history, all the top-tier power in this world started concentrating into a handful of hands." Su Fei gave no definite answer. "Just look at who's living most comfortably in this world today. It's not hard to guess, is it?"
Hearing this, Ning Zhe fell silent. Whoever Su Fei was hinting at was already perfectly clear.
Could it be that the rulers of the strongholds had destroyed the entire world, just to put themselves at the very top of the food chain?
And could the miserable, wretched state of the refugee zone today be something they'd engineered on purpose, too?
Just then, Su Fei noticed the IV bag had run empty, and stepped forward to pull the needle from the back of Ning Zhe's hand. "How is it? Feeling any better?"
"Much better, thank you!" Ning Zhe tried moving his body and found it had already recovered. He still felt some fatigue, but compared to how he usually felt after one of his episodes, this was worlds easier.
A few minutes later, Su Fei handed Ning Zhe some herbal ointment and walked him to the door.
Reaching the doorway, Ning Zhe turned back to look at Su Fei. "That..."
Su Fei paused. "What is it?"
"Good night." Ning Zhe started to say something else, then thought better of it and decided against asking Su Fei about his true identity.
Out on the wasteland, everyone carried their own secrets, and holding back one's curiosity was, more often than not, the wiser choice.
Besides, he couldn't be sure Su Fei would even answer honestly if he asked, and even if he did, Ning Zhe had no way to verify whether any of it was true.
Still, one thing was certain: this man was no ordinary warden.
He didn't even seem like a refugee at all.