Ironclad Group Chat: Red and Black Lists Engraved with Heroic Epics

The dreamer said, "If the surgery was successful, you should be recuperating in a field hospital now."

"By the Star God, that bullet went straight into her neck..." Even he was sweating bullets. "However, perhaps as a reward for her usual acts of kindness, the bullet didn't hit any vital organs. You should reply to her as soon as you've finished dealing with your trivial matters."

On Sunday, his eyes blazing with fury, he forced out a few words through clenched teeth: "Those... damned barbarians!"

He was furious and wanted to curse, but his vocabulary list couldn't find many sharp words.

"I'll pack my bags now... Thank you for telling me all this, Mr. Gopher!"

[March 7th: Ouch... that's her neck! Just a hair's breadth away, and Miss Robin was about to...]

[Star: This... should I say it's Hippe's blessing?]

[Sunday: If He truly blessed us, He should have let the bullet miss its mark, instead of leaving a nasty scar to demonstrate His mercy… Ah, sorry, I lost my composure. How could that deity possibly cast his gaze upon us for such a thing? And bestow His protection?]

On Sunday, he told the train crew, "I'm sharing this only so you can understand the limitations and dilemmas of 'harmony.' No matter how grand the vision of 'the strong helping the weak' may be, it's mostly just wishful thinking."

"But rest assured, this choice will not have any dire consequences."

"Because this is just a pipe dream, a nightmare that has haunted me for countless nights—if you all had the chance to make the same choice as me..."

"Will you still support the robin's journey to harmony?"

As usual, Xing asked his companions for their opinions.

Hearing about the nightmares of the night, Himeko couldn't help but wistfully recall, "I feel like I've dreamt of similar scenes on some nights. In the dreams, I see a group of blurry faces; although I don't know who they are, we're like family. We're constantly struggling against some transcendent being..."

"I remember their confusion and fear clearly... but I also remember that in that dream they never chose to give up—just like Miss Robin."

[Walter: Ahem!]

Walter patted his chest, opened his mouth wide, and turned his head like a robot, staring at Himeko. His expression was extremely complex, reflected in his non-prescription glasses.

This description doesn't sound like her story after she boarded the train at all; it sounds so much like...

"What's wrong, Welt?" Himeko asked, puzzled. "You... like Sunday, have you ever been troubled by the illusory separation of life and death in your dreams?"

It's not an illusion!

Walter instinctively applied force, and the porcelain cup in his hand cracked with fine fissures.

……

After consulting with everyone, Xing once again chose the opposite answer to Sunday.

"Hmph, I see," Sunday laughed. "I understand your arguments."

"The purpose of raising these questions is simply to clarify one thing: Pinocchio's predicament cannot be saved by [harmony], and the only way to truly build a dream paradise is through a [order] that combines force with weakness."

He pressed his hand to his chest, deeply moved, and asked himself: "I know how painful it is to be tormented, how lost one is when one is disoriented, how frustrated one is when things don't go as planned... even to the point of despair. All of this causes me pain, because it cannot be considered happiness."

Therefore, he solidified a shocking idea.

"We must teach the weak how to live happily. And this 'living' is not the refined lifestyle that celebrities and nobles talk about, but the absolute way of human existence."

Liu Ying pursed her lips and asked a question she herself longed to ask: "In your opinion... what constitutes a happy life?"

On Sunday, his eyes lit up, and the words "a promising student" already came to mind: "Good question."

He spoke eloquently and persuasively: "Human consciousness is essentially an illusion, a series of prisons called 'self-worth.' People are led astray by this illusion, commit mistakes, and the consequences are borne by external things."

"When one mistake after another fills the population, becoming impossible to trace... these individual prisons together form a prison, governed by a natural law called 'survival of the fittest.'"

"And nature is always accompanied by plunder and sacrifice... its opposite is called order."

"What I want to do is precisely this: to bring the happiness of all beings under a single [order], so that people no longer have to make bitter choices, no longer have to confront the weaknesses of human nature, and abandon the ingrained habits of beasts, so that a paradise belonging to humankind can be established."

[Fu Xuan: You want to use the power of order to break free from all the shackles of natural rules? To use a completely artificial order to monitor everyone in Pinocchio, regulate their every move, put an "exoskeleton" on them, and immerse them in a life of conforming to "good"? Is this your solution?]

Sunday: What's wrong with that? I remember an old proverb from Xianzhou—"Heaven and earth are ruthless, treating all things like straw dogs." The struggle for resources in nature has always been rude and cruel. On the contrary, artificial concepts are often filled with all sorts of beautiful connotations: law, morality, democracy…

Ask yourself, do nature, the animals that fight fiercely, the planets orbiting the stars, and so on—do they need these things? No! It is humanity, and at most, all intelligent life, that needs them. To date, all the progress of intelligent civilization has been focused on one thing: conquering the rules of nature! If that's the case, why not completely abandon those primitive rules?

[Star: Good heavens, this is... a universe-wide explosion of technology and ruthlessness? Even when Taiyi was alive, he wasn't this strict, was he? Even if He could be resurrected, would He really agree to this?]

[Screwgoom: Without a doubt. According to limited records, even when the Star God of Order was still alive, the civilizations under His direct rule were far from being so radical.]

[Fu Xuan: How can the true meaning of the ancient proverb of the Immortal Ship be interpreted in this way? If Heaven and Earth were ruthless, all things would be mere straw dogs to them. But precisely because you and I are far from being straw dogs, Heaven and Earth naturally possess a touch of benevolence.]

[Black Tower: But this set of rules is inherently rigid. You should understand how much of a role your so-called "prison of self-worth" has played in the galaxy so far. Lilta, who freely published all his scientific findings, and Elijah Salas, who invented the synesthetic beacon—weren't they all realizing their self-worth? Were their impacts negative? Even in your model, Archivist Aguilar, who pioneered star trails, and Eastern Enlightenment and Louis Fleming, who brought trade to all corners of the universe, are unnecessary. Those whose talents far surpass those of ordinary people inevitably lose the opportunity to utilize their intellect. Your rules may undeniably create a certain degree of beauty, but they render all creativity useless, and progress will be stifled. How can Pinocchio, so rigidly established for millions of years, resist external aggression?]

[Sunday: On this point, haha, what if I said... the radiance of order was enough to cover the entire universe? Then, all intelligent life would live happily under a unified plan. Then, all disputes would disappear, and the distribution of all resources would be fair. Moreover, is there anyone more transcendent than Zandal? If we place the happiness and crisis he brought to the galaxy on a scale, which side would be the heavier one?]