The ultimate blue sea

Chapter 60-Betrayal

Cheng Weizhi's expression became serious. He slowly shook his head. "No, your line of thought has gone astray—what activates the energy crystal within the human body can be called a certain kind of stress. There must be certain physiological characteristics. But it also needs external factors for activation. However much vitality it has, it may also harm the human body. It can't be compared to the external energy crystal you're talking about. Can you accept that explanation?"

Su Qing shook his head. "It's not just that. Don't fob me off. Everyone had the solid-state medium inside them, and they were all laid out together. Why was he the only one who stood up?"

However little Cheng Weizhi understood worldly wisdom, he could still feel the sense of intimidation Su Qing was gradually revealing. He could only continue: "Do you know about bone transplants? The world's population is so large, but finding a compatible donor is very hard. Naturally the probability will be a little higher between blood relations than between unconnected people."

Su Qing smiled. "So you mean that the carrier of the energy hub formed a 'matched pair' with the emotional type of the deceased?"

Cheng Weizhi frowned. "The energy hub had a carrier? You didn't say so just now..."

Su Qing cut him off: "In other words, I survived back then because there was something like an energy hub near me, and it just happened to match the type of my energy crystal. Actually, the probability of that is even lower than winning the lottery."

Seeing that Cheng Weizhi didn't answer, Su Qing laughed aloud. "What a coincidence—that energy hub was you. Uncle Cheng, I've never believed in coincidence. I know that if you scientists are looking at statistics and detect something of 'low probability,' you'll believe it couldn't happen. That's the way science handles things. I didn't get that wrong, did I?

"Well, I'm a layman anyway, it doesn't matter if I did get it wrong—but Uncle Cheng, tell me the truth. You didn't end up in the grey house just because of a meal from McDonald's, did you?"

Cheng Weizhi lowered his head. Looking closely, his hands were actually trembling a little. After a long time, he sighed, then quietly and incongruously said, "It's not everyone who can have an energy crystal activated. One in five people can produce a grey seal, but how many people can produce a blue seal?"

Su Qing remembered a part of the materials he had seen in the RZ Unit's files, so he said, "The government's view is one in a hundred thousand."

"So blue seals are equivalent to a category of people with a genetic mutation—the essential function of genetic mutation is to give a species limitless possibilities for evolution, to increase the likelihood that the species will survive a major change to its environment. But humans, from a certain point of view, can be said to have already escaped their natural environment. They live in a comparatively stable artificial environment. So to borrow a term from topology, the probability of a genetic mutation moving in a positive direction is constantly approaching zero."

Su Qing digested this for a moment, then asked, "You mean that blue seals are a kind of genetic defect?"

"Supposing that only the double core energy system is stable, that only it can integrate with the human organism, then the single core energy crystal must have a flaw. The more energy circulates through it, the greater a danger it poses. It's like a ticking time bomb buried in the human body. Don't you think that a grey seal being unable to automatically absorb emotion and being unable to convert emotion when forced to absorb it is a form of self-protection for the body?"

Su Qing listened quietly, but he knew that for him, none of this was the important point.

Cheng Weizhi buried his face in his hand and wearily said, "Utopia's research went in the wrong direction. Zheng... They denied the existence of the double core energy crystal system. First because a double core theoretically couldn't exist, and second because the contained nature of the double core system meant that it wouldn't be stronger than a blue seal. They believed that strength was one of the criteria for whether a species' evolution was successful. They overemphasized power and overlooked stability."