Andrew Robinson Leinbach
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Chapter 183: On the Nature of Evil
🕑 Added 2023-07-04 23:48:54 +0000 UTCIsaiah
“What the Hell is wrong with you?”
When Mila joined them in the Kimali Mountains, the first thing she did was walk up to Isaiah and slap him full force in the face. Granted, her effective Strength was less than half his effective Toughness, so the blow didn’t hurt, but she knew how to use her power, and he wasn’t prepared, so he went flying into the wall of the cave.
Then, as he slowly got up while struggling to understand what was happening, she growled at him. “You’re supposed to protect him. But what? You’re angry, so you let the insane person try to kill himself again while getting revenge?”
Mila, who’d returned to her normal appearance, had an aura and face showing extreme amounts of anger, sadness, and fear, and Isaiah was pretty sure she wasn’t faking her emotions.
He then looked at Aalam, who was sitting on the floor of the cave with a calm disinterested expression, the obvious signs of his anger and rage having disappeared when they were back on Hira, yet to return, and Isaiah realized he’d missed something.
Isaiah had been angry, and then confused by the slap, but his emotions quickly changed to match Mila’s. “What am I missing?”
“The System recognizes both of you as monsters. And it doesn’t treat monsters very well.” Mila was of the same race as Aalam, but she’d managed to trick the System back when she was an F rank into thinking she was a native cultivator from Hira, so, despite being a monster herself, the System didn’t recognize her as such. “A monster who slaughters an entire planet of cultivators without the protection of a System war will almost certainly have a bounty placed on his head, and an extremely large one at that.”
She turned to glare at Aalam. “Had I not risked myself and declared war against the Violet Mountain Sect while surrounded by C ranks, given what Aalam has already done, he wouldn’t be able to be within even a hundred kilometers of a cultivator without generating a high reward quest for his death.”
“Yes, you are very impressive.” Aalam matched her glare with a calm expression as his words focused on very much the wrong part of what she had just said, and Isaiah couldn’t tell what he was feeling.
Given the race they shared, as a default both their auras were nearly impossible to read, but, while Mila was deliberately fully expressing herself, Aalam wasn’t. If Isaiah didn’t know better, he’d think Aalam was just a normal mortal, and there was no way to tell his emotions as his face, which usually made what he was feeling fully apparent, was blank.
“What is wrong with you, Aalam?” Mila continued to glare. “I understand blocking communication with me and Diana. For your own good, we would have tried to stop you. But Id is supposed to make you impulsive, not stupid.
“The you from the last time you were in the Id state would have ordered me to start the war and, given the amount of primal energy that will start flowing on this planet, you would have brought Diana to convert some of it to nascent energy.
“The logic doesn’t work.”
Tears started to flow from Mila’s eyes but Aalam continued to just look at her calmly. “Yes, it does.”
“Only if you want to die!”
Aalam’s face didn’t change even as Mila screamed at him and Isaiah finally realized what was going on.
The Id state made Aalam lose his inhibitions, but it didn’t cloud his judgement. In practice, this meant he’d take on seemingly impossible tasks, ignoring the dangers involved when deciding on what goals to pursue, but, in his execution of his plans to achieve these goals, he’d still take the various dangers into account. And he couldn’t help himself but try to optimize.
Take Aalam’s last Id state for example. His first insane goal was to test what Mila thought about their relationship. And, to do so, he needed to get Mila in a highly emotional state, something he could only do through having Isaiah go through the painful process of upgrading his race by using the harmony dragon heart. At the time, Aalam hadn’t cared much about Isaiah’s welfare at all, but he’d still accounted for the danger of Isaiah’s anger and asked for permission first, hiding it from Mila, and, as he couldn’t help but optimize, he’d added several other treasures as well and given Isaiah a nearly perfect upgrade.
This time, however, he’d missed several possible optimizations, which was very out of character.
But this was only if his goal was purely to get revenge on the Violet Mountain Lord. If his goal was instead to kill the Violet Mountain Lord and pay the price for the actions he’d take to do so, on the other hand, his actions fit.
“Why do you want to kill yourself again?” Mila sat down in front of Aalam and glared at him, but Aalam’s expression didn’t change.
“Because I’m killing over 37 billion people to kill just one.” Aalam pointed at himself with his right index finger. “I’m evil.”
Mila wiped the tears out of her eyes and appeared to think for several seconds. Then she asked, “And why is it your job to kill evil people?”
For a normal person, accepting their claim they were evil and then making a logical argument probably wasn’t the best path for this type of situation, but Aalam was Aalam, and this question seemed to stump him for several seconds. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
“Yeah.” Mila nodded, and the sadness and fear in her aura began to fade slightly, her expression turning back into a glare. “Yet there are billions of people in the universe who are responsible for larger and more indiscriminate massacres than the one you’ve just started, and for some reason you’re trying to get yourself killed instead of going after any of them.
“I don’t buy your explanation. That’s not the true reason you want to die.”
Aalam looked contemplative for about ten seconds. Then he said, “I don’t like the fear that comes from living in a universe where a powerful cultivator could kill anyone I care about on a whim.”
“None of us do.” Mila continued glaring at him. “But random deaths are nothing new. On Earth, before the integration, my parents and your dad both died from random car crashes. Adding people with the power to blow up planets doesn’t fundamentally change anything. Your dad just died when you were too young to process everything, so this is the first permanent death you’re really dealing with.
“Other people get through the same thing without killing themselves.”
Aalam appeared thoughtful, looking up at the ceiling of the cave, but then he turned his eyes back to Mila with a look of interest mixed with frustration. “How do you deal with being evil then?”
Mila just stared at him for several seconds, her glare growing stronger than before as the anger in her aura rose. “First, I don’t consider myself evil. That’s just asking for a bad outcome.
“I do, however, acknowledge that I’m not a particularly good person either. And those actions I do regret I try to make up for.”
“Such as?” Aalam asked.
“Well.” Mila’s glare continued to intensify, the fear and sadness in her aura rapidly being replaced by more anger. “I regret tricking you the entire time we were in a relationship, so I do things like give you impromptu therapy sessions even when the process of doing so makes me really, really pissed off.”
Aalam turned to look at Isaiah. “Did I do something wrong?”
Isaiah thought about how to respond for a second, a bit afraid of triggering anything in Aalam now that he knew his friend was suicidal, but then he realized Aalam could read his aura like a book so lying wasn’t going to help the situation at all. “You did just call the person who saved your life and who you’re putting through a hard time evil.”
“Oh.” A look of realization appeared on Aalam’s face and he turned back to Mila. “Sorry. I just meant you were a person who does bad things.”
“Not helping, dude.”
Isaiah shook his head, but Aalam seemed to ignore him, more focused on his own thought processes as he continued to look at Mila, who was deliberately taking deep breaths. “You don’t talk to your grandmother about anything personal even when it would probably make you happy. Is that a form of self punishment? Should I do that as well?”
Mila just sat there, opening and closing her mouth a few times. Then she looked at Isaiah, who took it as a hint to answer for her.
“No.” As Isaiah answered Aalam turned to look at him. “You should do the thing where you make up for the actions you regret.”
“Ah.” Aalam looked like he realized something, but then he frowned again. “So I should find and then somehow save a few dozen billion people?”
“Or,” Isaiah offered, “you could, you know, not kill billions of people the next time you want to kill someone. Instead, with your talent, you could just wait until you’re powerful enough to do so without excess casualties.”
“Right.” Aalam stood up, a slight smile appearing on his face, his Id state taking away the inhibitions which would normally slow down the process of him getting out of his depression, at least temporarily. “Should I modify the plan to not kill the members of the Violet Mountain Sect on other planets then?”
“No.” Mila also stood up, fully in control of her emotions again, and the expression on her face was serious. “We’re in a war with them, and, due to the rank of our force, that war won’t end until one side is fully eliminated or surrenders in person to the other.
“Given what we have to do to even get off this planet, however, we can’t risk going to one of the Violet Mountain Sect’s other planets to accept a surrender, as we’d almost certainly be killed if we did. And we can’t not end the war, as members of the Violet Mountain Sect will automatically be upgraded to elder status after any existing elders die and those elders would get a notification if we changed our force’s name, something we’ll have to do if we want to operate in the universe without A rank forces hunting us down.
“We’re too far in now. And I at least put the safety of my friends and family above the lives of others.”
Aalam started to frown again, but then he nodded, seeming to agree. “Yeah. We’re definitely not good people.” He then walked over to the Altar of Sacrifice and started to make a few modifications to the formations. “But we can be a bit better. At least I can make the curse painless.”
