Chapter 157: Transaction

Lang Sheng’s brows were locked in a tight frown. No matter what, he must never allow himself to be penned up and farmed like livestock like this.

He knew that when people were pushed to the absolute limits of starvation, very few could maintain their sanity; eventually, they would degenerate into beasts and lose their humanity. When that moment came, it would spell his utter failure.

It seemed it was time to pay a price, he thought, gritting his teeth.

Some of the starving refugees could no longer contain themselves and began to shout:

"Let us out! You are restricting our personal freedom and violating the will of the gods!"

"That's right! We have the right to walk freely!"

Yet, no matter how desperately they screamed, not a single beam of blue light descended from the heavens to punish those driving the tractors.

"Why? This isn't right!"

The starving people were utterly bewildered.

Just at that moment, a pot-bellied middle-aged man poked his head out of the cab and gloated at the crowd:

"You bunch of fools, we're just out for a drive and happened to cause a traffic jam. As long as you sign this contract promising not to join the Famine Vanguard, we can clear a path and let you leave."

"Why would the heavenly gods trouble themselves over us? As long as no blood is spilled, the gods don't care."

"Who do you think you are? Do you expect the gods to keep their eyes on you every single second of the day?"

The crowd glared furiously at the man, yet for a moment, they were utterly speechless.

At that instant, a fierce glint flashed through the eyes of several starving refugees.

Every single one of them had been rescued by Lang Sheng's own hands. Relying on the arts of famine taught to them by him, they had exacted harsh vengeance upon the hateful enemies who had wronged them, enemies who had been utterly powerless to retaliate. Such deep grace was something they could never repay in a lifetime.

Suddenly, a young man fiercely hurled himself headfirst against the smooth, towering iron plate!

"Sanlang!"

Cries of shock erupted from the group.

The pot-bellied middle-aged man froze in sheer astonishment. Never did he expect anyone to dare throw their life away like this!

He had to remember that they were only trying to scam these people for their labor and wealth; they never intended to take their lives!

Blood stained the smooth iron plate...

At that very moment, a beam of blue light descended from the sky, instantly obliterating the driver of the lead tractor!

The man dissolved into countless tiny particles of light that scattered and drifted away, looking almost serene and beautiful.

However, a bone-chilling cold gripped everyone's hearts.

The gods were merciful, yet ruthless; the heart that laid down the rules was benevolent, but once those rules were broken, they executed themselves automatically!

Now that they had driven a young man to his death, they naturally had to pay with their own lives.

"Th-This isn't right! He brought this upon himself! Why are you blaming us?!" the middle-aged man panicked.

A man like him cherished his own life above all else. Forget a life for a life; even a hundred-to-one trade was something he would never agree to!

What possible meaning was there in having a hundred worthless beggars die to accompany him to the grave?

"The gods have said that from the moment a person is born, every single life is equal..."

Lang Sheng walked up to the young man's corpse and gently stroked his eyes, closing them for him.

The price was terribly high; a young life had just vanished like that.

Yet reality was precisely like this. Where on earth was there ever a seamless, perfect solution? More often than not, one had to pave a path forward with their very lives.

Right at that moment, the drivers panicked, frantically throwing their vehicles into reverse and clearing a path.

Those employers held no genuine deterrent power over them; they had merely used money and profit to entice them into risking their necks.

Because of the existence of the blue light, harsh military laws could not be established, and without military law, no army could ever be built.

"Stop! All of you, stop! They can't possibly keep gambling with their lives!" the middle-aged man yelled into a megaphone, roaring at the surrounding people.

But no one listened to him anymore. These people finally understood that in the eyes of the gods, all lives were equal. No matter how much wealth you possessed, causing one person's death meant the responsible party must pay with their life!

The defensive formation they had believed to be impregnable was shattered into dust by the death-defying strike of a single life.

In truth, such events had happened before, but because they had never witnessed it firsthand, they had always refused to believe it.

"Sanlang is dead, but his death was not in vain!"

A fierce glint flashed in Lang Sheng's eyes. He raised both hands to the heavens and shouted:

"Death comes to all men alike, but it may be heavier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather. Today, we have sacrificed a companion, but his death has purchased a glorious tomorrow. Without bloodshed, there can be no success. Every genuine revolution in this world begins with blood, and today, Sanlang is our first martyr!"

The pot-bellied middle-aged man abruptly interrupted his speech, shouting at the top of his lungs:

"Don't let him trick you! He's just trying to use your blood to pave his own path to power! It's all a conspiracy, he's the biggest swindler of them all!"

"Is that so?" Lang Sheng fixed his gaze on the middle-aged man, and then hurled himself headfirst toward the steel plating of the man's tractor!

"Ah..."

Terrified out of his wits and pissing himself, the middle-aged man scrambled down from the tractor and fled in a panicked frenzy!

Hmph, just as expected: the tough fear the fierce, and the fierce fear the reckless.

Lang Sheng stopped in his tracks at the very last second, but the people behind him raised their voices in a unified roar:

"Utterly shameless!"

"You still trying to trick us at a time like this?"

"That's right! What have we got to lose? We'll throw away these wretched lives and fight them to the death!"

The morale of the crowd surged instantly. In truth, many of them were still terrified of death, but swept up in this fervent momentum, they plunged into a subconscious state of utter fearlessness.

The tractor shield formation retreated one after another, and the Famine Vanguard regained their freedom of movement.

Lang Sheng instructed a few men to properly bury Sanlang's body, then gazed into the distance.

"You will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I promised you that."

...

"Truly ruthless." Through the feed transmitted by the Goodness System, Fan Bei discovered that the soul of Sanlang, who had just committed ritual suicide, had taken up residence within Lang Sheng's conscious world.

Beneath what appeared to be a grand and tragic spectacle lay a transaction between the two... abandoning the physical shell and entering the Kingdom of Heaven was the promise Lang Sheng had made to Sanlang.

And the reality was not far from it. Lang Sheng's conscious world had evolved to the Gold tier, taking a single golden bamboo as its core to construct a city of bamboo.

Living there, as long as Lang Sheng, the host, supplied sufficient spiritual energy, one could have whatever they desired—comparable to playing a next-generation virtual reality game.

Did not countless people prefer living in virtual reality rather than struggling through reality?

Therefore, the transaction was reasonably fair, lacking the overt bloodshed it seemed to project.

From this, Fan Bei realized something: the spirit and soul could break through the limitations of the physical body much more easily to attain a higher realm.

This seemed to be an evolutionary direction, much like the Buddhist practice of cultivating the spirit rather than the physical form, where cultivating the body was merely a means to nurture the spirit in anticipation of the next reincarnation.

This was the hope he had discovered, though he clearly still wished to evolve his physical body alongside it, for he did not want to cultivate to the very end only to lose the simple joys of being human.

He had read many books and knew that human pleasure stemmed from the secretion of various hormones... if one discarded the physical body, it was certain that their psychology would undergo drastic changes.

This was practically absolute. Matter determines consciousness, and consciousness is not all that mystical; many human thoughts are controlled by the physical body, ranging from the most basic urges of eating and sleeping to the lofty ambitions of conquering the world.

Even so, he could allow his hosts to experiment with this path to gather cultivation materials for him.