Chapter 176 Public Anger (1)

Vane’s question landed like a slap across the faces of the United Earth Government officials.

The conference room fell completely silent. Only the low hum of the air conditioning broke the tension.

“Do you really have to push things this far?”

The President took a deep breath, struggling to contain his anger.

After decades in politics, he’d never encountered anyone who spoke to him with such blatant disregard for his authority.

“What exactly do you want me to do, then? Kill all of you?”

Vane pulled out an apple and took a bite. The sharp crunch sounded unusually loud in the silent room.

“Because if that’s what you’re asking for, I’d be happy to oblige.”

He casually glanced around at the officials seated at the table.

“As it happens, I’ve been putting together an army of Iron Golems lately.”

“I could take down your underground cities one by one and wipe every last one of you out.”

Nobody in the room doubted that he could actually pull it off.

The shelter he’d built was proof enough of his capabilities.

Millions of people who should have frozen to death on the surface were alive because of him.

And they weren’t merely surviving. They were enjoying a better standard of living than the people inside the underground cities.

The President’s expression darkened.

“The underground cities were designed to accommodate a maximum of 3.5 billion people. All we wanted was to ensure the survival of human civilization. Abandoning those people was never something we wanted to do.”

“Not something you wanted to do?”

Vane took another bite of his apple, his voice perfectly calm.

“But you did it anyway.”

“Because you believed saving half of humanity was better than letting everyone die.”

“And you know what? I don’t disagree with that logic.”

“But you made one very big mistake.”

He casually tossed the apple core into a nearby trash can, landing it perfectly.

“You treated the people you abandoned like expendable resources. Just numbers you could sacrifice whenever it was convenient.”

“Three and a half billion human beings were nothing more than a figure you needed to subtract from your calculations.”

“But now they’re alive. And they’re doing pretty damn well.”

“Instead of being happy that they survived, you came marching over here demanding that they submit to your government again.”

Vane stood up and walked toward the President.

He pulled out another apple and took a bite while looking directly at him.

“So let me make this absolutely clear. For the last time.”

“The shelter will not join the United Earth Government.”

“I don’t care whether you claim it’s for the survival of human civilization or whatever other excuse you come up with.”

“You abandoned these people. You decided they were expendable.”

“The fact that they’re alive today is partly luck and partly because I chose to save them.”

“That doesn’t mean you get to keep treating them like sacrifices waiting to happen.”

“We have no intention of sacrificing those people again,” one of the officials protested.

“Then why are you so determined to bring them under your authority?”

Vane turned toward the speaker, his expression unreadable.

“They weren’t selected for the underground cities, and they didn’t start a war against you.”

“So why are you suddenly convinced they’re going to start one now?”

The official opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

Once again, silence settled over the conference room.

“All right, that’s enough.”

Vane waved dismissively and headed toward the door.

“There’s no point wasting any more time on this. You can leave now. Don’t expect me to show you out.”

With the government delegation finally sent packing, Vane returned to expanding the shelter.

He constructed one sturdy building after another, then began assembling nuclear power systems by hand.

Using heavy-element fusion reactors, he established a stable energy supply for the entire settlement.

Next came large defensive shields to protect the greenhouse farms, freshwater purification systems, and medical facilities.

He also built automated factories capable of mass-producing everyday necessities and construction materials.

With each new addition, life inside the shelter improved dramatically.

Before long, its residents were enjoying living standards comparable to those from before the disaster.

But Vane wasn’t finished.

He constructed an enormous protective shield encompassing an entire region and began rebuilding the ecosystem within it.

Forests gradually returned to the land.

Grasslands spread across areas that had once been frozen wastelands.

Under the protection of the massive shield, nature was finally coming back to life.

Eventually, the shelter’s population reached 130 million.

That was everyone left alive on Earth’s surface.

When the planet stopped rotating, 3.5 billion people had been stranded aboveground.

None of them had been granted a place in the underground cities.

The devastating winds and enormous waves that followed Earth’s sudden halt claimed countless lives.

Then came food shortages and falling temperatures, killing even more.

All 3.5 billion had been abandoned in the name of preserving human civilization.

Vane had no intention of passing judgment on whether the United Earth Government had been right or wrong.

But a civilization that had already mastered heavy-element fusion should have been capable of handling the crisis better.

Spending a little more time and investing additional resources into constructing the underground cities could have saved more people.

At the very least, they could have arranged temporary accommodations and given those stranded on the surface a better chance of survival.

Instead, they’d done nothing.

They’d simply written off 3.5 billion people as acceptable losses.

Once the shelter’s construction projects were complete, Vane received another conquest mission.

This time, he had to establish an entirely new administrative system and accelerate the development of human civilization.

With no way around it, Vane got to work designing the shelter’s government and talent-selection systems.

Looking back at the various civilizations throughout human history, he believed one of their greatest weaknesses was their inability to give truly exceptional individuals the respect and resources they deserved.

The result was an enormous amount of wasted potential, slowing the progress of civilization.

Of course, by “exceptional individuals,” Vane didn’t mean people who were simply wealthy or influential.

He meant those who possessed genuine talent and ability but had been forced to waste their gifts because of circumstances beyond their control.

In his view, human civilization had always been subject to two great equalizers.

The first was death.

Rich or poor, powerful or powerless, everyone eventually died.

The second was talent.

Geniuses could be born into any social class.

Even the wealthiest families couldn’t guarantee a genius child. They still had to roll the gacha like everyone else.

And for as long as humanity had existed, people had dreamed of breaking those two rules.

Conquering death.

And monopolizing talent.

Vane’s goal was to identify talented individuals and put them where their abilities could be used most effectively.

He began by establishing a comprehensive social welfare system.

Every child would receive a support fund from birth, sufficient to cover their basic living expenses and education.

That way, even if their parents turned out to be complete pieces of shit, the children would still have the means to survive independently and receive a proper education.

Next, he raised the cost of inheritance and established a system for removing incompetent individuals from positions of privilege while systematically reclaiming accumulated wealth.

With these reforms in place, the shelter entered a period of explosive development.

Enormous amounts of wealth were generated, and within a remarkably short period, several major scientific breakthroughs emerged.

Many of these research projects had always shown tremendous promise.

But in the past, they’d been abandoned because of academic rivalries, public pressure, corporate interference, or other outside influences.

Once those obstacles were removed, the projects flourished.

Research that had been stalled for years suddenly began producing results.

Naturally, the shelter’s rapid growth didn’t go unnoticed.

Some residents recorded footage of its development and uploaded the videos to global online forums.

That gave people who were already dissatisfied with the United Earth Government exactly the ammunition they’d been looking for.

Over the years, the government had been plagued by scandal after scandal.

There had been secret manipulation of underground-city admission slots, officials demanding sexual favors, widespread bribery, and people using stolen identities to secure places for themselves.

Even worse, reports had surfaced exposing the extravagant lifestyles of certain government officials and wealthy businessmen.

While ordinary citizens struggled to survive, these elites were wasting precious resources on luxury facilities, private gardens, and even personal zoos.

Some had gone so far as to waste valuable water and land building golf courses, just to maintain their comfortable lifestyles.

Yet whenever public outrage threatened to boil over, the government had invoked the same grand justification.

For the survival of human civilization.

And despite their anger, the people had repeatedly been persuaded to endure it.

But now that justification was falling apart.

The shelter had exposed the uncomfortable truth that things could have been done differently.

More and more voices within the United Earth Government began demanding answers.

Some even called for those responsible to be held accountable.

The underground cities scattered across the planet were turning into pressure cookers, each one growing closer to exploding.