“I just often get confused slightly.” She stroked Lily’s hair with her fingers. “We resist monsters and heterogeneous species. We resist foreign genes contaminating human genes and want to avoid our unique willpower being ruled by beasts… yet in order to achieve this purpose, everything we do is in violation of the rules of human nature. The collective we have formed, everything it does—gaining resources, strengthening itself and breeding offspring—just reflects the nature of beasts. Humans actually aren’t any different from the monsters. It is just that the flexibility of our brains have made us deceive ourselves. Humans are just one of the animals. We are born like all life and will die like all life.”

Madam Lu’s eyes had a dead look. “Human civilization is as worthless as its science and technology.”

She stopped talking and stared up at the ceiling for a long time. An Zhe saw her palms press against a dark knob and then turn it slightly.

The radiation-proof metal on the ceiling was opened. This was the top floor of the Garden of Eden and there was a limitless sky outside the glass. At night, the solar wind stopped temporarily and the silent twilight and Milky Way poured down together.

An Zhe whispered, “There will be a better day.”

Perhaps there would be a day when judges didn’t have to kill their fellow humans, soldiers didn’t have to die in the wild and the girls of Garden of Eden would be free again.

“No,” he heard Madam Lu say. “The time is coming when the world will be completely broken.”

“Lily.” She turned to the little girl in her arms. “Do you want to fly?”

An Zhe saw her gentle side profile, heard these words and suddenly got a chill.

He heard Lily ask in a clear voice from where she was holding onto Madam Lu’s neck, “Can I? Like Sinan?”

“Yes.”

At this moment, An Zhe finally understood Sinan’s intentions behind sending Lily back to the Garden of Eden. It was contrary to their guesses at the time.

Go back to Eden—not because it was safe.

CHAPTER 50

Lily raised her head from Madam Lu’s shoulders, dark eyes staring at An Zhe. Her eyes always had a special colour, misty, that reminded An Zhe of the creatures in the Abyss. In fact, every lady and girl on the 22nd floor had such a worldly look. If the judges were here then they might conclude these females weren’t human. If such a person was born in the Garden of Eden and couldn’t leave for a lifetime, they must be different from the outside humans.

An Zhe’s head suddenly felt some pain. The same type of fluctuation appeared again in his mind but it was far less grand and scary than what he had felt at night. It was much more specific and much closer, as if the source was just beside him.