Chapter 4-1
The team was clouded by the same familiar hazy feeling. Time felt distorted in this dreamy state. The members woke up to completely new scenery. They were standing on a spacious empty area to the side of an old looking street. On the empty land was a crudely made basketball hoop. Several black teenagers were playing near the hoop.
“Independence Day, huh?”
Zheng and the other members got up from the ground. They carefully observed the surrounding area. Zheng looked down at his watch, which displayed the team’s mission in this world. Many things became inconvenient after he lost the leader privileges.
Still lying on the ground were the members who were trapped in the dream world and one other man and two women. If they were to include Imhotep and Anck-Su-Namun in the count, that made the team nineteen people, which also stated the difficulty of the movie. This difficulty was almost the highest level possible.
While Zheng muttered the name of the movie, the words displayed on the watched turned his face serious. The rest of the veterans gradually turned to their watches after a while. He said with a hint of bitterness. “Speak of the devil and he will surely come. We were talking about team battles and there it is… we got into one. This movie is nineteen people difficulty plus team battle. We also have several members still in their dreams. No psyche force user. Our use of Cultivation technology is still primitive. We are in a pretty dangerous situation.”
The watched displayed. “Survive three days. Bonus mission: Destroy the Mothership. Rewards each team member two rank B rewards and 7000 points. Individual flying devices are restricted in this movie. Not allowed to leave Washington until one hour before the attack. Team Pacific has entered the world in advance. Killing each member of the opposing team rewards two thousand points and one rank C reward. Killing each member that unlocked the genetic constraint rewards seven thousand points and one rank B reward. Score minus one for losing one member. Score plus one for killing a member of the opposing team. Final score multiplied by two thousand is added to the rewards.”
Zheng gave a bitter laughter. “Worse yet, team Pacific entered before us. What a mixed feeling this is. We are rated higher than this team but they have the advantage of influence from entering earlier. Should I feel lucky or should I sigh? What are you thinking, Xuan?”
Xuan was the only person who didn’t look at his watched nor take in the surrounding area. He stood there with a frown on his face. It seemed as though he was confused by something.
Seeing Xuan’s face didn’t change from the question, Zheng tapped his shoulder. “Hey, I am asking you. Are you scheming again? Speak! I have come to hate your schemes with passion!”
“Uh…” Xuan raised his head to look at Zheng. He said with a frown. “What do you think of team China, you and everyone here? What I mean is do you think we are righteous or evil?”
The members came up to him. Zero said. “Not exactly righteous or evil. We are no more than people who struggle in the movie worlds, just to survive… We will repeat what we have done in The Mummy’s world. This is us.”
Xuan nodded. “Yes. We are neither righteous nor evil. We act differently based on the situation we are in, just like in the last movie. However, God records our acts and puts us in different factions once we are in the plot depending on our rating of good and evil. Do you still remember the movie with team India? We were on the side of the main characters and they were on the side of Imhotep. In Starship Troopers, we were on the human side and the team that enslaved newbies was on the Arachnid’s side. I haven’t evaluated the rating calculation for good and evil yet. Things like how many point are deducted for killing a teammate. Or how many points are deducted for killing a movie character. One thing for certain is the act we committed in The Mummy’s world, massacre of over a hundred million, would made our points plummet. Yet, why are we still on the side of humans? My original speculation was we should be on the antagonist’s side.”
Zheng had entered the third stage to emulate HongLu’s thinking process. He frowned after a while. “That doesn’t sound right. Although we could confirm the existence of good and evil alignments, the acts in The Mummy also rejected this conjecture. If killing a team mate deducts ten thousand points and killing a movie character deducts one point, the hundred million that we killed should push us toward evil way further ahead of any other team. Doesn’t it?”
Xuan sneered without replying. He turned around to look at the other members which gave the whole team a fright. A bizarre thought arose in their minds. Did he want to test the speculation by killing someone? This was a team battle and one death means minus one point in score, an outcome that affected the whole team!
Xuan didn’t act as they thought. He raised his head and looked up to the sky. “What is evil to you?”
(This dude… why does he feel so strange? Like a person with emotions sighing over a fact. Did he… unlock the fourth stage? Impossible! When had he ever struggled on the brink of death? He always put other people on the brink of death… Did he really unlock the fourth stage?)
Zheng was utterly shocked. ChengXiao said. “Evil? Evil acts? For evil acts, they refer to things that you are not allowed to do.”
“Evil in philosophy…” Xuan glanced over the team.
Everyone expressed confusion before he even began the explanation. He sighed and said. “To put it simply, evil is sin. A sin that you believe is one. So evil varies between people. One thing you believe is evil and another believes is not. If social morals accepted by the majority of people do not exist, then there do not exist good and evil to an individual. Zheng, do you remember how God judged whether we leaked the existence of God’s realm when you returned to the real world?”
Zheng paused for a second and said. “It was based on whether we have the memory of committing the act… You mean God judges a team’s alignment by the feeling of sin we have in our minds? If we tortured a person or if we did something hideous like a massacre, the memory of this sin will be labeled evil. However, if we helped someone, the satisfaction and benevolence will be labeled good.”
“Correct.” Xuan nodded. “Since the inheritance of the Cultivators of the East contains both refined Qi possessed by the righteous Sects and Magic possessed by the evil Sects, God does not judge a team’s good and evil in narrow definitions. Neither would God prefer good over evil. The two are nothing more than alignments that both belong to mankind. God would not give an advantage to any team in the movie world based on their good rating. We and the other team are standing on equal grounds.”
Xuan then frowned. “Even though we killed over a hundred million, the Magic Cannon was fired from extremely long range. The massacre did not trigger overly strong emotion in us. Like what we have said, we are merely struggling in this realm. We are forced to do what we have to do. If we do not witness these deaths with our eyes and have a sufficient self explanation, a hundred million people are simply a number. In a war, the troops that are least likely to develop any PTSD are the air force. We are in a similar position. Our evil rating isn’t high compared to the team that we are up against. Now that we have learned so many conditions, we can deduce the opposing team. One, they have a lot of members, at least nineteen when including the newbies. Two, their evil rating is extremely high. They know that the acts they have committed are evil. Three, their team rating is decent even though they are weaker than us. God selected them as an opponent to a team that defeated team Celestial. Based on these three conditions, there’s a sixty percent probability that team Pacific was the team we encountered in Starship Troopers. These two teams possess the same nature, a few strong members enslaving most weaker members. The strong members have powerful enhancements, bloodlines, genes, abilities, weapons and equipment. This is the kind of team we are likely up against.”
Zheng exhaled. Before he could say anything, clouds of flame rose on the horizon. A wave of red mist swept toward them like fire descending from the sky. As the flame slowly subsided, a huge black object revealed itself in the center. It was the size of the city below and floated in the sky. This was the mothership featured in Independence Day. It was a command vessel that carried countless smaller vessels inside and had a weapon that could destroy a city in one shot. Furthermore, it had a barrier strong enough to defend against nuclear weapons. This was a sky fortress impenetrable by mankind in this world.
Independence Day began!