Cyber Era Witch
Chapter 327 - 297: The Baby in the Dump

Chapter 327: Chapter 297: The Baby in the Dump

If A40 and Seeking Shadow kept arguing like this, they would definitely start fighting; they had battled each other before. Seeking Shadow used to be slightly stronger than A40, but now it was uncertain.

Xu Yang pulled up a blue plastic stool and sat beside them, attempting to resolve the conflict between them.

"Don’t worry," Xu Yang said, "First of all, A40 didn’t do it on purpose. It was just passing by and didn’t particularly intend to harm this place."

"Yeah," A40 said, feeling extremely aggrieved. From the beginning until now, it felt like it hadn’t done anything wrong, but Brother Fu and the rich were dead.

Seeking Shadow pursed its lips, staying silent, with a monotone, emotionless light seeping from behind its artificial eyes, shining on A40’s face and staring intently at it.

A40’s eye tubes flickered for a while, turning into a blank white, and both Synthetic Humans, negative in negotiation, remained frozen in place.

Xu Yang was also concerned about the five newly born Infant Witches, so he left them hanging there for the time being.

"If they really come down to kill," Xu Yang instructed, "strike back hard without overthinking. I’ll cover for anything that happens."

"Yes, boss!" A40 nodded, plugged in a cable to charge itself, increased the operation of its exhaust fan to maximize heat dissipation, preventing the central processor from overheating if a fight broke out.

Upon hearing Xu Yang’s words, Seeking Shadow’s demeanor instantly changed. It checked the operating condition of its Ion Sword "Shadow Kill" at its waist, waiting silently for the enemy to arrive.

The Poison Master was supposed to be the one receiving A40, but recently a lot of new members had registered to join the Self Help Society, and the Poison Master was busy coordinating with the new members, unaware that a group of hostile Samurai was heading their way. However, there was no need for her to worry; if the situation really spiraled out of control, Xu Yang would bring Farosa and the others over for a cleanup.

The immediate priority was to take the wailing Infant Witches away.

The Garbage Hill was very close to the shantytown of the Self Help Society, and it was only today that Xu Yang seriously observed this expanse of Garbage Hill, with its undulating peaks—eight large ones and about twenty small ones—and a slender sewage ditch snaking its way to the sea, emitting an unbearable stench, its flowing water congealed into a gel.

This was the largest landfill he had ever seen, looking like a pale plastic wasteland crisscrossed with colorful, oversized garbage, like the decaying corpse of human civilization.

Its scale continued to expand. He saw four large shuttle machines painted green, without company labels, as if even the companies were ashamed of their actions, afraid of being denounced. These large shuttle machines were gliding noisily over the Garbage Hill, circling in the sky above it, moving in a predefined trajectory that overlapped perfectly with the dumping patterns of the Garbage Hill.

The people below cursed wildly, throwing stones at the shuttle machines, but nothing could stop them. The machines opened their huge cargo doors, and a terrifying sound ensued as a flood of garbage descended, including debris, building ruins, radioactive waste, electronic products, packaging waste, broken robots, and vehicles, adding another layer to the Garbage Hill.

Xu Yang saw the landfill residents holding guns, staring angrily, but not shooting at them. Presumably, they had tried shooting in the past, which provoked crazed reprisals from the company’s damage control troops. Therefore, now they just watched without pulling the trigger.

The alarm on his Cloud Beast Armor warned him that the air quality in the area was extremely poor, with residual radiation, and suggested that he should not stay active in the area for more than three hours.

Three hours. Xu Yang thought to himself. The people here have lived in this place for who knows how many years.

He walked deeper into the Garbage Hill. The terrain of the Archipelago Continent was already narrow, with little space for construction. Now as the landfill’s scale kept expanding, people’s living space became increasingly smaller.

To this day, they had built eggshell-shaped garbage power stations, recycling plants, and scrap stations around the Garbage Hill, living around the garbage, much like bacteria and microorganisms decomposing food scraps, vainly attempting to reduce the scale of this vast Garbage Hill. However, even many generations could not empty this mountain of trash; they could only try to slow down its expansion.

Garbage consumes people. Xu Yang drove the Purple Wind over, and, after a final check of the five infant incubators he had prepared on the shuttle machine with health maintenance systems and Nutrient Solution, he got out of the car and saw the Leader of the Scavengers Society.

The Scavengers Leader drove over in a beat-up Green Iron Scrap Tricycle, his complexion waxen as if he had been hollowed out, emaciated to an inhuman extent, one hand abnormally swollen and the other arm exceptionally withered, his body unconsciously leaning to one side.

His eyes were cloudy and fierce as an eagle’s, glaring at Xu Yang.

"Are you the one coming to buy the Infant Witches?" he asked.

"I am," Xu Yang replied.

"500,000 for five," the Scavengers Leader extended his hand for the money, "No individual sales."

"There you go," Xu Yang transferred the funds.

"Hop on," the Scavengers Leader invited Xu Yang onto his Green Iron Scrap Tricycle.

"Please lead the way." Xu Yang unloaded the five thermostat boxes from the Shuttle Machine and placed them on the tricycle, then sat in the back of the tricycle himself, bumping along into the depths of the Scavengers Society. He kept one hand hidden in his coat, gripping his handgun, Well Tiger.

Garbage thrown from the Shuttle Machine was still rolling down Garbage Hill, a faint green glow of optical dust filled the air, and the Leader of the Scavengers coughed out a dirty, raspy cough.

Xu Yang looked around. The living conditions of the people here could no longer be described as poor; they were downright destitute. Their clothes and shoes were scavenged from Garbage Hill, and their furniture and electronic equipment were also extremely dilapidated second-hand goods. He looked farther away, and the shanty areas of the garbage sheds continued to expand; the Garbage Hill was as large as the shanty areas were sprawling.

A gloomy stillness prevailed, the strong among them were now traversing Garbage Hill, treasure hunting in the latest batch of discarded trash. Those with nothing to do, the sick and the elderly, sat under the walls waiting to die, while the condition of the women and children was not much better than the trash.

"Can I do anything?" Xu Yang asked, "This place needs help."

"The environmental cause is a bottomless pit, it’s like cancer," the Leader of the Scavengers said. "Once you start this work, it’ll drag you down. We supply Anjiu City with 18% of its electricity, provide 70% of the city’s waste recycling materials. I’ve set up a very small bank with this money to provide loans to our own people, to keep struggling in Garbage Hill. I don’t want to drag anyone else down. We are already doing our best, what comes next cannot be solved with money."

"If it isn’t a matter of money, then what’s the problem?"

"We’re here stopping the expansion of Garbage Hill," the Leader of the Scavengers said, drawing a circle in the air with his hand. "We can last another ten years, actually, that’s how long I’ve got left to live. To deal with the environment, we’d need a miraculous savior to come down from heaven within these ten years, to unite the entire world, and enforce environmental regulations on all corporations. That’s the only way out. Otherwise, as we’re digging this hill, they’re dumping pollution over there, and there’s no saving it."

"If I may ask, what did you do before?"

"I have a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering." The Scavengers Leader climbed down from the broken tricycle and led Xu Yang into the first household.

In the house, a woman placed a swaddle on the threshold, wrapping a three-month-old Infant Witch inside, cultivated like a human embryo in a laboratory environment, wrinkly and even lacking a sense of moisture.

"Photo," the woman said timidly.

Xu Yang squatted down, took a photo, capturing both the woman in the hut and the Witch infant on the threshold. The woman smiled faintly, then returned to the back room and lay on the bed, looking at a ray of sunlight coming through the broken window to the Ground.

The Leader of the Scavengers took Xu Yang back to the tricycle, and Xu Yang placed the Infant Witch in the thermostat box; she barely breathed, quite shriveled.

"Witches must be handed over to the company as soon as they’re born," the Leader of the Scavengers said. "Most of them end up in a miserable state within the companies. What does your company want with the Witches?"

"To change the world," Xu Yang said.

The Leader of the Scavengers led Xu Yang to three more households to collect three more Infant Witches, all less than a year old, in very poor nutritional conditions. Their mothers had no breast milk to feed them and no money to buy formula, facing the risk of starvation.

They all more or less demonstrated some peculiarities and were detected to have Magic Power when they entered the thermostat boxes. There must be other Infant Witches, growing up mingled with regular human babies, indistinguishable.

Finally, they reached the last household.

The Scavengers Leader stood at the doorway.

"It’s mainly this child," he said to Xu Yang. "It’s because of this child that I made special contact to get the Witches taken away. Of course, your offer was also the highest."

"Is this one special?"

"Very special," the Leader of the Scavengers said.

The Leader of the Scavengers pushed open the door, and Xu Yang entered, seeing two women already there, trying to feed some very thin diluted milk to a new-born Witch wailing in a swaddle on the bed. But she was close to dying, her frail skin covered with strange red streaks.

She lay still.

"This one is the most dangerous," the Leader of the Scavengers said.

"What’s special about her?"

The Leader of the Scavengers pulled back the left eyelid of the Infant Witch, and a red laser shot out from her eye, piercing through the roof of the iron-sheet shack.