Chapter 81: The Special Detention Center

Upon closer inspection, it became clear that Old Meng was far from the only one in this special detention center with such a bizarre appearance. The long corridor resembled a street, with the cells on either side not much different from residential buildings—standard five stories high, except that the front walls had been replaced with rows of clear iron bars. The rooms were crowded, with six, seven, or even eight people squeezed into each one, both upper and lower bunks filled.

Here, missing limbs, disfigurement, or bald heads were almost commonplace. Individuals with three arms or four legs, horns sprouting from their heads or tails trailing behind them, were nothing out of the ordinary. Occasionally, one might even glimpse someone with a tail atop their head and horns at their back.

There were faces that looked as if they'd been doused with acid, skin like swamp creatures, bones like segmented insects, bodies massive as halflings or titans on the march—the grotesqueries were endless, dazzling the eye.

At first, Alpha Ji couldn't help but exclaim in shock, but soon she fell silent. After all, this was the era of cataclysm—wastelands, radiation—this was the new normal. The world she had seen so far was odd but barely manageable; she had grown accustomed to it. Until now.

This was disaster, true disaster. A calamity so great that none could escape. The world’s population, once over seven billion, had been reduced to less than a fraction of a percent. Behind that simple calculation lay untold blood and tears—people lined up for execution, one spared for every one shot, and even then, it would take eight or nine rounds to finish them all.

Ye Chao and Fang Ju, being new humans born after the catastrophe, took it all in stride.

“They’re not all criminals, you know,” Ye Chao explained quietly to Alpha Ji, the isolation magic cast by the guards cloaking them. “Take that old man, for instance—he’s probably suffered a serious illness or been attacked by a contaminated beast. He can’t be around people, since he might become a new source of pollution. Those with strange appearances are often the result of incomplete beastification or plantification, arrested midway for unknown reasons. No one knows when they’ll start changing again, causing chaos.”

“And the rest, the truly bizarre ones, are usually due to mutations we can’t yet explain. They’re still being studied.”

“So you just lock them in prison?” Alpha Ji found this hard to accept.

It was like hearing of the long-abolished system of forced detention, or imagining centuries ago when medicine was primitive and all the sick were herded into one ward, regardless of contagion or illness, with no disinfection, no concern for the spread of disease—a method so brutally simple it bordered on the inhuman.

“What else can we do? Let them live in the residential districts?” Ye Chao replied.

“At least here they have food and shelter. Out there, as vagrants, who knows how long they’d survive?” he added, unperturbed.

Alpha Ji was speechless. Of course—after the cataclysm, universal values were long gone. In truth, such ideals had always been somewhat hypocritical, a facade for peace. Catastrophe had merely torn the veil away, leaving people too weary to even pretend anymore.

She had once scoffed at humanity’s hypocrisy. Why now did she feel like she was the hypocrite? Be careful, she warned herself—don’t become a self-righteous saint.

She quietly kept her thoughts to herself, especially when the guards began distributing lunch—meat, eggs, vegetables, milk, both meat and vegetarian dishes.

Following the food cart deeper into the facility, the number of inmates dwindled, and the security of the cells increased. At first, the rows of bars seemed formidable, but in an era of superpowers and mutations, slipping through them was hardly a challenge. As Ye Chao had said, many here weren’t bad people at all—some had volunteered for confinement, like elderly folks before the catastrophe who chose to spend their twilight years in prison.

The further in they went, the denser the bars became, their sheen and grain betraying the unusual material from which they were made. Eventually, the bars vanished entirely, replaced by seamless walls of clear glass. Here, the group stopped.

Beyond this point, the atmosphere remained harmonious and quiet; but further in, the sounds of beasts and dragons echoed, suffused with an oppressive air reminiscent of venturing into the Institute for the Abnormal in a certain old martial arts film.

The man in the black suit and tie, wearing broken sunglasses, lived in one of these glass cells, along with three others. His face was bruised, both lenses of his sunglasses shattered but still dangling from his face, evidence of a recent beating. His once-neatly slicked-back hair now resembled that of a battered fighting cock. The other three inmates, upon seeing the food cart, hurried to stand aside, as if seeking praise for having subdued him.

The man in sunglasses, however, remained unbothered. He straightened his messy hair, left his broken glasses on, and leaned nonchalantly against the wall, murmuring as if reciting poetry:

“What is real?
How do you define real?
If you are talking about—
What you can feel,
What you can smell,
What you can taste and see,
Then,
Real is simply electrical signals,
Interpreted by your brain…”

Despite his battered state, he retained the air of a romantic rogue.

Ling Du, watching from a distance, stroked his beard, hesitant to speak.

Ye Chao and Fang Ju, though uneasy, followed the plan: Ye Chao stood in the corridor serving food, while Fang Ju delivered the tray through the slot.

Suddenly, the posing man in sunglasses froze. Even through the glass and his shattered lenses, it was obvious his gaze was fixed on Ye Chao.

Ye Chao was his target. Now, finally, there could be no doubt.

As the man in sunglasses hesitated, one of his cellmates darted toward him with a snap of the fingers, his hands weaving a mesmerizing display before his eyes—petals blooming and falling in an instant of beauty. Another cellmate slipped behind him, massaging his temples and the sockets of his eyes.

Hypnosis—mental manipulation!

As it turned out, though the police had managed to apprehend the “Awakened One” in sunglasses with Ye Chao’s help, the shoe cultists were utterly resolute. No amount of interrogation could pry any information from him. Every tracking method had failed. To this day, they still didn’t know whether his true target was Ye Chao, or Fang Ju, or the mysterious VR helmet.

After much maneuvering, they’d finally managed to bring him here, hoping to create a crack in his mind through hypnosis.

“Alright, you can go now,” said Ling Du briskly, stepping forward as his colleagues took control of the situation and ushered Ye Chao and Fang Ju away. Their presence here was only to show their faces—a role that carried great weight.

Yet, before they could leave, the man in sunglasses suddenly began to struggle. “Hypnosis… has no effect… on the Awakened!” he cried.

There was a sharp crackle—the fragments of his sunglasses exploded again, revealing the eyes beneath.