Editor: Elanor
For this interview, the image designers had created a look that showed as if Xia Tian had just gotten off the training field and taken a shower.
They changed him into a loose-fitting white T-shirt, giving him a very homely look. They also found a makeup artist named Cassandra, who was said to be one of the top talents in the industry and could not be hired by the general public.
She only studied Xia Tian’s face for about twenty minutes, and then got the job done in five minutes.
He Yu was full of momentum as she brought her entourage to the interview location and quickly prepared for the interview. Her questions were also straightforward, with a sharp sense of insistence on getting to the bottom of the matter and practically without pleasantries.
She opened by saying, “Do you know that they have built a temple for you?”
“What?!” Xia Tian exclaimed. This shock was definitely not feigned.
“I also just got the information,” the host said, “Let’s go see it using the immersive mode—”
She raised her hand and opened the floating homepage.
Xia Tian raised his head. In the immersive mode, a huge steel gate appeared out of nowhere in the interview area, looking broken and ancient, as if it had emerged from the deep, deep darkness of time. The door was on fire, and the inscription “Never Give Up On Hope” was engraved on it.
“They call it the ‘God of War Temple’,” He Yu said, “saying that all the people burned here are sacrifices, the sinful and guilty ones. And the Gods—”
She pushed open the door.
When she pushed it open, what was presented was not a magnificent building, but rather a desert from the surface era, looking as if it had been weathered in an unknown corner for a long time.
“It’s you,” she said.
Xia Tian looked up. The statue of the God of War stood in the middle of the wasteland. It was surprisingly not exquisite, rather its texture was similar to that of an ancient stone statue. It was holding, with great momentum, a large thermal weapon of an unknown model. Xia Tian realized that this was an ancient battlefield, with a large number of corpses at its feet.
The skeletons looked very old, but Xia Tian recognized the appearance of some of the people and mutated creatures that he had killed previously. Their bones were weathering in the desert at the feet of the statue of the God.
Some stones and bones had moss growing on them as if there had been water flowing here, but it had dried up over time.
The statue was facing away, with an expression of exhaustion and refusal to compromise. It didn’t look like him at all, Xia Tian thought, but something much more massive and ancient. Though this was the immersive mode, it had a creepy sense of reality.
He said: “It looks like it has been here for thousands of years.”
“The believers say that it is responsible for revenge and resistance, the oldest emotions of mankind, and now they have finally retrieved it from the desert. They say Ares is a false god, and the palace of the false god will surely collapse,” He Yu continued.
She turned her head and looked a short distance away from her feet. Xia Tian followed her gaze and saw a man disemboweled by a sword and nailed there. The corpse seemed to have been rotting in the wilderness for a long time. It was a really realistic image with an accurate timeline.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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Xia Tian felt that this was not a matter of star-chasing, it was simply craziness.
For a moment he wanted to call Minkov Jr and ask if he had done it, but then remembered that the other party was still in confinement. The confinement was so thorough that he seemed to have disappeared from the world completely.
If it was not Minkov Jr… Well, there were many lunatics in the Upper World anyway.
He Yu didn’t turn off the immersive mode, so they appeared to be chatting in the middle of this forgotten and dilapidated temple—and now unearthed by the star chasers.
“This tendency reflects the current popular ethos,” He Yu said, “Let’s talk about this execution.
Recently, there has been a popular fad circulating that says that the thought ‘childhood is culturally constructed’ is now out of date. We can let the children engage in activities that were not allowed before, without feeling guilty. And they should withstand the proper tests of society. The deceased is one of the people who hold this idea.”
“I have a sister,” Xia Tian said, “If someone wanted her to ‘go through the proper tests of society,’ I’d kill that person, no matter whatever theory he believes in.”
He Yu smiled.
“I know you don’t feel ‘sorry’ for the deceased. I’m surprised that most people in the society take executions for granted, isn’t that crazy?”
“People take it for granted because, in this day and age, that’s what is taken for granted,” Xia Tian said, “It’s not hard to understand. In the early days of the Killing Show, abuse for fun was forbidden, but perceptions are changing.”
He Yu nodded.
“It’s hard to imagine that we used to call the Killing Show a ‘Battle for Justice’ previously,” she said, “But now, abuse and rape at Killing Shows have become very common.”
“At a celebration banquet, I ran into an anti-Killing Show scholar who said that it’s “stars” like us who are taking public morality further and further off course. Ethics and morality are obsolete words, just like attention, excitement, and coolness—”
“At a Killing Show celebration banquet?”
“Yeah, he was invited to attend. No one in this world can avoid the Killing Show.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I said I can’t afford to take on such a responsibility,” Xia Tian said, “Most of the Killing Show players are unlucky people and act according to the requirements of the TV station. It’s the media that tout us as popular stars. In a world where we are the popular stars, of course, public morals will shift step by step, and then move towards a direction wherein there is no bottom line.”
“You make it sound like our world is turning into Sodom, the city of sin.” He Yu said.
“Sodom was destroyed with brimstone and fire sent by God, wasn’t it?” Xia Tian said, “But this is an Atheist Era, so don’t worry about that. Modern civilization won’t be destroyed by God, it will only die by itself.”
He Yu clasped her arms and opened her lips for a moment to retort and refute, but no words came out.
“So,” she said, smiling again, “as the first criminal star to have a temple to his name, what do you want to say to your fans?”
Xia Tian wasn’t sure why he blurted out that sentence. It was probably because they had always radicalized him and he thought that would be a fantastic answer that fit his role… No, that wasn’t it. He wanted to say that because a dark desire had been burning inside of him.
Just like those previous times when he had all those irrational and destructive thoughts that led him to act instantly causing fatality regardless of the consequences without a scrap of hesitation.
He said, “If you ask me, the Upper World should be destroyed.”
He Yu looked at him wide-eyed. Xia Tian smiled at her, a smile that was brilliant and cold, radiant and murderous under the strong light of the Sky Viewpoint’s lighting crew.
He raised his hand, made a gesture of something falling, gently approached her as if he was flirting, then opened his palm suddenly and said, “Boom!”
Huitian shivered for a moment. She couldn’t say why she had shivered. Xia Tian seemed to be joking. He often liked to make such jokes.
Maybe it was because his smile had been a little too brilliant at that moment, containing a very real sense of aggression within it. Nowadays, people always compared stars to fireworks. They both ascended to great heights spreading a brilliant shower of light so bright that the whole world seemed to vanish after the flash of explosion.
She attributed her momentary shivers to the glamor of the stars, the fact that Xia Tian always spoke without qualms, and was always a dazzling presence.
This time, the organizers had given him the Joker card, which was typical image customization. Xia Tian would become an angry avenger, fighting alone, and would probably win at a great disadvantage.
The marketing department called this “revolutionary marketing,” and everyone wanted to make a fortune off the frenzy he created while he was still alive.
Huitian never felt that it was a good thing, but the Upper City’s game followed the baton of money. Money was the innermost core, and they would follow it anywhere, even to hell.
She took another sip of coffee and stood up. Before the start of the fourth round, she had to meet with the team and emphasize on the points they should pay attention to.
For stars, the precautions given by the organizers were very important. This was not a scuffle between a few criminals in the paddock back then, privately deciding who to kill and who not to kill. This was an industry involving extremely huge amounts of money, covering the entire human world. It rotated slowly, the gears buckled layer by layer, and no one had the luxury to screw up.
Thinking of going to see them, Huitian immediately recalled Xia Tian’s expression, his movements, the playful explosion he had mimed just now, and felt a little chilly.
Before the game, the whole building was busy as if a war was about to begin. It was indeed a war, involving battle, strategy, death, and a lot of money.
“Listen, in this round, you are heroes, well, at least anti-heroes,” Huitian said as she followed Xia Tian’s team all the way back to the lounge. “Don’t kill those who are trapped because of their contracts. You should kill for a plausible reason. You can’t mess around.”
“Right, you have to state the reason clearly before killing someone. The more righteous and indignant you are, the better. You know how to be liked!”
The team members looked at her with a “you are really asking for trouble” expression. She strictly ordered them to do as they were told and not to add to the workload of the planning team. This was not a trivial matter. If the wrong person was killed and the TV station was too late to rescue them, resulting in the setting being violated and causing conflicts between several parties, they could easily be abandoned by the organizers and be killed for it.
They were essentially entertainers. It was not like anyone really needed them to kill.
“I’ll try my best” Xia Tian said, but his tone did not sound sincere at all.
Bai Jingan gave an “um” and agreed with Xia Tian.
Huitian felt her scalp go numb. She had thought that Bai Jingan would be the one to calm Xia Tian and control the situation, but at this moment she began to feel whether she had been too optimistic.
She recalled visiting Bai Jingan’s house the previous week to gather items they had used and worn, for selling them at an auction or displaying them in a memorial hall, and ended up having a disagreement with Xia Tian over a pair of his “most comfortable underwear.”
At the moment, a recent movie about the Zone N Massacre was playing on the TV.
This Bai Lin was a young man with an innocent disposition. He was the unlucky guy who ran into a bad guy. Then the bad thing fermented into big trouble. He stumbled and tried to deal with it, making people sympathize with him.
Despite starting the biggest riot ever, he was a very likable and sympathetic character in this movie. His sister Bai Sang was only twelve or thirteen at the time, and the movie made her look like a femme fatale.
Xia Tian laughed at a plot-point in the movie, in which Bai Lin refused to confront an old friend who had entered the security team with swords. The two opened up to each other at a critical juncture, shook hands and made peace.
Although she had never seen a video of the Massacre and only watched an edited version made by the Killing Show, she still had some idea of the movie
“But the security captain is not a bad guy, and should live,” she had said.
Xia Tian had just returned from a party and was too lazy to change his clothes. He was leaning back on the sofa lazily with his shirt’s top three buttons unbuttoned making her blush.
She thought it must be something to do with money and fame, the kind of thing that just added an aura to a person. If he was just a poor criminal from the Lower City, she wouldn’t have blushed due to such a view.
“There are so many people in the world who shouldn’t die,” Xia Tian said, “Who really cares.”
He sat upright and came closer to her. “I knew a guy who had the deftest hand that I’d ever seen. I’ve never seen such a good magician in the Upper City. I learned my coin tricks from him.”
He tossed up a coin. As Huitian stared subconsciously, Xia Tian reached out and grabbed it. When he opened his hand, it was empty.
He smiled childishly, as if he was playing a particularly interesting game. It was hard to believe that he was a criminal who had killed more than a dozen people.
“He was nice. We did a lot of bad things together as kids, and he loved his mother very much,” Xia Tian said, “But one day we ran into… Let’s say, it was a dark road with no other exit, and all we had was a gun in one hand. What else could one do?”
He smiled at her innocently and naively. Huitian was a little chilled. She had long known that beneath the bright shell lay a cold, bloody, and unforgiving world. It was just that the lights in the Upper City were so bright that she forgot about it sometimes.
“No one will back off. The Lower City is such a place that if you want to survive, you have to think more about yourself,” he said, “That’s the real world.”
Beside him, Bai Jingan found a coin from his cuff, and Xia Tian laughed and told him how to do tricks. They were as close as a pair of playing children.
She had watched this scene and thought that sometimes one would really easily confuse him with the person promoted by the media.
Behind that idolized figure stood a dangerous man from the Lower City with the eyes of a cold carnivore.
He belonged there, and never under the sun.
Thanks for the chapter.
Yes destroy the upper world!!!