After Zha returned to his family, he returned to the highlands again to visit his sister who lived in their old residence and the doctor's long-abandoned single house.
His return has not been uneventful. After witnessing him being taken away by the Collectors, everyone believed he was dead. His family had completed his funeral in despair and pain, and burned all his body parts and blood they could collect. Naturally, when they saw an intact letter being returned by the collectors, they were so surprised that they almost fainted.
That wasn't the only surprising thing. The collectors who came with him immediately issued new orders. They gathered everyone in the neighborhood at the market and announced to people that the world had changed. Krishna's wrath has now been appeased - permanently. The Collectors will never come again. All sacrifices will come to an end, and Krishna will not be angry over this.
This incident is more confusing than exciting. There was never any doubt that the orders conveyed by the Collectors were false, but the circumstances of this announcement were indeed unimaginable.
However, some people have raised the question, if the collectors will never come again, who will be responsible for handling all future disputes? Who will tell them how to live their lives in the future? Or are they just surviving by the old rules? If necessary, would they be able to call the Collectors again?
The answer is no. The collectors responded mercilessly. Their earthly abode is now dismantled because there is no need to return. The men who had been chosen to welcome them and wait on them were out of work and assigned to other errands. From now on, people on earth can only take care of themselves.
Despite the horrific appearance of the collectors, people still asked them again and again, wanting to know if there were any errors in the edict and if there had been any misinterpretation during the transmission process.
There were no answers to these questions, and the collectors mounted their chariots and left. They followed the current, spreading the same message to everyone. Anyway, that's how it was decided.
These things made people forget Zha's return. Although they pry at him at first, they soon become convinced that he knows no more than they do. People are confused about the new life, but in fact, Zha is just like them. He vaguely understood that everything happening around him at this moment was related to the doctor, but that didn't help him understand what the doctor wanted to do. The Collectors have leaders, and the leaders rule over many worlds. That was already a complicated matter that had nothing to do with Zha.
But he knows some simple truths. Something that comes naturally. In the market, everyone has to give and everyone has to give. If someone takes something from him, the other person will always give him something back through some cycle. No one will only take but not give in this cycle, because it is very easy to be exposed. And as long as he is exposed, he will be isolated by everyone. He would live in fear and poverty until the next arrival of the Gatherer's chariot. If anyone reported this to the Collector, he would be brutally executed. Anyone who is thought to have concealed the information will be asked to double their contribution. In Zha's memory, no one who committed such a crime could survive. Even if he tried his best to please everyone for several years, he would eventually die.
Now, not in the market place, but in the presence of the foragers, the doctor took away the life of the chief and the freedom of all the foragers. This crime exceeded all the criminal laws that Zha knew. He couldn't help but think about how his elders in the past would be treated if Black Sky - what the doctors called the leaders - caught the man from the Black Tower Country. Zha even thought about himself. Although he was not particularly clear yet, if the doctor was caught by other leaders, would he and his family be involved? Just like people who don't report will be asked to double their sacrifices?
None of these things could be decided by him, and he had no reference experience in his past life to tell him how to deal with such a crisis. In his hesitation, he only thought of visiting the doctor's old house.
This behavior is very unwise. When he later met the doctor, he also pointed this out to him. If the doctor is really caught, a person wandering into the criminal's former residence will undoubtedly be noticed and punished. But Zha didn't think about it at that time. The solid order of past life seems to have completely collapsed in a series of huge accidents. He forgot about hunger and thirst, forgot about fear, and even almost forgot about the safety of his family. In that single room with weak light, he always lingered like a ghost, trying to verify whether those plain and beautiful memories of the past really existed.
Some changes took place during this period of disorientation. Although Zha has forgotten how to live due to a series of terrible experiences. Some people adapt to this change keenly. When the first man deceives, seizes and misappropriates excess supplies in the market, people still habitually isolate him. But soon, everyone remembered the news that had been announced: the Collectors would never come again.
No one can explain the second chaos that occurred. Because it was so close to the third and fourth piles, no one could tell who was affected by whom. Some people's exchange records were undoubtedly tampered with. There were also things quietly taken away. When the damaged men argued over this, beatings and violence ensued. All things the Collectors forbade people to do, but now people are reminded of that announcement. The Collectors will never come. They are known to never lie.
Unprecedented disasters follow one after another. Some people seem to suddenly forget their past life completely when they see blood. They took whatever they saw, and as a result, those who grew water plants stopped going to the market. Zha had to take turns going to his home with his children to exchange. Fortunately, the person who grew water plants also had a large family. They need sound tubes, and they don't have to worry about being robbed by outsiders when they stay together.
They spent dozens of days reluctantly. A greater disaster broke in from outside. There was a group of strangers, probably close to forty, all tall and strong men. They drove several electric cars that could run on the ground, the parts of which Zha had only occasionally seen in the market. Although they look exactly like the natives, they claim to be foragers and also demand sacrifices. But what they want is not minerals, but food, stone cutting blades, crystal oscillators, water silk cloth, and various ready-made tools. They still want people. Young, fit girls, as well as strong miners, carvers and experienced sound plumbers.
No one believed they were the Collectors. A man who grew water plants pointed out that this was ridiculous, so the forty or so people broke open the door of his home, dragged his entire family out, tied them to the tail of an electric car, and hung the family outside the market. Round and round. That's not the same as the string hanging under the collector's tank, and most people know how the electric vehicle works. But they still got what they asked for in the end.
The day after that family died, Zha fled to the highlands with his family. He later learned that he was not the only one who had done so, but he was the only one who succeeded. Among all the electric vehicles chasing the fugitive, the one that happened to be responsible for him was damaged inexplicably. It slid sideways from the flat stone field and fell into a deep ditch very far away from the original road.
Zha and his family fled back to the highlands. That remote and closed place has also shown a trace of chaos, but fortunately it still follows the inertia of past life. Zha hopes that this inertia can last longer. But deep down he knew that was impossible. Because he was a doctor, he escaped execution by the Collectors, but he brought even more terrible consequences to the entire world. They are destined to meet a tragic end. He didn't know who was most at fault in this matter, maybe himself. But that doesn't matter anymore.
When the electric car appeared far away at the end of the plateau, he ran towards the doctor's house. He wanted to destroy the whole house, burning all the parts that could be burned and leaving as little of the rest as possible. What the meaning of that was, he couldn't really explain. It was just an unreasonable and desperate fantasy to escape reality. But when he walked into the house, the courage to destroy had disappeared without a trace. He fell inside and passed out from hunger and fatigue.
In his sleep, he again saw the doctor sitting in his usual seat in a single room. And Zha himself was lying on the table like a corpse waiting to be cremated. The doctor in the dream still looked like the scary young man wearing a dazzling red robe and with deformed ears, but his cold expression actually made Zha feel friendly. With tears in his eyes, he reached out to the doctor.
Even in his dream, the doctor remained blind to this sign of weakness. He made gestures to tell Zha that he was fighting a war in heaven. The outcome of the war was insignificant, so he was still paying attention to the development of the world and thinking about the problem that had troubled him for a long time.
About life. He stated on his own. There are two views that are fundamentally incompatible with each other. Life is a purely complex machine, and thinking is an occasional spark of friction during operation. It can be said to be a by-product. Another view is that machinery is just presentation - life is something more intangible, just like people can't catch the wind. Only when it is connected with a certain material structure can it present the phenomenon that people call life. The more complex the structure is, the richer the phenomena it can present. But that is different from the soul. The soul as an individual never exists, just as an image is nothing more than a piece of information received by a person. If life is beyond matter, that means it is something that is not fully understood. From all so-called "living" things, they see only a very small aspect of it.
In this infinite repetition of life and death, things become orderly and then disorderly. It is almost impossible to discern the essence in this chaos. Controlled experiments are imperative. Only life that meets the conditions is allowed to appear, and interference items should and must be raised. Death is the inevitable way to eliminate this disorder.
Zha groaned in pain. die. The word reminded him of family. He couldn't stop crying. At this time, the doctor let out a sigh, and the crazy and unreasonable narration unique to dreams stopped. He looked at Zha with an expression similar to pity.
You have failed. He told Zha. Trading in equivalent substitutes has been invented many times in your history, only to be destroyed immediately by the collectors. They also do not allow written and spoken dialects to spread on a large scale, because it is too efficient in information exchange and can easily get out of control. And the population. In different years, the collectors adopted punishment strategies of varying degrees of severity, ranging from punishing just one person to killing an entire family. In fact, it is determined based on the current population. They always try to control the population on the ground within a self-sustaining range. If people are happy to sacrifice that year, killing alone cannot solve the problem, and they will also introduce highly contagious diseases.
even so. The doctor told him again. In the past less than a hundred days, the population on earth has declined as much as in the years of the Holocaust. Those who had served the collectors and knew better contributed greatly. They first fought internally to establish their superiority, and then began to expand their territories. The chaos was temporary, and maybe they would have new managers soon—but, no matter what, they still failed. Model calculations show that the world's population and resource structure have become too unbalanced, and the new managers are also of low quality. Famine was inevitable, followed by pillage and death.
Are you willing to accept this result? he asked Zha.
Zha lay weakly on the table, sobbing in this extremely long nightmare. With trembling hands he begged to keep it away from him. Let his life end in a secluded house, or restore order to this terrible world. The doctor didn't speak for a long time. It wasn't until Zha was struggling to roll off the table that he left his seat and walked over to hold Zha's hand. It was like a drowning man grabbing a piece of driftwood, but the wood was warm and real.
It was at that moment that Zha realized that he was not dreaming. The doctor had returned to the old house where he had been absent for many years, and stood before him. He still helped Zha up from the table with his elder-like attitude. Just do it. The doctor gestured to him. That's what happened the next day: the physician ruled the earthly world.
