Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 611 Human Power Generation
"Is he your friend?" Sun Hang asked.

“Friends? What are friends?” Nur asked rhetorically.

Sun Hang was bewildered. Did the concept of "friends" not even exist among these desert survivors?
"Are you... familiar with him?" Sun Hang asked in a different phrasing.

“I’ve known him since I was a child,” Nur replied.

You've known each other since childhood? So you must be childhood friends?

This guy killed his childhood friend without hesitation; he seems to be a ruthless person.

"Don't you feel bad about killing him?"

“If I don’t kill him, he will kill you and tell the High Priest. At that point, the High Priest might kill me or turn me into a condemned one. So, I have no choice but to kill him,” Nur answered honestly.

What a fine saying, "better to die than to die, my friend..." Although in the post-apocalyptic world, only the most selfish can become the last survivors, the problem is that this group of desert survivors has already formed a sizable settlement and has a social division of labor. Logically speaking, the people in the settlement should not be in a life-or-death struggle like in the dark forest.

Even if Nur was forced to kill Baha due to circumstances, he would have felt some regret or shock. However, Sun Hang did not sense any negative emotions from Nur other than tension and fear.

He killed Baha as naturally as a hunter killing his prey.

While both are for survival, the feelings of killing wild animals and killing one's own kind are definitely completely different for humans—unless they are seasoned veterans who are numb to the act of killing their own kind… In other words, in Sun Hang's view, Nur's psychological state and social cognition are obviously very different from his understanding of a "normal person".

"Is murder illegal in your settlement?" Sun Hang couldn't help but ask.

What does "breaking the law" mean?

“Alright, let me ask again: if you kill someone from your own settlement, will you be punished?” Sun Hang asked.

“No.” Nur shook his head. “If you are stronger than him and you kill him, why should you be punished?”

"So, in your settlement, the strong can kill the weak at any time?"

Nur nodded, then shook his head: "Okay, but we generally don't kill people, because if there are fewer people, everyone will have more work to do... and if we kill people randomly, the priest will be unhappy."

"If there's a food shortage, wouldn't chaos easily break out in the settlement?" Sun Hang asked again, "For example, indiscriminate killing over food?"

“Yes, but the high priest will intervene at that time,” Nur said. “He will turn those who are not devout into the condemned… As long as there are enough condemned, there will be no shortage of food.”

By this point in the Q&A session, Sun Hang had pretty much grasped it—the settlements of the desert survivors were essentially a cannibalistic social structure. The phrase "cannibalism" doesn't need to be in quotes because it's literally cannibalism.

As the supreme ruler of the settlement, the priest Nur spoke of had the power and ability to transform "population" into "food" at any time. Rather than a human settlement, it was more like a group of domesticated carnivorous beasts, and the priest was the "shepherd" who kept these beasts.

Sun Hang even felt that this priest and these ordinary survivors were probably not the same species. At first, Sun Hang thought that the priest was just an infected person among the survivors, but now it seems that whether they are human or not is still debatable.

Nur dragged Baha's body to a secluded cave, then broke off his own bone spear and stabbed it into the corpse's throat until half of the spear was completely embedded in the corpse's chest cavity.

"Do you still have the custom of whipping corpses?" Sun Hang, who was watching from the side, couldn't help but ask. Although Nur didn't understand what whipping corpses meant, he still explained his intention to Sun Hang: "It's to prevent the dead from becoming vengeful spirits and returning to the world."

"Are you implying that he can come back to life?"

“Wraiths are real. If the bodies of the murdered are not properly disposed of, there is a high probability that they will be resurrected and take revenge on their enemies… And after these resurrected vengeful spirits have completed their revenge, they will become the ones to be punished…” Nur explained.

"I understand. Death will likely activate the latent memes within you, turning you into infected individuals or monsters. Is that what you mean?"

Meme? Infected? Monster?

Nur was completely baffled by the new terms Sun Hang had used, but Sun Hang was too lazy to explain further and instead urged, "Now can you continue to take me to find your high priest?"

"The High Priest's residence is in the 'Temple,' and many people live around the 'Temple.' If you are seen by those people, you will be killed before you even have a chance to see the High Priest... Everyone in our settlement firmly believes that outsiders will bring disaster and destruction to the settlement, and they will not allow you to..."

“Everyone? Are you sure?” Sun Hang gave Nur a meaningful look.

Nulton was speechless for a moment.

"You believe the priest's words without a doubt, don't you?" Sun Hang asked again.

“I…I don’t know.” Nur shook his head. “But the High Priest has the power to manipulate life and death…Mortals cannot possibly defy the High Priest…”

"So you're still willing to lead the way for me?" Sun Hang chuckled. "Are you tired of living?"

“I…I just feel…” Nur gritted his teeth, but his limited vocabulary couldn’t produce a single sentence that represented his true thoughts. “I…I…”

"Alright, just take me there. Don't worry about those people stopping us. Besides, you don't need to kill anyone else." Sun Hang waved his hand.

"But they will..."

“They can’t stop me,” Sun Hang said.

After a fierce internal struggle, Nur still led Sun Hang to the interior of an extremely spacious cavity.

Inside this cavity is a small mountain made of bones and fluorescent stones. Around the mountain, there are huts made of bones and leather. At the top of the mountain is a "palace" that almost touches the top of the cavity.

The style of this palace is completely different from the dwellings of other desert dwellers. Sun Hang could tell at a glance that the materials used to build this palace came from the legacy of the old civilization. For one thing, the dozens of large coils standing around the palace alone were things that the current desert dwellers could not make.

Hundreds of shirtless desert survivors surrounded these coils, constantly pushing them to rotate. Bluish-white arcs of electricity flashed across the surface of the coils from time to time, and were then guided into the interior of the palace along one suspended copper wire after another.

"These things are... human-powered generators?"

(End of this chapter)