Chapter 588: Solution

"Jack, Jack," Tapai reached out through the acid rain to help Sun Jack up from the ground and handed him a lit cigarette. "You are Sun Jack. Get up."

At that moment, the disheartened Sun Jack shook his head vigorously. He took the cigarette and took a deep breath, savoring the numbing sensation, trying to calm his emotions.

However, when he saw the crowd kneeling before him, his recently stabilized mood seemed to be on the verge of losing control again. For a moment, he even began to doubt himself.

Was everything he had done along the way worth it? Were the deaths because of him really necessary?

As cracks began to form in his steadfast beliefs, the auditory hallucinations that had long been absent came surging back, growing louder and louder.

"Hey, hey, hey, don't go having a cyborg breakdown now!" Tapai's hand quickly extended dozens of sensor wires, swiftly inserting them into Sun Jack's neural slots, attempting to help.

"I...I don't need it!" As Sun Jack yanked out all the sensor wires, all the anomalies around him instantly vanished.

"Who did this, who in the world did this!" Sun Jack clenched his teeth as the Sky-base Weapon in the distance rapidly adjusted its direction, aiming at the huge statue, ready to vaporize it.

Tapai looked at Sun Jack, walked forward, and gently patted the shoulder of a cyborg covered in tattoos, "Can I ask who made you worship this?"

The man, without turning his head, said, "No one made us worship it. This statue was spontaneously funded by the Sun Jack Fan Club. Do you know how powerful Sun Jack is? With just one word, he can decide the death of tens of millions, absolutely amazing."

"Do you know how rich Sun Jack is now? He makes more in one day than you will in your entire life! He is my idol!"

The man kept talking about Sun Jack's great deeds, but behind him, Sun Jack weakly canceled the command.

He took a deep breath, raised his hands, and covered his face, rubbing it vigorously.

"It's my fault, all my fault, I shouldn't have given up on them, I should have taught them. Without anyone to teach them how to do things, they can only follow the old ways, and all the responsibility lies with me..."

"Can you stop blaming yourself?" Tapai came over, raised his fist, and struck Sun Jack's shoulder hard. "You're human, not a god. You've done enough, why should you take all the responsibility? Are all the others dead?"

But Sun Jack shook his head and didn't speak, seemingly pondering something. Suddenly, he looked up at the statue, "I... I think I know who bombed the office building."

"What?" Tapai, baffled by this abrupt statement, couldn't understand what Sun Jack meant.

Sun Jack didn't offer an explanation but silently opened the Sun Jack channel and issued orders to the other Sun Jack clones.

After a long wait, pieces of confirmed intelligence came through, continuously validating Sun Jack's thoughts.

Eventually, he sent all the evidence collected by the clones to Tapai. "See, it wasn't Abu, nor Steelheart, nor any senior official."

Tapai rapidly connected to the data and analyzed it quickly.

Sun Jack's mechanical fingers pinched the cigarette butt and fiercely squeezed it, causing sparks to burst forth. "There's no mastermind and no conspiracy, just that my order didn't align with everyone's interests, so it faced resistance from top to bottom."

"They dare not openly defy me, so each person just slightly tilts from their position with dissatisfaction, leading to the outcome we see now."

Gradually slowing down, Sun Jack's voice began to tremble slightly, growing louder and louder.

"Not only Abu wants immortality, everyone wants it, everyone wants to live the days of a Holy Grail Person, it's me who's fucking blocking everyone's way!"

But after the outburst, a strong sense of powerlessness surged into Sun Jack's heart; to whom could he turn in such a situation? His once-prized martial power was utterly useless at this moment.

He deeply sighed and looked up at the mid-to-upper management list on the system interface, scanning the area where all the masterminds appeared, but could he really kill them all?

After killing them, would the new people who came up be better than them?

Before the AI Lan Meng was shut down, it once said, "Capital never sleeps."

He had thought he understood what they meant, but it was only now that he finally grasped the weight of those words.

But as the sense of powerlessness subsided, Sun Jack gritted his teeth; his gaze hardened again—he wasn't ready to give up! He would find a solution; he was sure to find a solution!

From that day on, the upper echelons of Metropolis discovered that Sun Jack was keeping to himself and that the Think Tank had shut down all communications.

No one knew what Sun Jack was doing, but as days passed by and it seemed as though nothing had happened, everyone continued living their quiet lives.

It was unclear how much time had gone by when, in a smoke-filled meeting room, the light of a fire once again illuminated Sun Jack's haggard, bearded face.

"Since everyone thinks we can give it a try, starting now, implement the second plan—fully emulate the Detroit model, using Liberation Theology to transform the thinking of Metropolitan Citizens, and if all goes well, expand to the entire Utopia Federation."

Religion, Liberation Theology—using religion to arm everyone's mindset was the countermeasure Sun Jack and the Think Tank came up with based on the current situation faced in the struggle against capitalist corruption.

This decision wasn't made recklessly; what made Liberation Theology stand out among many options was that, for one, trying to completely change these people's mindset just through basic education was utterly quixotic.

Perhaps the Wild Men or the next generation could give it a try, but these people who were accustomed to the bizarre life of Metropolis could not.

Whether Sun Jack deduced it from experience or analyzed it through big data, the success rate was terrifyingly low.

Since they liked to believe, rather than letting them believe blindly, it was far better to guide them as much as possible in the right direction.

If you want someone to give up their benefits without compensation, then religion is an option.

And choosing this plan had another more important reason: in Detroit, a city with tens of millions of people, it had already undergone a large-scale experiment and operated very well.

Based on these factors, Sun Jack and the Think Tank made such a decision now.

"This process will take time; we need to increase the number of Liberation Theology followers among the Metropolitan Citizens, and we also need to step up the updates for the educational chips for the Wild Men, only when Liberation Theology reaches a certain scale will the others gradually be assimilated."

A representative of the Think Tank spoke while distributing the data model to everyone present.