Chapter 434.


    <strong>Chapter 434. Soul Exchange. (6/7)</strong>


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Choosing stability every time over taking a risk can be a stupid decision in and of itself. There could be a very tiny risk of something happening, but because you only want to choose the short term stable option, you could end up favoring stability of one small part whilepletely forsaking the stability of the greater picture leading to a disastrous oue in the long run.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Short-term stability does not equate to long-term stability. The only way to ensure long-term stability is through an equal bnce of both risk-taking and hedges against those risks with countermeasures and fail-safes to fall back on. It’s like implementing a fuse in aplex electric circuit. Risk management, just because one thing fails, the entire system doesn’t copse and can continue to function in a certain capacity.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Somehow, it sounds like we’re talking about investment now.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“It is investment. It’s investing in the future of humanity. You can’t only do one thing, you’ve got to do both in moderation. If you ever reach a point where one side is unwilling topromise and meet the other side halfway…” I paused as several scenes in history shed through my mind.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Aren’t you going to finish that thought?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“The system... truly does copse.” I’d already lived through it once and witnessed it happen with my own eyes after all.


    <span style="font-weight:400">As poptions grewrger and more concentrated, authority and stability won out over all else. One side umted far too much power. The concentration of power destroyed the delicate bnce. The scale broke and crashed into the ground on one side. It was an utter disaster in the history I recalled.


    <span style="font-weight:400">I could still vividly remember the fateful day that freedom died. All that remained thereafter was a shell of what it once was. A joke. When people brought up freedom after that, they’d just beughed at, ostracized, and treated like a fool.


    <span style="font-weight:400">I’d really like to... escape to somewhere far away before that day arrives.


    <span style="font-weight:400">As for trying to change it… yeah right. As if I was naive enough to think my actions would be able to do anything when going up against the giants of the world who held overwhelming power umted over decades to centuries. I’d be lucky just to survive through it all again.


    <span style="font-weight:400">Humanity can figure shit out itself. It’s not something I need to concern myself with… considering how I’m a devil now anyway.


    <span style="font-weight:400">It’d just be a little sad to see it all happen again. The inevitable fall and decline of freedom in the future we’re currently headed toward.


    <span style="font-weight:400">People like to see the good guys win, but what happens when you flip the tables and paint everyone’s perception of the good guys as the viins?


    <span style="font-weight:400">Good and bad is only determined based on the angle you look at it from. Politicians know this all too well and carefully manipte that angle. This is why I hate politics. It’s such a nasty subject.


    <span style="font-weight:400">It is very easy to paint anything in ck. But if you want to undo that, it’s very difficult to change something from ck to white once painted ck. Traces of that ck paint will always remain and linger. You’ll never forget that it was there even if you try to perfectly paint over it in white or any other color.


    <span style="font-weight:400">In the case of paint, you can easilybine things that absorb and reflect certain spectrums of light, butpletely separating or removing that paint oncebined is typically impossible. No matter how much white paint youbine with ck paint, the result will be a shade of gray. It could get very close to white again, but it will never be perfectly white again.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Hey… Ran?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“What?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“With the way you put it, doesn’t it kind of sound like civilization is screwed as things stand?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“It is screwed. But so what? Let it copse. If you ask me, it’s better if it happens sooner rather thanter. At least if it copses sooner there’s less work to rebuild it from the ground up as there’s less of a mess to clean up afterward. The bigger it gets, the worse the aftermath.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Hmm… I suppose that’s true.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“What do we even care? We’re just a little stupid couple in high school. Such concerns have nothing to do with us.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“True. Our conversation really took a strange turn, didn’t it?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Yeah, it really did.” I couldn’t agree more.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Let’s go down now.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Sure.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“I’ll head down first then.” Rosa rose to her feet and took one step over myp. Her smooth thighs rubbed against my face.


    <span style="font-weight:400">When I looked up at her, I realized she was looking down at me with a foot on the branch on both sides of myp.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Why’d you stop? Aren’t you going down?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Uh, I would but… I encountered a small problem.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“What?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“I… really have to go.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Then go.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“No, I mean…”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Wait… that?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Yeah. I’ve been up here for a while after all. I haven’t actually gone all day either.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Hurry up and go down and get it done.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“I don’t think I’ll be able to hold it in while climbing down. I only just realized that.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">What is this ungodly problem I’ve been presented with?


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Why not just let it out from up here?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“If I was a guy, sure. Did you forget I’m a girl? There’s no way I can do that with my boyfriend up here.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“I see, how about I go down first then?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“So you can get a better view of it falling? No way.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“I’ll head back to the campsite and zip myself up in the tent.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Mmmm… then hurry up and do that. I really have to go. This is seriously embarrassing. I’m an assassin… but I’m losing to a dder of all things. The humiliation is unreal.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">Her legs were shaking unsteadily, it was pretty easy to see how hard she was trying to hold it in.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Can you raise your leg so I can get past you?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Impossible. If I move right now, we’ll both suffer a horrible fate together. Well, it might only be horrible for me, maybe you’re into that sort of thing.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Don’t you dare pee on me. I don’t have that sort of strange fetish.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Then you better get moving.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">How?


    <span style="font-weight:400">Well… there was one way out of this.


    <span style="font-weight:400">I grabbed onto the tree branch and rotated my body to slip down through Rosa’s legs. I hung down from the branch supporting the full weight of my body with only my arms. In this fashion, I was able to move one hand at a time to the other side of her foot on the branch.


    <span style="font-weight:400">When at the trunk of the tree I stretched my leg out around the trunk and ced it down on another branch not too far away. It was a bit scary, but thankfully I didn’t fall.


    <span style="font-weight:400">I carefully descended back to the ground one branch at a time and used my belt to safely descend the remainder of the branchless portion of the trunk.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Hurry up!”


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Yeah, yeah.”


    <span style="font-weight:400">Upon her urging me to leave I didn’t stick around and quickly retreated in the direction of the tent. I wasn’t about to stick around to receive a golden shower.


    <span style="font-weight:400">I zipped up the tent and patiently waited for Rosa’s arrival.


    <span style="font-weight:400">About five minutester, I heard a branch snap. I unzipped the tent, poked my head out, and nced in the direction it came from.


    <span style="font-weight:400">“Rosa? You there?”


    <span style="font-weight:400">Wait, if she was here, wouldn’t I see that bright light? If there was no bright light… didn’t that mean she wasn’t there and asking waspletely pointless?


    <span style="font-weight:400">But if it wasn’t her, what was it? Was it all in my head? Wait, maybe there was a wild animal nearby.


    <span style="font-weight:400">It was quite dark right now as the fire had died out by the time I got back. I’d used the shlight on my phone to make my way back despite it not being too far away from the tree we were perched atop.


    <span style="font-weight:400">Man, being out here alone when it was this dark was actually pretty unnerving. What if it was a ghost or something? Haha, yeah right.