Chapter 23 My Purpose Is Publicity
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Translator: JayM
Chapter: 23
Chapter Title: My Purpose Is Publicity
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Rossetti could see the fear in her daughter's eyes.
A child of such an age already understood a great many things.
She crouched down and held her daughter tightly.
"It's alright. Everything’s alright now. We all made it out alive."
It was both a comfort to her daughter and to herself.
Rossetti was equally unable to control her own fear.
Because this wasn't only about herself — it was also about Leighton and Eileen, the ones she loved most, who were only twelve and ten years old!
"So the big sister on the phone saved us, right?" Eileen's body seemed to have stopped trembling. She lifted her smartwatch. "Should I say thank you to her?"
"We should all say thank you to her!" Rossetti said, her voice tinged with emotion. "She saved our entire family!"
If that call had never come, if the continuous warnings that followed had never happened, if she hadn't brought her daughter and son downstairs and had instead chosen to stay in the apartment like Conrad — they would now be trapped in a raging inferno, burned to death without mercy.
The moment that image crossed her mind…
An enormous wave of gratitude toward that call and the person behind it surged up within Rossetti.
Right now, she wasn't even thinking about how the other party had been able to predict the fire.
She was simply rejoicing.
It was the relief of someone who had survived a disaster.
"Rossetti, we need to leave this area. It's becoming unsafe here too." Ralph's voice came from beside her as scorched debris continued to rain down from the floors above.
Even this elite engineer's voice was trembling now.
On one hand, it’s because he knew…
Everyone who had stayed inside the building was already dead.
The flames had spread so rapidly — this luxury apartment complex, which had boasted the finest fire safety facilities, had exterior walls that weren't even made of fireproof material. And the people who had chosen to remain inside just moments ago couldn't even be reached by phone now.
It was obvious. To ward off the harassment, they had smashed their phones.
To hell with harassment!
That had been a lifesaving call in the truest sense of the word!
Those people had thrown away their own chance at survival!
Ralph felt an urge to scream and shout to release the turmoil within him.
On the other hand, it’s because he simply couldn’t comprehend what had happened.
All the way until he left, Ralph kept murmuring to himself without pause.
"How was it done? How could something like this be possible? What exactly is the Pan-Humanity Protection Association?" He felt as though the scientific convictions he had held all of his life were on the verge of collapse.
The terrifying hacking capability was still within the realm of his understanding — but observing the future? How could something like that ever be possible?
But he gradually found his own rationale.
It had to be some kind of technology that hadn’t yet been understood.
An entirely new discovery.
A discovery that would change the entire world!
He had to find them. He had to join them. He had to see with his own eyes how a miracle capable of saving countless lives had come into being!
Perhaps Ralph himself hadn't even noticed it, but a trace of fervor had already appeared on his face — it was the passion of an engineer combined with the elation of having witnessed a scientific miracle. He even felt as though his life, now saved, had taken on an entirely different kind of meaning.
That night was destined to be a sleepless one for many people.
Not only because of the fire.
But also because of the strange circumstances by which they had escaped with their lives.
A lightning-induced fire was something that couldn’t be predicted — no person, no method could determine that at precisely that moment, lightning would strike the building and ignite a raging blaze.
This was why, upon seeing this disaster in the scroll, Shen Yi had recognized it as exactly what he needed.
A terrible tragedy resulting in over five hundred deaths was more than sufficient to make the disaster a global flashpoint in the news.
And the advance warning notifications would simultaneously lend the Pan-Humanity Protection Association an air of mystery.
The combination of the two would produce an explosive level of public attention.
What was more, that night hadn't only seen this single event — there had also been four to five other disaster warnings spanning the globe, and though the damage from each was modest in comparison, they would each serve as kindling for the already raging fire of public discussion.
The next day.
The very first thing Shen Yi did upon opening his eyes was ask Dingxiang for a status report.
"Captain, the task completion rate was only sixty-seven percent." Dingxiang's voice seemed to carry a trace of disappointment.
"Sixty-seven percent?" Shen Yi was briefly taken aback.
"Yes. Warnings were issued to a total of eight hundred and forty-seven people. Two hundred and seventy-nine still died." Dingxiang answered.
"Which means..."
Shen Yi checked his points balance.
It had increased by over three hundred points.
"How did you manage that?" Shen Yi didn't feel that the number was too few — if anything, it was more than he expected. He stood up and began getting dressed as he asked, "The vast majority of people wouldn't believe a warning that sounded like a prank, would they?"
"Actually..." Dingxiang recounted everything she had done in full.
"I see." Shen Yi now understood completely.
To think that she had gone that far.
Phone bombardment, combined with taking control of all wireless devices — that would indeed have left quite a number of people filled with doubt and unease. And more to the point, it was virtually impossible to ignore.
"Captain, was there something wrong with what I did?"
Dingxiang had picked up on something different in Shen Yi's tone from her analysis of it.
Her voice had gone somewhat soft.
Like a little girl who had done something wrong — which, though somewhat at odds with the cool image she had projected, was more likely to earn forgiveness in front of her Captain.
"It wasn't that you did anything wrong. It's simply that you didn't grasp the primary purpose behind the orders I gave." Shen Yi stood up and pulled back the curtains. The morning light shone on his face, though it brought little sense of ease to him.
"The primary purpose?" Dingxiang questioned.
"That's right. Everything you did was built on the assumption that my purpose was to 'warn.'" Shen Yi looked out the window, his voice suddenly going very quiet. "But what I truly wanted to do was publicity."
"Publicizing the Association's existence." Dingxiang seemed to have already grasped Shen Yi's meaning.
"Dingxiang, human beings fear the unknown, and are terrified of the powerful." Shen Yi turned his head, his gaze fixed on the phone on the bed as if he was looking at Dingxiang. "Yesterday, you had already gone to such lengths, and yet a large number of people still dismissed it entirely — because people don’t easily believe what they can’t understand. What I need to do now is make people gradually come to understand, and then believe."
Shen Yi genuinely didn't much care about how many had been saved the previous night.
He had already learned not to treat deaths as his own fault, and to count only the saving of lives as his own achievement.
And beyond that, he understood very clearly…
Without any precedent, without any evidence, very few people would believe something so utterly inconceivable.
But there would always be survivors.
Even if only ten, or twenty, had made it out alive — they would speak of the warnings they had received, and then people would discover that the others who had perished had received the same warnings, but had simply chosen not to believe them, therefore losing their lives.
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T/N - Ah, I see where the MC is coming from. He’s basically building his organization up in the eyes of the public so that when the time comes, he can convince more people under its name. After all, no one will trust an organization that basically pops up out of nowhere, but as long as he does this enough times, people will realize that they’d want to trust the organization’s warnings if they want to survive. He’s basically starting early, while the world doomsday still isn’t in full swing.
Still, I think Dingxiang’s method, while extreme, did achieve his objective. In fact, she overachieved, which is probably why the MC’s a bit torn about it.