Her Celestial Farm on the Scrapyard Planet (by Kay Lucas) novel Chapter 15

Chapter 15 The Cost of Collapse

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When the door of the isolation cell finally opened a month later, the people outside saw only a girl curled on the floor, barely conscious, gaun to the point of being unrecognizable.

No one cared what she had endured. No one even noticed that something in her changed forever.

eyes had

It was not until a routine physical examination later on that doctors detected permanent damage to 20 percent of her mental power.

Had she been given sedatives in time back then, the damage wouldn’t have exceeded one percent at most.

From that point on, she found it difficult to maintain focus for long periods. She would experience sudden bouts of dizziness and became abnormally sensitive to certain mental fluctuations.

This was also why, later on, she came to be labeled by others as “stupid as a pig,” “volatile and irritable,” and “good for nothing.”

Pulled back from those memories, a shadow settled over Elizabeth’s heart.

She had once assumed that in a highly advanced interstellar era, the worst shortcomings would be limited to food and daily comforts.

She had not expected such a widespread and brutal hidden crisis.

In the interstellar era, mental power was everything.

For tens of thousands of years, humanity had struggled to survive in the vast universe. To adapt to radically different and hostile environments, they had been forced into repeated rounds of extreme and risky genetic modification and mutation.

The birth of mental power was regarded as humanity’s greatest and most successful evolutionary breakthrough.

It granted sharper perception, faster reactions, and even the potential to directly manipulate energy. It was the foundation upon which interstellar civilization stood.

Yet genetic mutation carried a cruel price, giving rise to a wide array of bizarre and terrifying genetic disorders.

Among them, the one with the most profound impact on individuals and society alike was

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Chapter 15 The Cost of Collapse

mental power backlash.

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This collapse, rooted deep within the genes, struck directly at the core of consciousness and caused permanent damage to mental power.

Once the damage accumulated beyond a certain threshold, total mental power collapse followed.

That was why sedatives existed.

If taken in time before a backlash occurred, sedatives could effectively suppress violent mental fluctuations and significantly reduce the damage caused.

However, even the most basic low–grade sedative costs as much as 1,000 stellar coins.

For people living on Garbage Planet, struggling every day just to eat, this was an impossible

expense.

A mental power backlash without sedatives caused devastating damage.

Even someone with SSS–level mental power couldn’t withstand many such episodes before collapsing completely.

And once mental power collapsed, rationality vanished. One would devolve into a beast driven solely by instinct and pain, incapable of recognizing family, frenzied, and dangerous.

At that stage, there was no saving them.

The kingdom’s method of dealing with those who suffered genetic collapse was simple and merciless.

After official evaluation, anyone deemed mentally “unfit” or “potentially dangerous” was stripped of citizenship and exiled to the fringe Garbage Planets.

In other words, those desolate worlds were populated not only by criminals like herself who had been sentenced to exile but also by countless people like the man before her, discarded by the kingdom after mental power collapse and written off as useless.

The man’s howls gradually weakened, fading into unconscious moans.

His body no longer convulsed violently, only twitching intermittently. His blankly at the ashen sky until all signs of life finally vanished.

eyes

stared

The surrounding crowd, accustomed to such scenes, closed in again and resumed lining up, as if nothing more than a trivial interruption had occurred.

Living on this planet, they had long since grown numb.

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Chapter 13 The Cost of Collapse

Elizabeth calmly withdrew her gaze and joined the line behind them.

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