Her Celestial Farm on the Scrapyard Planet novel Chapter 15

Chapter 15 The Cost of Collapse

Finished

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, gaunt to the point of being unrecognizable.

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

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 mental power

backlash.

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.

:43 pm

Chapter 15 The Cost of Collapse

0:4

Finisher

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 eyes stared blankly at the ashen sky until all signs of life finally vanished.

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.

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

She was just another insignificant drop in this flood of despair. There was nothing she could do, and she didn’t want to do anything either.

Thinking of the original body’s mental power damage, Elizabeth immediately turned her attention inward to examine her own mental domain.

What this world so–called mental power, she understood, was essentially another expression of a cultivator’s spiritual sea.

Just as the memories suggested, there were clear signs of damage along the edges of this body’s spiritual

domain.

Yet unlike the stagnant, withered sensation described in those memories, she now clearly perceived a layer of extremely faint but vibrant pale green energy lingering around the cracks.

2/3

9:43 pm

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify