Misstep

"Attention, attention. Due to interference with the space-time shuttle orbit, you will be making an emergency landing at the nearest location. Emergency landing at the nearest location. Please prepare!"

When he got the message, Wei Keng felt a little apprehensive at first. Once the four small hourglasses had run out, he would have to face reality.

During this time, communication between the Main World and him had been intermittent. They had more or less told him, "There's been an air disaster." "But don't worry, we'll send enough supplies."

That was right—enough supplies. The Federation had sent three thousand times his usual Information Enthalpy, doing everything it could to save Wei Keng.

The problem was that, lacking any understanding of the Target Plane's Physical foundation, Wei Keng had no way to make effective use of all that Information Enthalpy. Of course, the Target Plane was a low-exploration plane, and its key Physical rules were blank to begin with.

Couldn't he find a guide provided by the system?~

After calling the system to no avail, Wei Keng began taking steps to save himself. He used the original template for his deployment and kept copying it, again and again, making sure to use it all. It was like a lousy student who didn't know any of the answers on an exam, so he copied the questions to fill in every blank.

By the time the system reestablished stable communication, Wei Keng had already used up all three thousand times his usual Information Enthalpy.

The system seemed rather surprised by what Wei Keng had done.

At the Time-Space Administration Bureau, sixteen observers—including Bai Linglu and Yang Chunfen—had formed a Joint communication network to speak with Wei Keng. Their assessment of his way of handling Information Enthalpy went beyond "misuse." Even "thinking he knew better" was putting it mildly. He was practically "in a hurry to get himself killed." But given the circumstances, they couldn't very well scold a New transmigrator.

As Wei Keng's consciousness began descending through the void, the system offered a few brief prompts and a crucial reminder. "Your situation is one of Single proliferation. I must warn you that the system is currently unable to establish a precise connection with your proliferation. We can only use Broadcast docking."

Wei Keng asked, "What do I need to do in this plane?"

The system gave a succinct answer: survive for a hundred days.

At last, amid a blaze of light, Wei Keng arrived. He opened his eyes. Flowers and grass surrounded him; the place was utterly pristine. But a moment later, he suddenly realized something was wrong.

With a single, synchronized motion, fourteen hundred people stood up on the beach. Wei Keng looked at all the people around him. Were they all him?

They were all exactly alike. Some stood beneath trees, their faces caught in spiderwebs. Others stooped to avoid being scraped by low branches.

Wei Keng raised his hand, ready to—

Then came the sound of a slap. Nearly half of them smacked their own foreheads, though their movements weren't quite as synchronized this time. The flurry of smacks sounded like firecrackers. The rest seemed to share Wei Keng's opinion: having so many people slap their foreheads at once was too damn stupid. Better to lower their hands.

In a daze, Wei Keng realized that after more than a thousand simple copies of his Information Enthalpy, every person here was now him. But from the perspective of the self inside each individual, the other selves had become other people!

When in doubt, ask the system. Wei Keng began querying it, while all the other selves around him did the same.

"System, come out."

As Wei Keng looked for the system, he locked eyes with the other selves doing the same. That settled it for him: they were all him, all copies.

"Too many users are online. Please consolidate your questions among yourselves." The system seemed to be in utter chaos and had no choice but to issue a Shielding language.

Wei Keng and the others were gripped by panic. They were only of average ability, without the composure of Daoist Qi cultivation. If one person in a group like this panicked, the fear would ripple through everyone like a contagious disease.

Even as their emotional stability rapidly deteriorated, the Wei Kengs still had their logical faculties. They knew they had to do something and reach a consensus through Collective action.

A few seconds later, one of them stepped forward and shouted, "Fall in!" He started out loud, but his voice soon lost some of its conviction.

If he had been stranded with other people, Wei Keng would never have boldly stepped forward to shout. And after doing so, he would definitely have felt nervous.

But these were all himself.

As one self after another silently lined up according to a standard formation, the Wei Keng who had called out the command let out a long sigh of relief.

The Wei Kengs began lining up of their own accord. They called out their numbers, each one louder than the last.

Before they started counting, they quickly prompted one another from left to right. "Wei Keng" decided that the number he called would serve as his temporary code.

There was no need to explain what that meant. The Wei Kengs had all realized that they would clearly need to work together as a group in this plane. For every self to complete tasks efficiently and divide up the work, they needed a mutually accepted Code system.

The first formation came together. It had been crooked and uneven at first, but the Wei Kengs immediately dressed the lines, straightening it into a reasonably orderly formation.

To prevent another "too many users" incident from jamming the Communication channel,

the Wei Kengs designated the twenty-fifth person in each row as a member of the Communications Group, responsible for contacting the system. Twenty-five was also Wei Keng's birthday—and his lucky number.

The Wei Kengs assigned to the Communications Group quickly obtained information from the system and relayed the situation to the others in the formation.

First, this was a Biological evolution plane, and it was a Near Plane.

According to the Space-Time Bureau's Plane classification, this was a "Near Plane." As for its Plane resource level, that was unknown. Based on the ratings given by Past transmigrators in the plane, it was classified as "Danger level."

Actually, "dangerous" was too vague a description. Most worlds that had experienced a world war in which a tenth of the adult men had been killed or wounded could be called dangerous. But in Wei Keng's plane, the "Pandora" Plane, Human Civilization had nearly become extinct. Over the past twenty years, almost every wave of transmigrators sent by the Main world side had returned injured—including three high-ranking nobles.

Since no safe rules of conduct had yet been established for this plane, "horrifying" was a more fitting description.

Pandora Plane Data:

Human Civilization underwent a major transformation in 2012. It began when an extraterrestrial object named Pandora arrived on Earth from the Outer solar system.

It wasn't a meteorite, nor was it an alien spacecraft. It was a kind of existence humanity had never understood before.

At first, this entity landed in Florida, North America. Before it arrived, the US Space Department had tried to warn it, but to no avail. They used a Nuclear weapon to intercept it in space. It didn't work. This Optical existence passed through the nuclear bomb's Light radiation and Shock wave like a ghost. Its arrival on Earth also proved that it couldn't be destroyed with a Nuclear bomb.

The US military quickly sealed off the area. The blockade only prevented outsiders from entering; it didn't stop people inside from escaping, because there were no living people left in there.

The outermost layer of the area was covered in clusters of fog. Beyond the fog lay a bizarre and ever-shifting Boundary line.

It was as if two different spaces had overlapped unevenly to form an irregular interface. Once sunlight and other forms of energy passed through it, they refracted into all kinds of rays. After passing through this layer of light, most electronic devices could no longer transmit signals. Information in the frequency bands became inexplicably distorted. Walkie-Talkies could only transmit over distances of a few hundred meters inside.

Early on, the US government sent a team of scientists into the area as an advance party, wearing the highest-rated biological and chemical protective gear. Almost the entire team disappeared. The only one who made it back couldn't speak at all and merely stared blankly at anyone who questioned him.

However, after the second expedition entered, a female biologist was lucky enough to make it out alive. She brought back crucial information about the Pandora Area: the genes of every living thing inside were linked together. Crocodiles had octopus teeth growing in their mouths; cheetahs' tongues had turned into snakes' tongues; and humans who entered inexplicably fused with plant genes, becoming human-shaped shrubs.

There were talking bears, deer with flowers growing from their antlers, and fish with suction-cup tentacles in the water. The genes of all living creatures could be exchanged at a distance. The entire ecosystem seemed on the verge of becoming one big family. Reproductive isolation between species? No, there was no need for reproduction at all. Every population could share its genes with every other one.

Perhaps this was an alien tool for studying the life Information on a planet, which had accidentally leaked onto Earth and caused an ecological disaster.

Or perhaps it was only a disaster for Higher Animals, since it was about to make the entire Natural World—whose genes had evolved over billions of years—communal property overnight.

Communal property? That was a concept from Human Society. If this was a biological concept, it was undoubtedly insane. Just as organisms followed Darwinian Evolution, if society started playing by Darwinism—then fuck that.

Humanity was currently the top contender in Earth's four-billion-year evolutionary competition, occupying the highest Ecological Niche in the ecosystem. And that was setting intelligence aside: our bones, muscles, and motor nervous systems were all top of the line on Earth! Those top-tier traits had been forged through countless deadly trial-and-error attempts during evolution.

The wholesale merging of life Gene Information within the Pandora Area? Humanity was understandably terrified.

But what terrified humanity even more was that the Pandora Area kept expanding.

By 2113, after only a hundred years, it had spread across all of Florida. By 2304, the entire Pandora Area had swallowed the whole United States, and it was expanding even faster. Earth officially entered the Pandora Era.

Compared with its initial range, the rate at which the genes of different species exchanged with one another in the expanded Pandora Area had decreased, but the exchange was still happening. And within the Pandora Area, countless species had been recombined.

The primates had survived because the environment demanded it, giving rise to an intelligent species capable of communicating with nature. To some extent, they were New Humans: a new intelligent species better suited to this era of upheaval, destined to replace Old Humans.

The term "Old Humans" didn't sound very nice.

To cope with such enormous changes, scientists around the world had made tremendous efforts. They had observed, experimented, and established many rules, but still found no solution.

Within the Pandora Area, the way energy in matter spread information at the level of microscopic physics had changed.

As Carbon-based Genes copied themselves and formed proteins, their information tunneled into other substances. As a result, all life within the region covered by Pandora radiated information onto other life forms as part of its vital processes.

During this radiation, weaker life forms were influenced by stronger ones, and less numerous life forms were influenced by more numerous ones.

Groups of life forms with identical genes maintained a certain frequency of resonance within Pandora. Once this resonance formed, it became a Species Community.

All the species in the Natural World descended from a common ancestor four billion years ago, and heredity was based on a double-helix structure. As a result, when the genes of certain Dominant Species directed the production of proteins, they could cause the genes of other species in the area to change in sync.

This created a resonance phenomenon in the Pandora Realm! Differences in local environments provided the foundation for life to split into regional groups.

By 2373, the Pandora Field had expanded to cover two-thirds of the Earth, and would soon swallow the sea around the islands in the southern Indian Ocean over the next forty years.

During this process, as the map of the Earth became a vast poisonous zone and the human realm shrank, humanity fell from its throne and discovered the competition between the Gene Colonies in different regions of the Earth covered by the Pandora Field.

For example, the life community on the Tibetan Plateau was clearly different from the one in the Bay of Bengal. When a species from one area entered the other's territory, the local life's genetic radiation would overwhelm it.

So the surviving humans had to band together, and they had to perform a ritual! Once a week, people in a settlement had to draw blood from one another and inject it into their companions. However powerful Pandora's life radiation transmission of information from outside the human realm might be, it could not match the volume of physical information exchanged through life between humans.

[An inane joke from a 21st Century forum: The DNA information in a single sperm cell amounts to 37.5 megabytes. In other words, an average ejaculation transmits 1,403,810 gigabytes of data in three seconds. That's enough information to fill 44,000 32-gigabyte iPads, so men have the world's most powerful data-transmission device.]

Once human blood cells had been exchanged, their life radiation could take an express route, giving it priority over other life radiation. This gave the humans in settlements a certain resistance to the genetic radiation of other species.

It was like a group of people crossing a muddy swamp arm in arm. When one person lost his footing and fell, the others pulled him up. That was how humans kept walking, supporting one another through the exchange of blood.

What about viruses spread through blood? There was no room for viruses to run rampant in the Pandora World.

A virus couldn't even be considered a complete life form. As soon as it weakened an individual of a species, that individual became a target of life radiation. The body's metabolism—and even its genetic chain—could be altered through insertion. This thing called a virus couldn't survive under that constant "radiation therapy."

By 2400, Pandora's Field had completely swallowed Earth. Every day, new and bizarre species successfully fused. And in different regions, Carbon-based organisms fought one another every day, following the will of their communities to defend their genes. In the past, lions, deer, sheep, and other herd animals fought fiercely over mating rights. Now, species from different communities fought just as fiercely.

Humanity, once a Dominant Species, was dissolving like a lump of sugar in water. The entire "lump" of Human Society had disappeared, but the "sugar" that had dissolved—the surviving human genes—persisted within the species communities of every region, continuing to provide building blocks for the development of Earth's life consciousness.

Now, the surviving humans of the past could only huddle in a handful of settlements and cling to life. Not only were their populations difficult to sustain, but the transmission of knowledge and the level of civilization were also beginning to break down and be lost.

If they still couldn't find a way to change the desperate situation facing their people, then the humans who inherited the society of the past really would become a thing of the past.

Back to Wei Keng's current predicament.

The formation in the forest was nearly complete, but some old, crooked trees blocked the position of Wei Keng's formation, so he had to switch to a single-file column.

Just then, a series of "roars" came from the dim depths of the distant forest, hidden behind the fog.

The Wei Kengs said, "Oh no, my squad isn't lined up yet."

The movie Annihilation and the novel Southern Reach had once beaten Liu Cixin on the bestseller list.