As Wei Keng was getting everyone organized, the system was still explaining the background to the Wei Kengs in the Communications Group: in this era, Human Civilization existed only in scattered specks, like oases in a desert.
During the Great Fusion, the Emergent Biota had achieved the coexistence of regional life communities under the guidance of Regional Dominators. All this had, in turn, affected the societies of the Old Era Humans. Humans had also tried to harness their strength by coexisting with certain Dominant Species...
Wei Keng (Comms 1): "Wait, let's not get into that right now!"
Wei Keng (Comms 2 to 11) called out to the others on the outskirts, urgently explaining the situation: "You landed in the grass? Hurry and join us. Don't stay out there alone. Move toward the center."
The first thing the thousands of Wei Kengs at the center saw after landing was a mass of themselves moving in perfect sync. But not every Wei Keng opened his eyes to that sight. Some woke up surrounded by plants and trees because they had landed in the scattered outer areas. The first time they saw someone just like themselves, they were startled. They hadn't figured out what was going on; some were even frightened enough to turn and run. The Communications Group had to notify each of the nearly one hundred and fifty unfortunate Wei Kengs one by one. Not a single one could be left behind.
By now, the shouts of the headcount at the center were loud enough to give the early arrivals scattered around the landing site a sound to follow as they gathered.
Wei Keng (Comms 12) searched the system's public records and queried its automated Q&A function: "Right, genes and other forms of life can easily cross-link now. What's happening to me?"
Wei Keng (Comms 45) was still talking to the Observer: "Where's my 'cheat'?! Support, a map, and shooting markers in my view—plus throw trajectories! Yes, hurry up!"
Wei Keng knew, of course, that the Observer was a woman. If he'd been dealing with her alone, he would've been shy and polite. But now he was one of a crowd, and the situation was uncertain. He couldn't help sounding like a group of people pressing a clerk at a service window for answers.
As for Wei Keng, he needed to worry about himself first.
The plants in this jungle were lush, but it was still possible to make out traces of human activity. Fragments of Red Bricks and mixtures of cement and sand remained in the soil. The paved roads from the Civilization Era had been twisted out of shape and forced apart. Like the splendor of humanity in the past, they had now been reduced to rubble.
The four squads Wei Keng had organized had already gone to guard the perimeter. Everyone else was busy taking stock of their current resources. Each person now had a Quantum Node, which could teleport supplies to them. Some Submachine Guns had already been delivered into their hands, and Protective Suits made of Kevlar and Ceramic had been distributed to some of those stationed at the perimeter.
A Magnesium Strip sparked against the Dry Twigs they'd gathered, setting them alight. Then forty Wei Kengs lined up to carry over fuel, making the fire blaze higher. They cut thick branches, roasted them over the fire to make Makeshift Torches, and carried them to the outer perimeter.
Calling them torches was a bit of a stretch. Real torches needed to be wrapped in lots of dry vines, ideally with some oily fruit or Pine Branches tied on as well. That would make them burn longer. By the time these torches reached the perimeter, they might be reduced to little more than Red Embers smoldering at the tips. They'd need to be wrapped again with vines dried beside the fire.
The activity in the Northern Jungle was making Wei Keng feel more and more pressed for time.
At last, in the northwest corner, Wei Keng's squad made contact with the threat there. The huge roars and the shouts of Wei Kengs calling to one another made the Wei Kengs still in the central area feel a chill of fear.
The Wei Keng organizing everyone on the north side yelled, "Spread out! First Group and Second Group, move up!"
Since the rest of the teams hadn't finished organizing, prioritizing the First Group and Second Group made sense from a wider perspective.
The Wei Kengs in the two groups hesitated for about a tenth of a second, but still obeyed the Group Order as one.
Jia 33, from the First Group, thought, Of course I'm scared. But rules and discipline are what ensure my group's survival on a large scale. When it's time to step up, I have to step up. That's the rule—the rules of the nation, the morals of society, and the responsibility I have as a man.
Wei Keng had originally planned to travel to the Eight-Day Plane as a merchant. And the first step for a merchant was to scout the place. Naturally, he'd brought a little equipment for self-defense.
That equipment now consisted of a Bulletproof Vest, a Kevlar Helmet, and a Carbon Fiber Skeleton over his shoulders, back, waist, ankles, and knees to help him carry heavy loads. He also had a two-kilogram Small Caliber Rapid-Fire Submachine Gun. But his main weapon was a Mechanical Crossbow that he cocked with his foot. He only had a hundred bullets in total, and every shot was one gone. The Metal Arrowheads, on the other hand, could be reused.
So the Wei Kengs heading out to help took the Mechanical Crossbows first. It wasn't because the crossbow bolts were more powerful than the Submachine Guns, nor because they wanted to save a few bullets. They simply hadn't brought Walkie-Talkies for fighting in the jungle. If they fired their guns at random, the noise would drown out communication and make it hard to put up an organized defense.
Still, each squad had three people carrying Submachine Guns, ready to form an Alternating Fire line when necessary and cover the main force's retreat! Yes, the Wei Kengs with guns knew they had a duty to cover the rear.
In the First Brigade, the Fourth Squadron, thirty people in all, was the first to reach the target.
When the combat squad reached the front line, they ran into a Self Individual from the Reconnaissance Team fleeing for his life.
The man's arm seemed to have been caught by some kind of barbed tentacle. When he saw the support squad, he pointed behind him, then immediately dropped to the ground and shouted, "Shoot!"
The squad instantly aimed their crossbows in the direction Wei Keng was pointing. As the grass behind them rustled, one person sprayed gunfire while the others loosed their crossbow bolts.
The thing in the grass seemed to falter for a moment when it was hit. The Wei Keng who'd been lying on the ground scrambled back up and shouted, "Stay alert! That thing's as big as an elephant!" Before the scouting Wei Keng had taken two steps, the thing emerged from the jungle.
Good grief—what kind of monster was this?
Its lower body had four tiger legs. Its upper body was covered in metallic plates like a segmented worm's. At the front, it had sixteen tentacles lined with octopus-like suckers, and in the center of those tentacles was not an octopus's beak, but Mantis Mandibles.
What the hell was this thing?
The Wei Kengs in the Communications Group immediately asked the system. The system replied, "Exploration of this plane is too limited, and species are constantly changing through various forms of Gene Fusion, so..."
The Wei Kengs in the Communications Group cut it off: "If you don't know, forget it." Then they focused on what was in front of them, ignoring the system, which wasn't useful right now.
The scene was on the verge of erupting into violence.
The monster, which had just been driven back into the jungle, spotted the fleeing Wei Keng from the Reconnaissance Team in its Infrared View. He was trying to get back to his unit, and it immediately launched itself at him. The explosive speed of a cat was fully displayed in its lower body. The surviving Wei Keng from the Reconnaissance Team was clearly moving too slowly.
Just as it looked like the monster was about to make a successful kill, Wei Keng, holding a Submachine Gun and acting as the Temporary Commander, rushed forward. He grabbed the scouting Wei Keng, braced the gun on his shoulder, and opened fire on the pursuing monster, which was only five meters away.
It was hard to call this a rescue. It looked more like he'd used another version of himself as a shield while attacking.
The fleeing Wei Keng was clearly stunned for a moment, but he quickly composed himself and didn't resent the version of himself holding the Submachine Gun.
In that situation, the choice Wei Keng would most likely make was clear: if the chance of surviving was only fifty percent, he'd choose the plan that had a hundred percent chance of making the target bleed.
The momentum of the fleeing Wei Keng charging forward and the recoil of the gun in the armed Wei Keng's hands—
One of them fell onto his back, eyes wide as he stared at the approaching monster, while the other sprawled on top of him, resigned to serving as a human shield. If they were both going to die, they might as well put a few more bursts into the thing.
Luckily, the monster was stopped by gunfire once again. The crossbow bolts from the second row of Wei Kengs behind them arrived too. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—the bolts stuck all over the monster's body. It wasn't quite accurate to say they'd turned it into a pincushion, because the bolts had been fired from crossbows cocked by spinning the foot pedal three times, and they'd sunk straight into the monster's body!
Now the monster was truly badly wounded. With dozens of bolts buried in its head, where nerves were densely packed, it could no longer control its whole body. It could only move erratically using other nerve nodes inside it. The several-ton monster staggered toward them like a drunk.
The two Wei Kengs on the ground rolled aside and dodged its final stomp. Wei Keng's formation scattered in time, and the monster finally crashed into a tree and fell into a pit.
"There's more than one. At least six," the scouting Wei Keng who'd escaped death continued to report.
Shouts came from the eastern side of the jungle. Other squads had also run into enemies.
"Go help them!" shouted a Wei Keng from the Communications Group. Everyone turned and moved out. The people carrying torches and wearing Bulletproof Vests instinctively went to the front, swinging their Red Ember-tipped branches to keep anything in the grass from ambushing them.
Wei Keng's arrival seemed to have stirred up a hornet's nest in a Gene Colony on this plane.
The surviving Wei Keng seemed to have gotten only a partial view of what was happening. The information he'd gathered in his panic was incomplete.
There were indeed seven or eight Large Species, but they weren't all that made up the Gene Colony. Across the entire region, there were also other Small Species, and they were all obeying the Will of Life in this area and repelling outsiders.
By the time Wei Keng's Fourth Squadron reached the Conflict Zone, the first phase of the fierce fighting there had already ended. In the middle of the battlefield, blood and flesh lay everywhere. Three Wei Kengs had been decapitated, and seven or eight more were bleeding and wounded, dragged to the rear and protected by the formation.
Two squadrons of Wei Kengs were now facing off against the monsters by the lakeside. Once the Fourth Squadron arrived, there were three squadrons confronting them. The trembling hands of the Wei Kengs holding crossbows in the original two squads steadied a little when their own side arrived.
The lake was clearly man-made. In the middle of it, a small island held a huge rounded boulder of the sort usually found in major rivers. Oh, this had probably once been a human park, though it was impossible to tell now. More monsters were gathering. And what about the Wei Keng Collective?
The Collective was also conducting a reckoning within itself at the rear.
The squadrons at the front had already united closely. When they were facing danger head-on, the Wei Kengs didn't have the mental space to think about anything else. Wei Keng studied most effectively when exams were near.
But in the rear, although they logically agreed that supporting their comrades on the front line was necessary, some hesitation, fear, and wishful thinking were hard to avoid.
A real army should have every individual ready to sacrifice themselves at any moment for the victory of the collective.
Of course, Wei Keng understood himself. Faced with a collective made up of versions of himself, someone would step forward and point out this hidden danger. And the way to point it out could be very direct.
After asking to speak, Wei Keng 18 from the Communications Group stepped in front of the Collective to rally them.
His expression was strained, but in the end he took the plunge, opening up about the most private thoughts in his heart and seeing himself clearly for the first time in this life. "Everyone, we all think alike. We're all Wei Kengs. So as individuals, each of us should know what it feels like not to matter, to be left helpless and rejected by the group! In this life, we wanted to forget some things, let go of some burdens, and try not to take the wrong path.
"But now we've become a collective! We've come to this hostile environment.
"As a collective, we need to show ourselves something! If a society doesn't ignore or abandon the basic necessities each person needs to survive, and does everything it can to meet its responsibilities and obligations in every way it can, could that give everything a different direction?"
Those words made the Wei Kengs, whose gazes hadn't even been in sync, suddenly turn as one to look at the speaker. Then, seeing all the others around them make the same movement, they understood that every one of them was alike.
The same way of thinking, the same will, the same points of resonance! Unity was achieved in an instant.
Like a wildfire spreading from a single spark, one Wei Keng after another began taking action of their own accord, each attending to his assigned role.
"I'm from Team 12. Line up around me. I'll coordinate the resources from the nearby trees."
"I'm from Team 7. Use me as the base. Quickly gather the powder from the fire and find large, dry leaves." (They were preparing makeshift smoke cover.)
Wei Keng's view of society: the most frightening thing about society was how, once the group dispersed, it began to ignore people one by one. Today, it could ignore your need for food; tomorrow, it would ignore my need for water. And the day after that, everyone would be living in a broken society, driven by people waving lofty goals around, treated as expendable parts and lubricant.
During World War II, the Island Nation, to prevent American soldiers from running rampant, recruited some women in the sex trade to satisfy the occupying troops' desires. That way, most of the public wouldn't have to worry. But would most of the Island Nation's people feel grateful to those women? No. They wouldn't. They'd ignore them, thinking, "That was their profession anyway. If the politicians chose this solution, then let's just accept it."
The whole society even felt a sense of superiority, believing it had saved itself by sending those individuals to fill the pit. When the people sent to fill it raised their voices, society acted like flies drawn to the smell of blood, subjecting them to every kind of soft violence and hard indifference to satisfy the group's appetite for cruelty.
That was the poison flowing through its culture: the belief that it was understandable to be afraid in the face of disaster, while other people were born to do that kind of work. The poison spread as the economy exploded for a time, then flowed across East Asia along with its culture. The societies of East Asian countries changed to varying degrees, and their resistance to it varied too, but there was no doubt that all of them were affected.
This poison was called "indifference."
The symptoms of an infected society were these: as long as someone else was the one suffering, people tried to numb themselves to it; as long as someone would shoulder the responsibility, they thought that was only natural. Society supposedly assigned everyone their role that way.
Wei Keng hadn't yet had time to forget the pain this social sickness had caused him. Time hadn't yet dulled the hurt.
It was exploitation, yet they insisted they were "helping you grow." Then they wondered aloud, "Why are people so ungrateful? Why don't they work harder?" And they began to represent society in reflecting on whether "something had gone wrong with this generation," as if everyone else were drunk and they alone were sober.
But Wei Keng hadn't had time to forget. His Collective hadn't yet become incurably "infected," and there were no class divisions within it.
So why not prove it now? Prove that the society he had made of himself could refuse to follow what some people called "only natural."
Before you continue