The battle was over. All that remained was to clear the field: skin the animals that needed skinning and roast those that needed roasting. The jungle was thick with moisture. Night had just fallen, yet mist was already gathering in places. They had to start fires quickly to drive out the damp.
As for their own bodies, the Wei Kengs dug pits and buried them hastily. There was no need to mourn themselves. It was enough to remember the pain, the scars, and the lessons bought with blood and sweat.
For every self they buried, the Wei Kengs smashed a stone. Half of it went atop the grave; they took the other half with them.
Work was urgent, and there was no time for a funeral. But before leaving, Wei Keng would carve the names of the selves who had died into the cliff, along with the information they had left behind in this world. In the future, the fragments they took away would be placed before those inscriptions in the mountains.
For now, they needed to turn pain into motivation.
Wei Keng had confirmed their location: they were in the Zhū Shuǐjiǎo Region. The towering buildings of the past had all collapsed within a hundred years, and vegetation had covered them so completely that they were nowhere to be seen.
During the battle, Wei Keng had briefly spotted several mounds about fifty meters tall. They were actually piles of rubble from collapsed skyscrapers. After decades of rain, even the glass shards had worn down into fine sand, while moss and grasses had steadily consumed what remained. There was no sign of the city on the surface.
It was only when Wei Keng started digging and uncovered red bricks, shards of tile, rusted door handles, and other such items that he realized this had once been a city. Wei Keng had none of an archaeologist's respect for preserving relics. The bricks could be used to build a bathhouse or beds. These fired red bricks were valuable supplies now.
After a brief discussion, the Wei Kengs decided to set up camp right there and search for more underground supplies.
As a soul from the 21st Century, digging up a city from the 21st Century gave Old Master Wei Keng no qualms whatsoever.
Groups of workers began switching into construction-team mode.
The first group started dismantling steel pipes and assembling tents.
At the lake that had once been their water source, the second group of Wei Kengs planned out a new supply. Using a naturally formed river that was already there, they began lining the streambed with nearby pebbles, then dug a channel to divert the stream into the lake. After filtration, it would become drinking water.
The hundred-person team worked in silence. Now and then, they tried to make light of their hardship by tasting the roots they had dug up, hoping they might be sweet.
Wei Keng 1344 suddenly said, "We're living in the middle of the city now. Too bad there's no hospital."
Wei Keng 1365 said, "Or fast-food restaurants. Or internet cafés."
Wei Keng 1343 said, "All we can dig up now is brick. The glass bottles are all cracked. There's nothing we can drink."
Someone else replied, "You'd actually drink sugary water from a few hundred years ago?"
Just then, a Wei Keng from the Communications Group walked over and asked, "Are you chatting?"
The Wei Kengs looked up and nodded, then suddenly realized something.
The Wei Keng in charge of communications said, "You weren't moving your mouths just now!"
The Wei Kengs looked at one another in astonishment! They really hadn't moved their mouths. Some of them had even been ten meters apart, and the noise of shovels scraping against rocks should have made conversation difficult. Yet they had naturally shared their thoughts and received replies from one another.
Now, though, everyone deliberately tried to do it again, only to find they couldn't—like dreaming that they were floating down from the sky and wanting to keep flying, only to discover they couldn't recreate it.
The Communications Group Wei Keng said, "Don't panic. We'll ask the other groups later. It probably isn't an isolated case." As long as it wasn't an isolated case, they could treat it as nothing unusual and analyze it objectively.
If they could consciously use this kind of telepathy, the Wei Kengs' ability to cooperate would increase dramatically.
It wasn't an isolated case, of course. Several other groups had also briefly experienced unobstructed mental communication.
At that moment, the Observer was reeling from the data just sent back by the node particles on Wei Keng's side.
The individuals replicated by Information Enthalpy consisted only of bodies and thought processes. Consciousness wasn't included in the replication.
More precisely, consciousness was a quantum physical phenomenon that couldn't be observed or measured precisely. The moment it was observed, the wave function would collapse into a fixed state—which was tantamount to killing someone.
What would happen if only the body and fixed thought patterns were replicated, without consciousness? They would act according to habitual thinking, hesitate when faced with different situations, and follow their instincts.
Mass self-replication like this was most likely to end in chaos and disintegration. Yet Wei Keng hadn't fallen apart. His habitual thinking contained certain dogmatic principles, and those principles had clearly kept him from scattering at the start. Instead, they had formed a collective.
As an individual, Wei Keng had always seen himself as an ordinary person, not someone capable of turning the tide. So when faced with danger, he instinctively assumed he should stick with the group.
But that was still just habitual thinking. It wouldn't be enough on its own! Without consciousness to further bind them together, the group would run into all kinds of conflicts and begin to disintegrate.
After Wei Keng arrived and his movements stopped synchronizing, the whole was still held together subconsciously, but it was nonetheless trending toward fragmentation.
If this had been a vacation on a deserted island, the Wei Kengs would have split into factions within days.
But when the next crisis struck, that trend quickly halted.
A brief aside: Bai Linglu had expected the crisis to accelerate Wei Keng's disarray and end with him scattering in every direction. After all, Western Transmigrators had repeatedly suffered this kind of human failure in experiments ten years ago.
But Bai Linglu had no idea which nerve Wei Keng had struck. In an instant, consciousness suddenly surged. More than fifteen hundred individuals, whose copied minds had contained only instinct and habit, developed Subjective Initiative!
And the surge continued throughout the battle.
When Wei Keng's individual selves began dying violently, the surge reached its peak!
At that point, the consciousness of the vast majority of Wei Keng's individuals had surpassed Civilian Rank. Some individuals' consciousnesses—for example, those who had charged straight at the Node Creature to fight it at close range—had clearly reached the level of a sergeant.
The surge subsided somewhat after the battle ended, and the consciousness of every individual Wei Keng dropped below Civilian Rank again.
Even so, the total consciousness of nearly sixteen hundred bodies was still terrifyingly vast.
Observer Bai Linglu was currently busy with her actual duties.
Her job wasn't just to provide Wei Keng with all kinds of cheats! It also included saving the thought patterns of Wei Keng's individuals at the moment of their deaths.
The Time-Space Shuttle Department paid close attention to the life and death of Transmigrators. But medical assessments had always been based on the Transmigrator's total consciousness. Losing memories would undermine the foundation of consciousness.
During Plane Exploration, however, total consciousness grew, so the accidental loss of some memories during transit didn't matter much.
Besides, as long as valuable memories were preserved and copied, it was equivalent to putting a small portion of their memories into hibernation! When they returned, the self would receive those memories again, as if waking them from hibernation.
To some extent, when an individual Wei Keng died in this world, his Plane Exploration was merely suspended. Once he returned to the Main World, he would remember his past.
So for now, Bai Linglu, as Observer, wasn't worried about the handful of Wei Keng's individual selves who had fallen during Plane Exploration. But she didn't tell Wei Keng about the "memory preservation" of the dead, either.
Once Bai Linglu had finished the necessary work on Wei Keng's side, she hurried to report this major discovery.
After the standard interval for crossing four Dimensional Distances,
a reply came from the Gravity Well's exit: "Do his multiple individuals have any difficulty fusing?"
Bai Linglu replied, "No. All their consciousnesses are extremely well synchronized and can fuse perfectly."
The people on the other side of the Gravity Well seemed to discuss it for a while before responding: "There are still several months left. Please continue observing while ensuring the Transmigrator's safety."
What was Bai Linglu thinking? The Time-Space Administration Bureau knew! In fact, some of the people discussing the matter there had clearly taken an aggressive stance.
The Pandora Plane was a high-risk restricted zone! It had been classified that way because no effective survival technology had yet been found for the plane.
As for whether the native humans of that plane could find a way forward and build a brighter future? Put it this way: the human settlements there were in the process of going extinct.
So even if a High Minister came, all he could do was alter the stories of a few people living in that era and exert some influence.
But now! Wei Keng seemed to have found a new answer to the problem of life radiation on that plane.
More than fifteen hundred individuals, all with identical genes, whose thoughts didn't conflict with one another and whose wills had been unified. There might be many complicated mechanisms behind this. Whether it could be replicated with other Transmigrators remained to be seen.
But one thing was already clear:
According to Bai Linglu's latest assessment, in the Pandora World, where life radiated between organisms, Wei Keng wasn't being continuously infused with foreign genes like other Transmigrators. On the contrary, it was Wei Keng who was radiating life!
And his life radiation had begun to evolve further in response to the environment!
Look at what had already appeared within this group of Wei Kengs: consciousness-based communication. It meant their life radiation was beginning to evolve toward the transmission of information.
Bai Linglu, inside the high-energy compartment of the plane, was certain that Wei Keng was suited to develop, explore, and accumulate experience in this plane. If an exploration team made an unprecedented breakthrough in a high-risk plane, allowing the Space-Time Exploration Department to develop the area on a large scale, that team would be granted exclusive access to the plane.
(A less important note: this access belonged to the Transmigrator and the Observer accompanying him.)
So inside the Space Bubble, Bai Linglu covered her ears and quietly defended herself: "What's wrong with hoping you'll amount to something?"
Meanwhile, the situation facing the time-space planners had changed as well!
The Plane War among the Main World's Transmigrators had already reached a fever pitch.
If Wei Keng could accomplish an unprecedented breakthrough in the Pandora Plane, it would open a new strategic route for the Eastern Time-Space Administration Bureau. That could prove pivotal in breaking the stalemate across multiple time-space regions.
The first military conflict between Human Civilizations in the plane domains was of extraordinary importance. If they lost their first-mover advantage, someone would have to answer to history.
So over at the Earth Time-Space Bureau, people had begun to entertain some bold, proactive ideas about the plane where Wei Keng had arrived.
But the problem remained the same: Wei Keng had only just become a Civilian Rank Transmigrator.
"Civilian Rank" meant exactly that: a civilian. Strictly speaking, by the definition used ten years ago, Civilian Rank Transmigrators weren't considered regular military personnel in the Transmigrator program. They were still reserves in training. Making them responsible for opening up a high-risk plane was a little... a little cruel!
"Yes, it is a little cruel." The supporters didn't deny that their aggressive plan would put too much pressure on a new Transmigrator, but they laid out the situation at the front.
The relevant discussion in the Time-Space Management Department had reached this point when the Space Bubbles near Wei Keng's Space-Time Region began to voice their opinions.
The High Minister–rank Transmigrator Luo Hongxing said, "But isn't the struggle on the front lines even more cruel? The war has already left three of our sergeant-rank Transmigrators lost in space."
This weighty remark brought the discussion to a temporary halt.
Meanwhile, on the Pandora Plane,
night had fallen. The mist outside was thick, leaving the fence damp. The bonfire at the center of the camp burned even brighter, and the hot bricks in the fire were taken out one by one, wrapped in grass rope, and distributed among the Wei Kengs to warm their bedding.
The condition of the twenty-three wounded Wei Kengs had stabilized. Wei Keng couldn't help marveling at his own vitality.
One of his severely wounded individuals had lost enough blood to be on the brink of shock and death. But after the Wei Kengs poured some boiled Blood Curd Soup into his mouth and kept him warm with blankets, that self pulled through.
The bonfire burned in the camp, and the fence was finished. Beyond it lay one pit trap after another.
They had also arranged shifts for the guards. The more they did, the calmer they felt.
Most of the Wei Kengs began reviewing the day's work and gathered to investigate the consciousness-resonance phenomenon that had occurred among many of their groups during the day. When they had just been thinking deeply, their thoughts had spread outward, and the collective telepathy had happened again.
The Communications Group Wei Keng began getting detailed information from the system.
For once, the system appeared in a form the Wei Kengs could perceive within their consciousness.
Bai Linglu appeared in Wei Keng's mind as a sparkling star. She linked together the images she had collected from the various individuals during the battle and began to explain.
The flashy system in Wei Keng's eyes said, "There is currently insufficient information and data about the communication of thoughts you have experienced. You are the only Transmigrator to have arrived in this plane in your current form and survived here effectively.
"What we know so far is that in this plane, the genetic information encoded in life's replicating proteins undergoes powerful quantum tunneling, causing the genes inside different organisms to become chaotic.
"But life itself has the ability to organize chaos.
"For example, the Node Creature and its group, which you encountered, are an example of life in a region of Earth's Natural World attempting to unify its biological information in the Pandora Field. They form a Gene Colony.
"And as a new group, your genetic foundation is far more orderly than that of the traditional life groups in this plane.
"So you may be able to produce a certain degree of resonance between living beings?"
Wei Keng 33 from the Communications Group asked, "What does this biological activity at the genetic level have to do with my communication of consciousness?"
The system replied, "Consciousness is also a form of life. The consciousness you understand now is something you perceive through thought. Most life hasn't evolved thought to carry consciousness. The consciousness of these organisms was born from genetic selection during evolution, in response to the quantum tunneling of life in the Pandora Era."
Wei Keng 13 from the Communications Group asked, "So I can try thought resonance, then consciousness resonance, and eventually achieve resonance between living beings?"
The system replied, "Yes. But you? You don't seem to be able to control the resonance yet."
Wei Keng, Wounded Individual 87, said, "Maybe I can try. Let me think... What could give me goosebumps?"
Fifteen seconds later,
forty Wei Kengs gathered together. At their leader's signal, they opened their throats and began to sing: "The Five-star Red Flag waves in the wind! The song of victory rings out so clear..."
Wei Keng couldn't remember how long it had been since he'd sung with all his heart in a chorus.
When he was young, during the flag-raising ceremony, he had always hummed instead of singing at the top of his lungs. If he sang too loudly, people around him would notice, and his voice would instinctively grow weaker.
During military training, everyone was told to sing loudly. But that was only because the instructor demanded it. They each just wanted to meet the required volume.
But now, he was singing with a large group of himself in this foreign land, giving voice to their joy without restraint.
The chorus of forty soon struck a chord. More and more selves joined in, and their voices grew louder and louder.
It was as if an invisible force spread through the air—something sacred they shared. As each self grew more impassioned, they felt a sense of resonance.
Through that resonance, they sensed the day's exhaustion and the pain of their other selves.
Something strange happened.
The wounds of several seriously injured Wei Kengs, which had begun to heal, started growing new tissue again. One Wei Keng with a broken leg felt terribly thirsty, drank huge amounts of water, and began eating ravenously. Meanwhile, the cells in his leg grew rapidly, like a mass of fungus.
Of course, the growth didn't include the bone. It was only muscle. But if the flesh could grow back, the bone would surely follow in time.
After the song ended, the telepathy that had appeared temporarily among the different work groups during the day now appeared in every Wei Keng's mind. Each self established a channel of communication with anywhere from six to thirty other selves. It lasted for two hours.
Observer Bai Linglu got busy again. This was far beyond even the best-case scenario she and the administrators had expected.
Before you continue