Wei Keng's Down-to-Earth Days

In this world, life existed in a state of mutual radiation!

When Wei Keng sang at the top of his lungs, from his own perspective, it was a self-aware life-form reaching an unprecedented level of unity and forming a controllable, temporary telepathic connection. Even injured individuals could regenerate and heal like jellyfish and starfish.

But to this world, it was a powerful radiation event!

This phenomenon caused considerable upheaval across the broader ecosystem.

Fifty kilometers away, a group that Wei Keng had nearly wiped out in battle was preparing to rebuild its gene-exchange nodes. In a pond, their newly grown Life Embryos had transparent muscles, only a few blood vessels, and skeletons that were still barely distinguishable from their muscles. But there would be no more growth. Like a dead chick embryo whose development had suddenly stopped from the cold, the heart that had just formed in the pond ceased beating. The remnants that had gathered around it fled in panic.

A hundred and fifty kilometers away, the lives that had belonged to a single group seemed to have been driven mad. They began tearing into one another. The group's Node Creature—a colossal being whose outstretched wings spanned fifty meters—swept its shadow across the sky. Its hanging tentacles seized one Ground Savage Creature after another and drained their blood. Fifty minutes later, it finally stopped the chaos in its territory.

Five hundred kilometers away, on either side of the natural Water Area formed where two rivers converged, two groups of aquatic creatures that had always hunted each other suddenly called a truce that day and retreated to their respective waters.

A thousand kilometers away, the enormous trees above Great River Canyon seemed to sense something. Willow-like branches sprouted from their trunks, streaming down from the canyon's gullies like little brooks and reaching the surging Yangtze River. The branches formed a barrier that blocked the river, causing the water level to rise by half a meter.

Back at the center of all these events, it was a bright, sunny morning. At least, that was what Wei Keng thought.

At dawn, after a whole night, the leaves and branches of the bushes were covered in dew.

Wei Keng began the day's work. He walked to the shady spot north of the living quarters, where there was a drainage ditch.

Within a hundred meters of the living quarters, the Wei Kengs crouched by the drainage outlet, using cups rolled from leaves to rinse their mouths and spit.

Fifty meters farther downstream, one side of the ditch was a steep slope of about seventy degrees. Wei Keng, who had eaten too much meat the night before, sent golden streaks shooting out beneath the sun. Farther downstream, the ditch was lined with rows of upright stakes, and farts rang out nonstop.

The Wei Kengs confirmed something once again: eating nothing but meat made their bowel movements huge and incredibly foul. The stench seemed to drive away even the small animals nearby.

Animals in the Natural World knew the smell of carnivore droppings, too. They would never approach such creatures' territory without a good reason.

System checks showed that several badly injured Wei Kengs had grown new limbs overnight through muscle proliferation. The bones in their legs were growing, and during the process, their leg muscles kept twitching involuntarily. If they weren't careful when stretching their legs, they'd feel growing pains. At their current rate of recovery, their legs could heal quickly as long as they got enough nutrition.

So the top priority on today's plan was to break open some rocks and make a stone mill. They would grind the bones they'd roasted dry into powder, giving their injured comrades the Calcium Element they needed to repair their limbs as quickly as possible.

Today, the Exploration Team split into six groups and headed out in different directions to explore the surrounding area.

They inevitably ran into some troublesome creatures along the way. Mosquitoes landed on Wei Keng one after another and took a sip of blood, leaving huge welts on his body. But after a minute or two of itching, the swellings disappeared.

Wei Keng noticed this and found it strange. He soon determined that it was a Life Link caused by his own Life Radiation, allowing a certain amount of harm to be shared. What Wei Keng didn't notice was that every mosquito that had bitten him died in the grass within a minute! To other species, Wei Keng's Life Radiation was no less harmful than Nuclear Radiation.

When Wei Keng recorded how long each welt took to disappear in his personal system, the Monitor seemed to have found its first opportunity to join the conversation. It offered a suggestion in a coaxing tone: "The phenomenon of individuals with the Same Gene state repairing one another has been observed for the first time during exploration of This Plane."

Wei Keng said, "Oh, a first? So you still can't provide data services. No worries, I don't blame you."

The Monitor seemed to choke on his words.

A few minutes later, the system came right out and said, "How about applying for a mission to establish a temporary base here? It wouldn't have to be long—three years would do."

Faced with this proposal,

all of Wei Keng's Communication Individuals answered in unison, without a moment's hesitation: "Let's head back first. We'll talk about it when we get back."

Although they had fought a battle and wiped out the other side, not a single Wei Keng would ever claim on behalf of the group that "he" wasn't afraid of death, then recklessly go looking for trouble.

An hour later, in the grass to the east,

a searching Wei Keng shouted, trembling with excitement: "A king cobra! A king cobra! Pin its head down with a stick, then step on its tail. Once it's dead, bury the head so it can't bite anyone!"

Six Wei Kengs approached with sticks and carefully subdued the large black-and-white snake. None of them would play the hero and grab it by the neck, even with the group's ability to share harm.

The Wei Kengs weren't teammates to one another right now! Teammates could be sold out.

A Wei Keng exploring the edge of the city ruins saw that the railway embankment had turned into a hedge. The steel rails were still on the ground, but enormous roots had twisted the roadbed into a mess. Wei Keng marked the area. If they ever got the chance, they would salvage the Steel Resource there.

Wei Keng also found some useful things. For instance, he dug several Metal Items out of the soil and planned to take them back and melt them down to replace their current sabres.

After returning to camp, Wei Keng realized that what he needed most now was bricks.

The trees they had just cut down for building houses had started "growing fur" after a day of dew. Mushrooms sprouted from them in layers, section after section, growing dozens of times faster than bean sprouts.

The system explained, "In the Pandora Biotic Field, organisms that were originally simple might still be simple, but their Energy Exchange isn't limited to a single pathway. Life Radiation can rapidly supply energy to each individual."

Wei Keng drew his sabre and sliced off a large clump of mushrooms from the wood. He found that the mycelium had already transformed much of the wood. The outer layer had turned into powder that crumbled at a touch. When he cut the wood all the way through, he found that the mushrooms' roots had penetrated deep into the core.

All Wei Keng could say was, "Well, damn. If you got a Foot Fungal Infection, wouldn't it be incurable?" Wei Keng knew athlete's foot all too well. It itched until it rotted, then rotted until it itched.

He checked his immune system with the system again. After seeing how his Life Radiation affected the gene fragments of all kinds of organisms, he finally confirmed that he really was immune to everything now.

Still, he had to figure out what to do with all these mushrooms.

Looking at the various mushrooms sprouting in layers, Wei Keng's first thought was: could they eat them?

The system replied, "The surviving human communities on This Plane rely on them. They gather Organic Matter in the wild and feed it to the mushrooms for processing. But there are many different kinds, and they can't be eaten directly. They have to be sorted by species and pickled a second time to remove their toxins."

As Wei Keng inspected the places where the mushrooms grew most densely, the system's words suddenly made him think: "There are other Human Colonies in this world."

He opened the system's records on Human Civilization.

Humans had lost control over the Natural World. Water sources, sunlight, and favorable temperatures had once been the foundation of human agriculture. Large-scale agriculture had supported a global population of billions, and its collapse meant that large cities had lost their Material Basis.

Wei Keng's current Stationed Place was in what had once been a major city, with convenient transportation and open terrain. The Native Humans couldn't compete with the Gene Colonies in the area, so they could only settle in cities that had once been considered fourth-tier or lower.

Each settlement had a population of no more than twenty thousand. Any settlement with over fifty thousand people was an Overlord Human Faction in its region.

Wei Keng said, "Huh?"

From the system's explanation, Wei Keng discovered that the people of this world had gotten up to all sorts of things!

To deal with the many kinds of Giant Beasts in this world, and even some extremely resilient Node Creatures, humanity had developed the profession of Beast Tamer.

It was a symbiotic organism and large machine.

Before the Pandora Field swallowed Earth, humanity had already gained an exhaustive understanding of Life Radiation. In their final, desperate efforts, the various human groups' laboratories had tried to find Node Creatures and control them using human life information.

Naturally, it was futile. Some people had incredibly strong wills and could indeed use Life Radiation inside the Pandora Field to affect the living tissue of Node Creatures, replacing their neurons with their own. But when one side forcibly subjugated the other, the defeated creature became malformed and couldn't survive independently in the Natural World.

The life scientists conducting the experiments were deeply dissatisfied with this result. They believed, "If only we'd had more time, more manpower, and more resources, we could have coordinated with Node Creatures powerful enough to rule their regions."

Just as everything seemed hopeless, another group of technicians put the failed, half-finished technology to use. They cut off the deformed organs and attached mechanical structures in their place. These malformed creatures still had powerful vitality, and soon their growth followed the Organic Matter conduits in their mechanical limbs.

That was how Beast Tamers gained control of lesser species by becoming symbiotic with them and taking the lead. They then fused those lesser creatures with machinery to increase their combat power.

For example, the system showed Wei Keng some examples of symbiotic beasts in this world.

Wei Keng saw the first one and nearly blurted out, "WarGreymon?"

It was a mechanical beast that looked like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Fifty percent of its body was alive, while its head was fitted with a mechanical helmet and its chest and other vital areas were protected by gleaming metal plates. Mechanical devices were embedded in its arms, and its shell could open at any moment to reveal cannons. Its right hand was a solid steel shield.

Putting everything else aside, the thing looked incredibly cool. It was basically a living monster figurine.

Of course, precisely because it was so cool, it had put a stop to the plans of earlier Transmigrators who had arrived in this world and thought of starting from scratch. The few High Ministers from Earth who had visited this Plane had already been locked into this path. As they developed their own war beasts along the world's mature Beast Tamer system, their course was set.

It was Wei Keng who, before the accident that brought him here and before the Monitor had arrived, had processed his Information Enthalpy in an extremely "simplistic" way, splitting it into thousands of copies of himself. That was what had allowed him to stumble onto a different path.

It was like history. Once a power became highly developed and complex, it lost the ability to adapt and create new things after falling into decline. Most Chinese dynasties, even when they still controlled far more resources than they had during their founding, had no chance of rising again once the foundations of their rule were shaken. Why? Because the Last Emperor wouldn't willingly discard his ceremonial retinue, and the Bureaucratic System wouldn't give up its hierarchy.

[People can be a little simpler, a little more down-to-earth.]

Back at camp, Wei Keng had finished figuring out where the mushrooms grew best. Damn, they grew on the stakes beside his latrine. They were flourishing, and a sweep with a stick sent a massive cloud of spores flying.

"Damn it!" "Fuck you!" "Masks!" "Set it on fire!" As they backed away, the Wei Kengs voiced their opinions without holding back.

Wei Keng said, "When you're taking a shit, being surrounded by plants is fine, but being surrounded by mushrooms is not."

To deal with the problem,

one group of Wei Kengs volunteered to clean the toilet. First they lit torches and burned the mushrooms, then they scraped them off.

The mushrooms smelled cooked. Well, since it was a toilet, one side effect was that the Wei Keng handling the cleanup wouldn't eat mushrooms for a long time.

But as they were cleaning, an ember from a torch fell into the pit. It flared up before going out. The Wei Keng from the Excrement Removal Group handling the work realized something: the Manure Pit had only been built two days ago. Wasn't that fermentation rate for microorganisms a little too fast?

A new work project began.

Four hours later, in a temporary shelter in an open area outside the settlement,

a Wei Keng from the Chemistry Group followed the system's instructions. He filtered the material with coal, heated it in a Pottery Pot they'd found, and carried out a series of other steps. At last, crystals formed.

He took out the dried white crystals, mixed them with a certain amount of charcoal, and lit the mixture. There was a sharp hiss. It was definitely nitrate crystals.

The Wei Kengs looked at each other. Once their eyes met, they communicated through their shared consciousness.

A Wei Keng 1 said, "We're leaving in three months and never coming back. We don't know how much we can produce. So, should we do it?"

A Wei Keng 2 replied, "But messing with shit is something we can only do here. We can't do it back in Shenzhou, and we can't do it in the Main World either." The former wouldn't let him hang around a dry-latrine Manure Pit, and the latter wouldn't let him make this kind of dangerous substance.

Wei Keng had begun to discover a little of what made this world fun. He could speak loudly without anyone laughing at him. He could freely share his ideas and his taste without anyone representing the trend and calling him tacky. He could do what he wanted without anyone calling him an idiot.

P.S. While shoveling manure, Wei Keng had ignored the possibility that the Monitor might retch. Oh, he hadn't turned on the filter during the morning's group contest to see who could fart the farthest, either.

I don't want to eat mushrooms anymore.