Preparing for Maximum Leeway

Facing the list of supplies, Wei Keng suddenly felt that he could tear up his previous plans and start over.

For example, when it came to weapons and equipment, he had originally planned to replace everything. But after seeing the items on the list,

Wei Keng realized that after choosing an exchange that cost him 300 days, he no longer had to settle for a single option for dealing with Jian City's threat: launching a high-intensity defensive battle in the short term. Instead, he could wage a prolonged war of attrition to repel the enemy invasion.

If the sole goal was to defend the base, rather than eliminate the enemy's manpower, Guerrilla Warfare would also reduce casualties.

So he needed to choose his weapons and equipment again.

First, he needed Heavy Firepower. He'd take eight 60 mm mortar barrels—there was no change to that requirement. He'd wanted them from the start; without them, he'd have to build crude improvised mortars. As for light machine guns, three would do. Ammunition would be difficult to replenish, so there was no point in taking more. They were just to make sure he had some.

But after that, his plan to get several hundred Assault Rifles was cut outright and replaced with a smaller selection of better equipment.

Guerrilla Warfare required fighting at night, so he'd take fifty sets of infrared night-vision goggles and a Solar Charging Panel, along with a one-ton Small Boiler Generator Set and a series of power-transmission devices.

As for the main weapon, he'd take forty High-Precision Sniper Rifles, with forty thousand specially made rounds and spare barrels. According to the manufacturer's specifications, each sniper rifle barrel had a lifespan of two thousand shots.

That seemed about right.

As for the remaining cargo capacity, he was using it to make further preparations to ensure their survival.

The Chemical Equipment had to be replaced. The Chemical Reactor Wei Keng had assembled himself could produce only a little over twenty kilograms of Nitric Acid a day, and its smell was overpowering. Some of the joints could only be sealed for a short while with Clay Gum.

He'd import a set of Standardized Small Equipment—in other words, Primitive Equipment of Modern Craftsmanship—with a thermometer and Pressure Gauge.

Also, extracting alkali from Plant Ash over and over took too much labor, so he'd get a set of Ammonia Production Equipment and a simple Hou's Alkali Production Facility as well.

Next, he'd take a Gas Generator, a small open-hearth furnace for steelmaking, a better Bullet Mold, and Steel Rolling Equipment.

Wei Keng still had his eye on the steel lying on the railway tracks outside. Though the focus of Guerrilla Warfare would be those forty High-Precision Sniper Rifles, with the weapons constantly rotated among the people at the front,

it was still necessary for everyone to carry a gun. What if they ended up fighting a large-scale battle? Having a gun meant peace of mind. The settlement was surrounded by earthen walls and fortifications. Wei Keng, who knew the production team's situation better than anyone, understood the difference in how people felt when they heard noises outside if they had a gun versus if they didn't.

As for the remaining cargo capacity, Wei Keng requested a full four thousand bearing rings, along with all kinds of Steam Engine Core Components.

Production equipment, personnel, and basic transportation infrastructure all had to come together for production to work.

Wei Keng knew there were small mines in the nearby area, so transportation was what he lacked. Here on this plane, he'd tried hauling ore with a shoulder pole. After carrying about fifty kilograms for a kilometer, his shoulders felt as if the bones were being ground to pieces. Later, he'd used a wheelbarrow to move two hundred kilograms of cargo five kilometers. The wheelbarrow had no bearing rings, so the wheel rubbed against the front axle as it turned, making a loud creaking noise. Pushing it had made Wei Keng nostalgic for the construction-site wheelbarrows he'd once looked down on.

Wheels meant transport capacity. The components that could withstand the friction of a turning wheel were strategic parts for the transport industry. But though those two recessed steel rings and steel balls looked simple, only modern industry could make them.

With transportation, they could easily move the Soil Blocks they dug up, and salt production from coastal brine wouldn't have to rely on crude iron pots anymore. Efficiency would increase a hundredfold.

With transportation, they could move dozens of tons of bricks from the city ruins to the river near the settlement. Combined with timber transported through the jungle waterways, they could build Charcoal Kilns and Lime Kilns.

With transportation, they wouldn't have to butcher animals they caught in the jungle on the spot and carry them down the mountain in baskets. They could bring them straight down instead, then clean the hides, soak them in acid, salt and air-dry the meat, boil the innards, and compost the scraps. The whole process would be cleaner.

After Wei Keng had chosen the items,

the system confirmed his request and immediately sent them over.

At the central site, Wei Keng piled a large amount of wood in the middle of the open ground. Atmospheric Charge in the sky began to gather around a point, quickly forming Ball Lightning. Smoke appeared on the wood, then suddenly it burst into roaring flames. But the heat didn't rise with the airflow. Instead, it focused on the Ball Lightning.

As the energy at the center of the Ball Lightning grew stronger, space began to distort, as if it were constantly absorbing everything around it. Wei Keng felt a pull, but then something flashed through his consciousness, and he could no longer feel it. It was as if his body had been a magnet sensing a magnetic field, then suddenly turned into a copper block that could no longer feel it.

Yet the flow of matter across the ground continued. Countless tiny particles from within a radius of several hundred meters converged on the center of the Ball Lightning, while vast amounts of vaporized matter rose from close to the ground.

Twenty seconds later, the Ball Lightning split off a plane of light and began printing across patches of Stereoscopic Space. Soon, the equipment took shape, emerging under repeated sweeps of energy.

So this was "transmission."

Wei Keng: So that's how I was transmitted over back then. Huh, I was printed here?

Within the dimension.

After obtaining the list of supplies Wei Keng needed, Bai Linglu controlled the "transmission" while reporting to her superiors.

Superior Space Department: "Does he know about this arrangement?"

Bai Linglu: "The Shuttler Wei Keng is currently working at full speed to develop the area. I'll report the relevant details to him in accordance with protocol."

Observer Bai Hengqian: "You should tell him now."

Bai Linglu: "During this crossing, he's developed a crisis of trust in me—he's resistant to my assignments. If I put forward my opinion, it will affect his attitude toward his work."

By all appearances, Wei Keng's current work plan was excellent. He claimed he'd stay for a while before leaving, but in the Observer's eyes, everything Wei Keng was setting up on the Target Plane was preparation for a long-term presence.

From housing and water supplies to food reserves, ammunition production, and road repairs,

none of it looked like the preparations of someone who planned to stay only a year. It seemed more like he intended to maintain a lasting force of influence there.

From Wei Keng's own perspective, there was a tiny chance his return might be disrupted. So, to guard against the worst-case scenario, however unlikely, he was making plans as far ahead as he could.

And the farther ahead Wei Keng planned, the more Bai Linglu, within the Space Bubble, wanted to push the mission toward becoming a long-term one. But any decisions on those ideas still had to wait for the Time-Space Administration Bureau to rule.

In the Time-Space Administration Bureau's eyes, the pairing of Wei Keng and Bai Linglu was quite strange among the Plane Exploration teams. One of them kept his head down and worked, barely managing three sentences with his partner. The other made plans for Plane Exploration by guessing and piecing things together from the sidelines—and now, she was even concealing things.

As for whether they were in conflict, they weren't. Their situation wasn't like that of some teams, where a Transmigrator and Observer couldn't get along and one had to be replaced. But could they say the two worked well together? Many Transmigrators and Observers had friendships that went beyond being colleagues. Wei and Bai were nothing more than ordinary online acquaintances.

After reviewing the situation on the Pandora Plane once more, the Superior Space Department held a serious discussion, then sent Bai Linglu a message: "Observe the losses he suffers in this battle. If they exceed one-tenth of his total resources, arrange his return immediately."

One-tenth was a very lenient threshold. For Wei Keng's process of increasing his consciousness, it took a loss of one-third to count as harm. The Time-Space Administration Bureau was being extremely cautious with him.

Bai Linglu: "Understood. But what if his losses are extremely low? Could we then..."

Superior Space Department: "Observe first. We'll arrange what comes next."

As their conversation made clear, there was no plan to delay Wei Keng's return after the supplies were transmitted. He could return early in another dozen days or so.

The equipment being delivered now didn't really count as cross-plane transmission. Wei Keng had survived here for more than eighty days, and his consciousness had already mapped the properties of every material particle in this place. With those properties mapped, the materials had just been printed using energy from This Plane. It didn't take much Information Enthalpy.

It was like the first Moon landing. At the beginning, sending even a water bottle took a huge amount of fuel and wore out the launcher. But once a base had been established on the Moon and the properties of the lunar soil had been studied, they could just mold bricks there and harden them in a solar furnace. There was no need to send them up in a spacecraft.

The 120 tons of supplies weren't a limit on what could be transmitted. They were the scale of the Information Enthalpy printing operation Bai Linglu was authorized to direct.

For certain special Plane Exploration missions, an Observer could theoretically declare Combat Mode and give the Transmigrator orders.

On Earth, within the cross-dimensional space opened up in a high-energy state inside the East Asia No. 14 Gravity Well,

Yuan Yue asked veteran Transmigrator Luo Hongxing, "What do you make of this situation?" He meant the signs of a "two-headed dragon" emerging from the decisions the two of them, Wei and Bai, were making as they developed the Pandora Plane.

Luo Hongxing said, "We're currently at war, and the problem with the new pair isn't serious. After this conflict, we can try assigning him a different Observer."

Yuan Yue said, "To be honest, we watched Old Wei's kid, Wei Qiang, grow up. But this Wei Keng... sigh, even when he was little, he was a bit of a closed book."

Luo Hongxing pointed at the situation on the Pandora Plane. "He's been handling things quite smoothly on this Plane, hasn't he? Well, like they say, even dragons have nine sons, and each one is different. But they're still dragon-borne, not a litter of mice."

Yuan Yue gave him a smile but didn't continue the discussion. Instead, he said, "Go down there, and be careful."

Luo Hongxing replied, "Don't worry. I've been to the Pandora Plane. As long as the Life Radiation there is suppressed, there's basically nothing to fear." He glanced once more at Wei Keng's current living conditions. "Once I get down there, I'll open up a route into the war zone."

On the Pandora Plane, the Wei Keng Settlement had begun to show signs of life. In one of the large, earthen houses, representatives from Wei Keng's various work groups were meeting to share information.

Having determined that conflict was unavoidable, Wei Keng began studying the various forces on this plane.

In the settlement's central clearing, a mud model of the surrounding terrain stood at the center. It showed the area within two hundred kilometers of Zhushui Jiao, and Wei Keng's team had made corrections based on actual observations for forty percent of it.

The Wei Kengs from Group One gathered around the large model with the information their scouts had collected and analyzed the region's politics.

Human Forces were in steady decline. The various city-states governed themselves in different areas—or, no, they were left to fend for themselves. The human world still had several dominant cities. Here on the East Asia Continent, it seemed to have a tributary system, with multiple lesser cities along the great rivers shielding the major cities. The Yangtze River and Yellow River Basin, for example, maintained this kind of state system.

The cities in the Min Yue Zhe region wanted to pay tribute too. The core cities in the great river regions had preserved the most human technology from before the Great Cataclysm and possessed many more advanced biological and electronic technologies. Paying tribute could earn them access to that precious technical support. But Gene Colonies of all kinds had blocked the land and sea routes, making it very difficult for them to pay tribute.

Apart from technical exchanges, cities such as Jian City also needed their mayor to be appointed by the center of the state system. Well, "appointed" was more accurate. The Pandora Field had completely swallowed East Asia only a hundred and fifty years earlier, after all, and they still needed some semblance of legitimacy.

With that legitimacy, regional powers could recruit Beast Tamers. The central cities, meanwhile, could use their authority to appoint local leaders and collect information about Beast Tamers outside their actual territory.

Wei Keng marked this information as important.

First: he couldn't let an attack on Jian City draw in forces from one of the other dominant cities. His military operation needed a limit.

Second: he couldn't let certain people in Jian City recruit allies from other regions. So his military operation also needed a clear bottom line. At the very least, he had to wear the enemy down until they no longer had any desire to take military risks against him.

While preparing militarily, they were also studying the economy.

In a newly built, tightly sealed darkroom six hundred meters away, rows of brick-and-tile compartments held a fungal growing medium made of wood shavings.

Here, Wei Keng's economic research group looked at clumps of mushrooms and wondered once again: Could this stuff really serve as a staple food?

These little mushrooms formed the economic foundation of the city-states.

Humans were no longer the masters of Earth's ecology. Without vast farmland to supply them with food, they had to seek out other Ecological Niches.

So, eat wood? Of course not directly. On the Pandora Field, a variant of fungus could process wood in two to three days, rapidly breaking it down into Organic Matter that was easier to digest. Before the Pandora Era, humans couldn't digest fungi, which was why people joked about how many meals they could get out of enoki mushrooms. But humans had the Life Radiation effect, and under its influence, the bacteria in the human gut belonged to the same Gene Colony as humans.

In the early days of the Great Cataclysm, people were so hungry that they started raiding termite nests for food. Gradually, they discovered they could digest fungi completely. Their gut bacteria had acquired the genes of the termites' symbiotic organisms.

Now, this type of food had become the main source of sustenance for people south of the Yangtze River in East Asia.

More importantly, it kept well, and the raw materials were easy to come by. City-state pulverizing machines shredded the trees nearby, and the resulting wood blocks, mixed with spores waiting to grow, were sealed together with quicklime. When they were ready to eat, people took them out, poured water on them, and let the fungal fruiting bodies grow.

These wood blocks were also called Jing Blocks, because Jing Blocks grew Jing Zi.

As for the edible fungal spores mixed into the Jing Blocks, it had taken people in the Southwest region repeated cases of "seeing little people"—poisoning—to figure out which ones were safe. Their self-sacrificing experiments deserved to be praised. The "Jing" in "Jing Block" was a homophone for "fungus" in the Southwest dialect.

When Wei Keng heard that the mushrooms growing on the Jing Blocks contained many amino acids and tasted great, he couldn't help salivating.

The system hastily warned him: No variety of Jing Zi should be eaten raw.

Of course, Wei Keng knew that edible mushrooms had a very low energy density. And with the current level of production, cities were short on salt, let alone scallions, ginger, and garlic. The mushrooms ordinary people ate couldn't possibly be as delicious as he imagined.

As someone who'd grown up in the abundant food and clothing of the Industrial Age, he might consider some of the foods people in this era ate for years delicacies. Meanwhile, people in this era might only wish for the fatty pork that 21st-century women picked out and threw away in the cafeteria, so they could render it into lard and mix it into a bowl of rice.

By noon, the two research groups had each submitted a detailed report and plan.

Wei Keng from the kitchen had brought more than twenty one-pound Hairy Crabs and three large black fish from the river. Under the distribution system in the Wei Keng Collective, these went to the Wei Kengs who did the thinking.

Of course, the two groups ate only a third of it. They especially just took the first taste of the Hairy Crabs. They didn't feel full enough to count it as a meal, so they called over the Wei Kengs from the manual labor group. After ranking them by the difficulty of their work, they divided up the rest.

Don't eat mushrooms raw. Also, I don't eat mushrooms.